Tomorrow, the service will ramp things up a notch when its "pro" version launches. For $5 per month, Wolfram Alpha Pro will allow users to do way more with its data, as well as enable them to upload their own. The premium offering will be discounted for students and enterprise users.

The value offered by Wolfram Alpha Pro is two-fold, and it sits at both ends of the query process. First, users can upload their own data sets and have the service crunch through it for them, try to understand it and built out reports and graphs that previously could have taken them hours in Excel or elsewhere. In addition to text, you can even input images and get a detailed report about their visual characteristics.

Second, once a report is built - be it from Wolfram's data or your own - you can export the end results, images and all. This allows you to take the data analysis one step further using whatever other tools you want, effectively open-sourcing Wolfram Alpha's results. You can also turn charts and graphs into interactive versions of themselves. The Verge put together a detailed, hands-on overview of Wolfram Alpha Pro that is well worth checking out.

The potential these features have for people like journalists, business owners and Web analytics professionals is enormous. Just plug in a spreadsheet or other data set and let the knowledge engine work its computational magic. So much of the heavy lifting is shifted over to Wolfram Alpha's servers, freeing up the individual to spend time understanding the information, more easily spotting important trends and deciding if any further analysis is needed.

The premium plan is the latest part of the company's monetization strategy, which to date has included paid mobile apps, licensing of its API to third parties and various enterprise services.

"[When] I first looked at the completed timeline," Wolfram writes, "the first thing that struck me was how much two entities stood out in their contributions: ancient Babylon, and the United States government... [It] is sobering to see how long the road to where we are today has been. But it is exciting to see how much further modern technology has already made it possible for us to go."

Wolfram argues that Artificial Intelligence has languished over the years, but that the body of data that's become available for computation has exploded. "[We] can just start from the whole corpus of systematic knowledge and data - as well as methods and models and algorithms - that our civilization has accumulated, poured wholesale into our computational system... this is what we have done with Wolfram|Alpha: in effect making immediate direct use of the whole rich history portrayed in the timeline."

We've written here for several years about the explosion of data production that's beginning and will be a major factor in determining the nature of human civilization in the near-term. In terms of sheer quantity, far more will be made measurable in the next few years than has been instrumented by any of the other developments on Wolfram's timeline. Google's Marissa Mayer calls the coming Internet of Things "bigger than Moore's law." Former HP CEO Mark Hurd said in 2009: "more data will be created in the next four years than in the history of the planet."

What will we do with all that data? That's up to us as a society, but it's a good idea to see it coming and look at it within a historical context.

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."

In a blog post describing the new format, Conrad Wolfram compares a "traditional" graphic explaining the Doppler Effect with what he calls a "knowledge app," a CDF-based graphic demonstrating the same thing. Using the latter, readers can adjust the variables - observer location, source frequency, initial velocity and time - in order to gain a better understanding of how the Doppler Effect works.

That idea of giving readers tools for better understanding dovetails with Wolfram's larger mission of supporting educational and scientific efforts. And Wolfram sees the CDF as being particularly useful in educational and scientific publications.

It isn't simply readers who are meant to benefit from having more interactive publications. Wolfram says that the CDF is also designed to make it easier for authors and publishers to create and incorporate these knowledge apps into documents, arguing that up until now, these sorts of things have often required a knowledge of programming. CDFs can be created using the Mathematica software, and Wolfram insists that building a knowledge app is as easy as writing a macro in Excel. (And Conrad Wolfram quips that he'd like to make authoring even easier so that "anyone who can make an Excel chart be able to make a CDF.")

Will the Format Be Widely Adopted?

While the CDF does open a lot of possibilities here, this new format is based on proprietary technology. It's not an open standard, and as O'Reilly Radar's Andy Oram notes, "I assume Wolfram will keep strict control over the format, which draws a lot from the Mathematica language, and I doubt other companies will want to or be able to catch up to Wolfram in the sophistication of the tools they offer."

