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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.

Yesterday we asked what 3 web apps or services you find the most exciting right now. Not your 3 most used or favorite, but the apps that currently make you tingly with excitement. We got some great responses in the comments, so in this post we pick out our top 10 from your choices.

We've chosen the 10 in two batches. Firstly, the services that got the most number of mentions. As expected, these are well known apps that millions of people are using (or will use when it's launched, in the case of Google Wave). We didn't want this to be purely a popularity contest though, so we've also selected 5 lesser known web apps or services. Those apps all got multiple mentions and in our estimation they're each worthy of being labeled 'exciting.'

At the recent SemTech conference in San Jose, I sat down with Wolfram|Alpha's Russell Foltz-Smith. Wolfram|Alpha bills itself as a "computational knowledge engine," a nerdy and unfortunately not very intuitive description. Because it's hard to grok, most people have categorized Wolfram|Alpha as a new type of search engine. The site got a lot of press when it launched in May, as many pundits saw it as a challenger to Google. However in our own extensive tests of the product before launch, we concluded that it isn't a "Google Killer" and that it has more in common with Wikipedia.

Even now there is still confusion about what Wolfram|Alpha is and what its main use cases will be. In this interview with Russell Foltz-Smith, we discuss what people are using Wolfram|Alpha for now; and more importantly what its uses will be in the near future.

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.

Wolfram Alpha, the new "computational knowledge engine" from the makers of Mathematica is scheduled to officially launch on Monday next week, but starting tonight, Alpha will 'soft launch,' starting with a live webcast of the launch preparations tonight. After that, Alpha will gradually open its doors to everybody throughout the weekend. We have had a chance to test a preview version of Alpha for the last seven days, and we are quite impressed with what we have seen so far. Here are some resources for getting up to speed with Alpha, as well as some recommendations for getting started with this powerful, but sometimes frustrating new tool.

Wolfram Alpha, the hyped "Google killer" will officially launch on May 18, but we already got preview access to it today, and had a chance to put it through its paces.

Let's get this out of the way quickly: Wolfram Alpha is not (yet?) geared towards mainstream Internet users, who, for the most part, are still better served by Google. Of course, comparing Alpha to Google isn't even fair, but most users will treat it like Google, and will most likely come away sorely disappointed. Instead, Alpha, for now, is going to be a great tool for students, engineers, and academics - and anybody who needs data quickly and knows how to interpret it. It takes some time to learn how to best use Alpha, and it still has its rough patches, but, overall, we have come away quite impressed, though, at times we were also frustrated.

Last weekend, we attended a web demo of Wolfram Alpha, a new "computational knowledge engine" based on the work of Stephen Wolfram. Some have dubbed Alpha a "Google killer," but, in reality, it is very different from the standard search engines that we are all familiar with today.

When we got the demo, Wolfram asked us to refrain from publishing any screenshots. Today, however, the Berkman Center posted a video of the public demo Wolfram gave earlier this week, so we think it's only fair that we share our own screenshots with our readers at this point.

The hype around Wolfram|Alpha, the next "Google killer" from the makers of Mathematica, has been building over the last few weeks. Today, we were lucky enough to attend a one-hour web demo with Stephen Wolfram, and from what we've seen, it definitely looks like it can live up to the hype - though, because it is so different from traditional search engines, it will definitely not be a "Google killer." According to Stephen Wolfram, the goal of Alpha is to give everyone access to expert knowledge and the data that a specialist would be able to compute from this information.