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Wolfram, the company behind the Mathematica computational software and the Wolfram Alpha "computational knowledge" search engine, has released a new document format today - the Computable Document Format (CDF). As the name suggests, the CDF aims to bring real-time interactivity and computational power to documents, by enabling them to include a variety of graphs and formulas.

This makes a "computable" document quite different than a "print" document. The information isn't fixed but can be manipulated by the reader. Unlike static formats, CDFs are "as interactive as apps, yet as everyday as documents," say Wolfram. "Central to the concept are knowledge apps, interactive diagrams, or info apps - the live successors of traditional diagrams and infographics."

The launch of the "computational knowledge engine" Wolfram Alpha was one of the most anticipated product launches of early 2009. Since then, it's been rather quiet around Wolfram Alpha, even though the company continues to add new features and data on a regular basis. Today, we had a chance to talk to Wolfram Research's founder Stephen Wolfram about the first year and the company's plans for the future.

Yesterday, Wolfram Alpha announced the price drop of its iPhone app and the return of its mobile site. Today, after Apple itself broke a press embargo that was originally set for Saturday, Wolfram Alpha is also announcing the launch of its iPad app, as well as the launch of its new Wolfram Alpha for e-books program. The fact that Wolfram Alpha would launch an iPad app - which will retail in a bundle with the iPhone app for $1.99 - doesn't really come as a shock. The e-book program, however, comes as a bit of a surprise, but makes perfect sense in light of Wolfram's new push towards making Wolfram Alpha ubiquitous.

Yesterday, Wolfram Research shut down the iPhone-optimized version of Wolfram Alpha, the company's "computational knowledge engine." Many pundits speculated that Wolfram decided to shutter the mobile site in order to drive more users to the company's $50 iPhone app. Earlier this morning, we got a chance to talk to Schoeller Porter, Wolfram's product manager for the iPhone app. According to Schoeller, the reason for killing the mobile site was simple: not enough people were using it.

The launch of Wolfram Alpha in May is still one of the most exciting product launches we have witnessed so far this year, even if the enormous hype around it also meant that it disappointed a lot of people who expected a "Google killer." In the last couple of months, however, the Wolfram Alpha team has been working quietly on improving Wolfram's 'computational knowledge engine.' According to Stephen Wolfram's latest post on the Wolfram Alpha blog, things are moving ahead as planned. The company has used the summer months to tweak and extend Wolfram Alpha quietly as it got ready for more people to use it more heavily once the fall semester begins in the US.

Wolfram Alpha, the 'computational knowledge engine' from the makers of Mathematica, received its first major update today. According to Wolfram, this is the first broad update to the core code and data of Alpha since its launch, and includes a number of refinements to the way Alpha handles certain types of data and queries. Specifically, these refinements include combined time series plots of different quantities ("germany gdp vs population"), additional linguistic forms of many types of data and questions, and a number of updates to Alpha's data set, so that it now knows more about planets, foods, and government positions, for example. In total, the team touched about 1.1 million data values in this update and made 1,850 code commits.