To experiment with the new Computable Document Format, you can visit the Wolfram website and see some examples and other use cases. These require the download of a Wolfram CDF Player.

The idea is to be able to quickly access the pertinent capabilities of Wolfram|Alpha relevant for specific subject areas. Currently, these subject areas are Algebra, Calculus, and Music Theory. But the company says it plans to add apps for other subjects - "for every major course, from elementary school to graduate school," - including those fields outside math and science.

Each app is organized according to some of the major curriculum units of a particular subject area. And within each of these units, are sub-sections that cover some of the types of problems learners are likely to face. But rather than a study guide that only provides a stock set of questions and answers, these new apps actually solve problems, computing the solution to whatever is asked, by using the Wolfram|Alpha technology.

The apps are built using the Wolfram|Alpha computational engine, its API and the Mathematica-based development pipeline.

The Algebra and Music Theory apps cost $1.99. The Calculus app is $2.99

There are a number of areas in which Wolfram Alpha is currently seeking volunteer input: species data about fish and birds, currency data, and literary and mythology information. (On a personal note, I must say I love a company that can help me track the path of the Sun and give me information about various Sun gods.)

Contributors will earn "data points" that allow volunteers to display badges on their blogs and social media profiles that they've contributed to the project.

According to Elle Destree, Community Development Specialist at Wolfram Alpha, the importance of the volunteer program is twofold: "First, it allows users to contribute to Wolfram Alpha by curating data that will be incorporated into our knowledge base. We are fortunate to have a very talented group of users who want to contribute to our efforts, and we are happy to work with them. Second, it allows us to explore different areas that we have not yet tapped into."

The volunteer project allows the Wolfram Alpha knowledge base to expand beyond the expertise of employees. And Wolfram Alpha says it is open to suggestions for other projects and other subject areas to build out the knowledge base.

As Wolfram Alpha's product manager Schoeller Porter and managing director Barak Berkowitz told us last week, making the service as ubiquitous as possible is currently the main mission for the Wolfram Alpha team. The recent pricing change for the iPhone app and launch of Wolfram's iPad app were some of the first steps in this direction (sales for the iPhone app increased by over 100x after the price drop). Now that more users are aware of the service, getting the API into developers' hands is the next step in the company's march towards ubiquity, with the widget builder being the first step in this direction.

Building Widgets

We were able to preview the application over the last few days. What makes it stand out from similar products is how easy the company has managed to make the creation process. To get started, you simply perform a regular Wolfram Alpha query. From there, you choose which parts of your query should become variables in your widget.

If you are trying to build a widget that compares the cost of living in different cities, for example, you start with a query like "cost of living New York Boston." Then you highlight the name of the cities and declare them as variables. In the next step, the layout editor, you can then add additional text, choose the color of your widget and add additional choices to your widget's popup menus. In the following steps, you can select which part of Wolfram Alpha's results will appear in your final widget and choose the form in which the results will appear on your site (iFrame, lightbox or popup).

During the beta phase, you will have to publish your widget to Wolfram Alpha's widget gallery (under a Creative Commons license) before you can embed it. If you find an interesting widget in this gallery, you can also modify and re-purpose it.

Simple and Straightforward

According to Wolfram's Schoeller Porter, the philosophy behind building the service was to make creating these widgets "as simple and straightforward to build and embed as possible." Judging from our experience with the application, Wolfram succeeded in this while still giving users access to a lot of Wolfram Alpha's power without giving up too much flexibility for the sake of simplicity.

Wolfram on Wikipedia?

The app makes it easy for users to embed their newly created widgets on most of the popular blogging platforms, including Wordpress and Blogger. In addition, the service also offers the ability to export a special embed code for MediaWiki-powered sites. The most popular of these, of course, is Wikipedia. While we weren't able to get much information about this from the Wolfram Alpha team, it seems like there have been some discussions between Wolfram and Wikipedia about possibly integrating some of Wolfram Alpha's capabilities into Wikipedia articles. Wolfram Alpha already features links to Wikipedia in its results pages.

Today, we lament no longer, as the latest update to the virtual personal assistant notes that it can now provide you with "more knowledge and computation results" using "computational knowledge engine" Wolfram Alpha.

Before now, Siri was limited to a select number of categories and information types that it could answer questions or provide services for. It could reserve you a table for two at a local steak house using OpenTable. It could help you buy tickets to a five o'clock showing with MovieTickets.com or tell you if it was going to rain tomorrow using WeatherBug. But questions like "What time is it in Paris?" or "When was President Obama born?" would likely end up with a list of search results.

Now, with Wolfram Alpha, you'll get a straightforward answer. You'll not only find out that President Obama was born on Friday, August 4, 1961, but that this was 48 years, 11 months and 4 days ago. Or more specifically, it was 17,870 days ago on the 216th day of 1961. (You have to love that special brand of Wolfram Alpha answer, where you not only get the basic facts, but the facts in every way you could possibly want.)

While the app told us that we were "stretching its capabilities" when we asked it "What's the circumference of the Earth?", it quickly answered, using Wolfram Alpha, that the Earth's equatorial circumference was 24,901.47 miles. Where before we relied on Siri to ask simple questions about a specific set of real life situations, we now feel comfortable asking it the most inane of questions. The addition of Wolfram Alpha turns Siri into much more than simply a virtual personal assistant. It's now a virtual personal researcher, too.

As Siri CEO Dag Kittlaus once told us, Siri really is the "mother of all mashups."

As Wolfram told us, the most basic question he tried to answer when the company started development was simply to see if it was even possible to take all this data and make it computable. Now, a year later, his answer to that question is an emphatic "yes."

Wolfram, however, also acknowledged that right after the launch the user experience for first-time users wasn't necessarily ideal, as Wolfram Alpha didn't yet have data for a lot of knowledge domains. The choice at that point, he said, was to either delay the launch and get more data, or to release Wolfram Alpha and be able to learn how its users would use it, and then enhance the experience over time.

Wolfram says that today, most users are aware of the difference between a search engine and Wolfram Alpha, and the experience for first-time users has become far better. He stressed that the team (which consists of about 200 employees and 500 volunteers) is currently adding new data at an increasing pace. That's gotten easier as the team has learned how to import information from a large variety of knowledge domains and sub-specialties.

Getting the Data is Just 5% of the Work

Unlike Google, Wolfram thinks that the Web "isn't useful for getting raw data." Indeed, whenever the Wolfram Alpha team experimented with this, the data simply wasn't up to par. Instead, the company will continue to mostly work with data from primary sources. Getting this data, however, is only 5% of the work. The real difficulty is to understand how to compute this data and to understand how people talk about this data: What kind of questions do they ask? What are the alternate names for a specific chemical element? In addition, the Wolfram Alpha team and volunteers also check for anomalies in the data they receive. If there are major outliers, the team will track down more information to verify the original source.

Sadly, though, not all data is free and Wolfram Alpha has to pay if it wants to include some databases. To make Wolfram a viable business and still offer this data, the team is considering a subscription plan that will give paying users access to deeper datasets from subscription databases.

Challenge: Bringing Wolfram Alpha to More Users

The question now, however, is how to get more users and how to bring Wolfram Alpha to more users through more channels. As we noted earlier this year, the company's newly minted managing director Barak Berkowitz thinks that the team's "number-one priority is to get Wolfram|Alpha in the hands of everyone." To get to this point, they will soon release more and better tools for third-party developers who want to use the company's APIs to integrate Wolfram Alpha's functionality in their own sites and services. It's also worth noting that Wolfram Alpha now offers an appliance that companies can install behind their firewall to curate and compute their own data.

Looking Ahead: Analyzing Your Own Data, More Knowledge Domains, Programming with Natural Language Queries

Besides looking back, we also asked Wolfram about his plans for the future. In answering this question, he stressed that this new approach to computing is just getting started and it usually takes him about 10 years to develop his projects before he fully understands what's possible once this new paradigm has arrived.

For the near future, however, Wolfram hopes that Wolfram Alpha's users will be able to upload their own data and perform complex computations on this data and use Wolfram Alpha to find correlations within Alpha's vast database. The usage scenarios for this could include anything from analyzing sales data to doing personal analytics on data from devices like the Fitbit. In addition to uploading data, Wolfram Alpha will soon make it easier for users to download data to use in presentations.

Wolfram also wants to bring Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica closer together. One development that Wolfram is especially excited about is using Wolfram Alpha's ability to understand and compute natural language queries in order to create Mathematica programs. By building on this capability, Mathematica users may soon be able to write and manipulate their code using natural language queries just like in Wolfram Alpha.

Obviously, the team behind Wolfram Alpha will also continue to add more data across an every-growing number of knowledge domains. Today, for example, the team is launching real-time space weather data, 12 complete genomes and local maps, as well as numerous other knowledge domains related to math, biology, physics and geography.

The first application to make use of Wolfram Alpha for e-books is the visually stunning iPad version of Theodore Gray's best-selling The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe. The e-book application integrates Wolfram's computational knowledge engine closely into the e-book experience. It's easy to imagine calculus, engineering or geography textbooks that will also make use of Wolfram Alpha's vast data repository and its ability to manipulate this data. For now, the company is remaining relatively quiet about the exact details of the program, however. The full launch is scheduled to happen later in Q2 2010.

As Wolfram Alpha's managing director Barak Berkowitz noted yesterday, the team's "number-one priority as of today is to get Wolfram|Alpha in the hands of everyone." This new e-books program is clearly another move in this direction.

Wolfram Alpha iPad App

Wolfram Alpha's newly affordable iPad app will make good use of the extra screen estate on the device. It will use a two-pane view, which looks like it will become a standard interface for many iPad apps. A sidebar on the right will feature your search history, examples and favorites, while the left side will display your results. We will take a closer look at the app once we can test it ourselves.

According to Wolfram Alpha's newly minted managing director Barak Berkowitz, the team's "number-one priority as of today is to get Wolfram|Alpha in the hands of everyone." This, obviously, is a complete reversal of Wolfram's earlier policy, but we are very happy to see this new direction the team is taking.

Refunds for Those Who Bought $50 App

While Wolfram always argued that the app was worth $50, not too many people thought so. The current version only has 24 reviews in the App Store. Wolfram will obviously take a loss on the refunds as Apple won't return the 30% cut it took from all the sales, but the Wolfram Alpha team clearly feels that this is the right thing to do. We can only guess how much money Wolfram made from the $50 app, but chances are that the company will sell more than enough $1.99 apps to make up for the price difference. If you bought the app at the full price (or $19.99 during the holiday sale), you can go to this site and ask for a refund.

To get a refund, users will have to supply their phone's or iPod touch's UDID, a screenshot of their UDID on the iTunes summary and account details page, as well a copy of their receipt from Apple.

You can find our full review of the iPhone app here.

New Mobile Site

The new mobile site feels faster than the original page, but at least in the version we tested just before the official launch, result pages seemed to be formatted for a screen somewhat larger than the iPhone. We assume, however, that this is just a glitch and that the company will fix this shortly. Unlike the native app, the mobile site obviously also doesn't offer the specially formatted virtual keyboards for entering formulas (something Wolfram used as the main reason to charge extra for the iPhone app).

More To Come

According to today's announcement, the company also plans to expand on this strategy of making the service more accessible in the next few months, though the announcement didn't offer any further details. According to Schoeller Porter, Wolfram|Alpha's architect, "the new iPhone and iPod touch app price, and the refund offer are just the beginnings of a wider strategic move toward ubiquity."

Why Did Wolfram Kill the Mobile Landing Page?

In our conversation, Schoeller Porter pointed out that this landing page was only meant to be a test, and traffic to the site had decreased to the point where the company simply decided to pull the plug.

It's not surprising that Porter would defend Wolfram's decision to shut down the mobile site as a traffic issue, and not as a ploy to sell more of the company's pricey mobile app. According to Porter, users can still choose to get a good mobile experience through the website and those users who need a mobile experience can always get the mobile app. Until now, though, the mobile landing page offered a happy medium between the regular desktop website and the mobile app.

Currently, the team wants to focus on enhancing the experience on the default website and the mobile app; Wolfram is also thinking about mobile apps for Android and BlackBerry.

Why Not Just Keep the Mobile Site Up?

One could argue, however, that it really wouldn't have cost Wolfram a lot of money or manpower to keep the mobile landing page up for the time being. The company also didn't help itself by killing the mobile site without any explanation on its blog. The fact that the mobile site now features a big add for the iPhone app only helped to fuel the speculation about Wolfram's intentions.

Here is our list of the top 10 consumer web apps of 2009. These are apps and services that helped consumers use the web in new ways this year; and brought technologies that were previously only geared towards advanced users to a mainstream audience.

Bing

Until earlier this year, Google didn't have any serious competition in the search market. Now, however, thanks to Microsoft's Bing - which launched in July - users finally have a choice when it comes to search engines. Bing's market share climbed steadily over the last few months, and Microsoft keeps adding interesting new features like visual search, hover previews, integrated Twitter search and a smart integration of some of Wolfram Alpha's most compelling features.

Bing, which bills itself as a "decision engine," tries to give its users more than just 10 links. Instead, Bing focuses on giving users answers right on the search results page. A search for a football or baseball player, for example, will bring up recent stats, while a search for flights brings up data from Microsoft's Bing Travel service.

Wolfram Alpha

No other new web service was greeted with the same amount of hype as Wolfram Alpha this year. Inevitably, Wolfram Research's "computational knowledge engine" disappointed many who were looking for a Google killer, but Alpha introduced a new paradigm for search engines: Instead of giving you a long list of links, Alpha tries to give users an answer based on information from reputable sources. If this sounds familiar, it might be because Microsoft's Bing is trying to do something very similar - even if Microsoft's approach isn't quite as radical. Because of these similarities, it also doesn't come as a surprise that Bing was the first search engine to integrate search results from Wolfram Alpha.

While it isn't useful for everybody yet, the Wolfram Alpha team has worked hard to expand Alpha's knowledge. If you are an engineer or scientist, Wolfram Alpha might just be the most useful web app for you. For the rest of us, Alpha's ability to solve anagrams, aggregate weather data and tell you the distance between two cities proves to be useful, too, though not as useful as the service's ability to solve complex math problems. We still have to wait and see what the future holds for Wolfram Alpha.

For now, the service is a great experiment and even if it fails (which we don't think it will), its influence will surely extend to other search engines like Bing and Google Search. In the spirit of trying something different, Wolfram also launched a $50 iPhone application in October. Even though Wolfram Alpha's web interface is available for free, the company insisted that its mobile application offered enough new features to justify this price.

Google Chrome

Google launched the first beta version of Google Chrome in late 2008. Even though Chrome still only holds a small share of the browser market and doesn't offer a stable version for OSX or Linux yet, Chrome has already changed the browser market. Chrome's relentless focus on speed helped to reignite the browser wars and even Microsoft now compares the performance of the next version of Internet Explorer to Chrome. Thanks to its fast JavaScript rendering engine and interesting new technologies, Chrome is changing the way developers are thinking about browsers. Even if you don't use Chrome, you will see Chrome's influence in the upcoming versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Chrome, of course, is also the basis for Google's upcoming Chrome OS, so chances are that we will see a lot more of Chrome in the next year.

Posterous

Whether you want to open up a new blog without any fuzz or just share photos and messages easily on multiple services like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, light blogging service Posterous has you covered. The service launched in May 2009 and was definitely one of the most interesting new arrivals in the blogging landscape this year. What makes Posterous stand out is its ability to cross-post updates to other services (Flickr, Facebook, Twitter or your own blog, for example). In addition, it's also extremely easy to set up a new blog. Just email a message, photo or video to post AT posterous.com and your new blog is ready to go. Advanced users can also port their own domain names to the service and theme their blogs.

With PicPosterous, the company now also offers an easy to use iPhone app.

Hulu

Thanks to its prominent ads during the Super Bowl, Hulu became a household name in the US this year. Even before this publicity campaign, however, Hulu had already established itself as a the #1 destination for finding episodes of TV shows online. Hulu started out as a joint venture between FOX, NBC and other TV networks. In April, ABC also joined this group. Thanks to this, Hulu now offers one of the only destinations to easily find TV shows online in the US. While Hulu is currently available for free, it's worth noting that Hulu could start charging for subscriptions as early as next year.

Next page: Consumer web apps 6-10

TweetDeck

Except for Twitter's own website, TweetDeck is currently the single most popular Twitter client. While a few of us here at RWW prefer Seesmic's Twitter application, there can be no doubt that TweetDeck has set the standard for Twitter clients this year. TweetDeck was the first client to popularize a column-based layout - a design feature that a lot of other Twitter clients now use as well.

In its current version (our review), TweetDeck introduced support for Twitter's new lists feature, as well as integration with LinkedIn and partial support for Twitter's new geolocation feature. TweetDeck was also one of the first clients to introduce local lists, a feature that many power users had been clamoring for long before Twitter introduced its own version of this functionality.

Twitter

No Top 10 list of web applications would be complete without mentioning Twitter. No other web service (except for maybe Facebook) has recently managed to capture our imagination to the degree that Twitter has. Over the course of the year, Twitter introduced numerous new features, including lists and integrated search. Twitter's users didn't greet every new feature with complete happiness, however. The new retweet feature, for example, was met with resistance and it's still not clear if it will win out over today's retweet convention that grew organically over the last few years.

Today, there are numerous users on Twitter with more than 1 million followers, and services like BNO News regularly break news reports on Twitter long before the mainstream media. While Twitter has its detractors, there can be little doubt that 2009 was the year when Twitter came of age.

Aardvark

Have you ever found yourself in a city you've never been to and wondered where to find a good place for lunch or dinner or just playing pool? You could go to Yelp or Citysearch, but the best suggestions are likely to come from your own personal network and the friends of your friends. Aardvark makes it possible to harvest this collective knowledge of your extended social network through an easy to use web app, instant messaging bot and iPhone app. Simply ask a question and Aardvark will route your query to one of your friends (or your friend's friends) who is currently online. Thanks to sophisticated machine learning algorithms that run in the background, Aardvark quickly learns who to ask about specific topics.

Unlike Yahoo Answers or similar services, Aardvark doesn't keep a repository of frequently asked questions. The service's mission is to get you current answers from experts in your own social networks. While we had our doubts about how well this would work when the service first launched, Aardvark has proven it's worth time and again. On most days, over 85% of all questions get answered.

Google Voice

Google loves to enter markets where the status quo prevails and turn things on their head. With Google Voice, the search giant is doing just that to the telecom and VoIP industry. Google Voice assigns every user a new phone number that can be forwarded to any phone. Google Voice, which features a Gmail-like user interface, allows its users to make free local and long distance call, as well as cheap international calls from their existing phones. The service also features free text messages, conference calls and automated voicemail transcriptions.

While other services like Ribbit Mobile and VoxOx offer similar features, Google Voice has the name recognition and marketing power behind it to make it an even more important product in the coming year. For now, Google Voice is still an invite-only service, though Google continually sends out additional invites.

Facebook

Over the course of 2009, Facebook continued to grow and added new features which ranged from vanity URLs to a new sharing widget and a focus on real-time updates of its users news streams. While it still trailed MySpace in 2009, it became the #1 social network this year, and by September Facebook had passed the 300 million active user mark. The service's user base is now bigger than the population of all but three countries in the world.

While Facebook was once the domain of early adopters, today's Facebook population is highly diverse. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook today is users over 35.

Did We Miss Your Favorites?

This list showcases some of the favorite consumer web apps of the RWW team. What are your favorites? What web services do you think made the biggest impact in 2009? Let us know in the comments.

ReadWriteWeb's Best Products of 2009:

Earlier this year, Google also added data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau's Population Division to its search results page. The queries that Google showcases in today's blog post (gdp of a country, internet users in the US or energy use in Iceland) are exactly the kind of queries where Wolfram Alpha excels. Currently, Bing doesn't display this kind of data from Wolfram Alpha and just focuses on math and nutrition, but a deeper integration between the two is just a matter of time.

Wolfram Alpha uses curated data sets - just like the World Bank or Census Bureau data - to compute its results. Google's current use of this data is less ambitious. Google wants to make public data more accessible - Wolfram Alpha wants to be a 'computational knowledge engine' that can manipulate these data sets.

Google Wants Your Public Data

One interesting aspect of today's blog post is that Google points out that there are "still many other data sets and sources out there, and we're excited about the possibilities for the future." Google also asks data publishers who are interested in making their data discoverable in Google to contact the company.

In the current implementation, Google can display results for the following types of questions:

CO2 emissions per capita, Electricity consumption per capita, Energy use per capita, Exports as percentage of GDP, Fertility rate, GDP deflator change, GDP growth rate, GNI per capita in PPP dollars, Gross Domestic Product, Gross National Income in PPP dollars, Imports as percentage of GDP, Internet users as percentage of population, Life expectancy, Military expenditure as percentage of GDP, Mortality rate, under 5, Population, and Population growth rate.

Update: in our briefing and later emails with Microsoft, the company told us that the integration with Wolfram Alpha would only consist on exchanging data about nutrition and that was reflected in the first version of this post. In today's blog post, however, Microsoft also announced that it will display math results from Alpha. We have updated this post accordingly.

Bing tries to get users to the answers they are looking for faster than any other search engines and these new updates are all geared towards making things even easier for users.

Wolfram Alpha Integration: That's It?

We first learned about the integration with Alpha during a briefing with Stefan Weitz, Microsoft's Director of Bing, a few months ago. At that time, it was just a screenshot of Wolfram Alpha pasted onto the Bing interface. Rumors about this integration flared up in August, but anybody who expected a full integration between the two is bound to be disappointed by today's announcement.

We can't help but wonder if the two teams aren't working on a deeper integration, though. Getting better information about nutrition and solutions to math problems in Bing is nice, but this is only a minor part of Alpha's feature set. Microsoft's vision for Bing is compatible with Wolfram's idea of Alpha as a 'computational knowledge engine.' The improved hover previews that Microsoft announced today go into a similar direction and Microsoft could potentially use the real estate in these preview boxes to showcase other results from Alpha in the future.

Smarter Hover Previews

Hover previews are not new to Bing. In the current version, the little pop-ups that appear when a user hovers the mouse over the right-hand side of a search result only show a short excerpt from the page. The new previews use entity extraction to get information from the page that is related to the query. For businesses and restaurants, the new preview now also filters out information like street addresses, email addresses and phone numbers.

When a Facebook page appears in the search results, Bing will now show the person's picture and users can see their networks and send a message or friend request from the preview box.

The new preview box also shows a screenshot of the page and a list of popular links on that site. In addition, the preview now features another search box that allows users to quickly do a search within that particular site.

Better Weather

Bing now always displays weather information in the search results when it discovers a query for a town or city. Clicking on the link above the icon now takes users to a separate page with comprehensive weather information inside the Bing interface. The full page weather results show forecasts, satellite maps and historical averages.

But there is More...

This is clearly a busy week for Microsoft's Bing team and according to a Microsoft spokesperson, these are only some of the updates to Bing that Microsoft has planned for this week.

Earlier updates this week included a number of changes to Bing Reference, which uses the technology Microsoft acquired from Powerset to semantically index Wikipedia. This feature can be accessed from the 'references' tab in the sidebar. We also wrote about Microsoft's new interface and features from Bing Maps yesterday morning. Later in the day, Microsoft also updated its video search, which now uses embeds to show videos from a wide variety of sites like Hulu, ABC and YouTube right on the Bing search results page.

According to the latest data from Hitwise, Bing's market share in the US grew 7% last month and is now at 9.57%. While the current Wolfram Alpha integration won't bring new users to Bing, it does showcase that Microsoft is willing to try new things with Bing and we can only hope that this is just the beginning of a deeper integration between the two - though for the time being, this is a one-sided integration as Wolfram is still using Google as the fall-back search engine on Wolfram Alpha.

On Twitter and in the tech blogosphere, the reactions to the app's price were anything but subtle. We called it "too expensive" ourselves, though others had stronger words for it. MIT's Technology Review called it a "a pricey online calculator for geeks" - a product that's more like the expensive but immensely powerful Mathematica than Stephen Wolfram's original idea for Alpha ("Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people").

It is worth noting that the Wolfram Alpha app quickly appeared in the list of top 100 grossing apps in the iTunes App Store (iTunes link) and has been hovering at the lower end of the top 50 ever since. That doesn't make it a breakout hit, but some people are clearly buying the app, even though only a small number of users have left reviews.

A Premium Price for a Premium Experience

There can be little doubt that the Wolfram Alpha team was expecting some backlash. As Porter told us today, the Wolfram Alpha team decided to price the app with the cost of a hardware graphing calculator in mind. At $50, the app costs roughly half of what a hardware calculator would cost. As Porter also stressed, the app offers a far superior range of features thanks to its connection to Wolfram's server farm. The company thinks this price is justified because of the superior experience of using the app over the mobile website.

After using the app for a few days, we definitely have to agree there. The dual-keyboard solution makes entering queries in the app much easier than using the mobile site and accessing Wolfram Alpha from the app is also much faster then using the mobile site.

Porter noted that Wolfram is trying to set itself off from the mass of $0.99 apps that only get used once and are quickly forgotten. Instead, the company hopes that the app will become a regular companion for its users, whether they are using it for help with their homework in school or college, or in their professional life.

At the end of the day, this is an app for specialists. While Schoeller Porter worded this more carefully in our interview today, the basic fact is that Wolfram is charging a premium price for a premium experience. Users who don't need the app can continue to use the website, while those who are willing and able to spend $50 on the app will get a superior experience. For the time being, Wolfram doesn't expect to bring the price of the app down and so far, according to Porter, the team has been happy and excited about how the app has been performing in the marketplace.

The Price of iPhone Apps

This also leads into a broader discussion about the current pricing in the iPhone App Store, where even the most complex apps and games have to sell for under $10 to reach a wide audience. At the end of our discussion, Porter noted that the Wolfram app may lead to some changes here, though we have to wonder if anything is likely to change the current drift towards lower prices in the App Store.

It is also worth pointing out, though, that a lower price point opens up the market for an app to a far wider audience - often to the point where the lower price brings in exponentially more users and more than offsets any potential losses from the lower price.

What Do You Think?

Is Wolfram's price point for the iPhone app a bold move? Hubris? Or would you be happy to pay $50 for the superior experience and ergonomics of the app?