Wolfram|Alpha is described as having four key components:

An ever-growing repository of underlying curated data piped in and stored on Wolfram Research systems, complementing the existing computable data stores already available through Mathematica.
5-6M lines of computational code repurposed from the Mathematica software kernel
Rudimentary natural language processing (NLP) capability, which is optimized for this specific domain, and […]

Earlier this month, via web conference, I had the privilege of participating in a live demo of the pre-release Wolfram|Alpha, presented in person by Mr. Wolfram, and had the opportunity to ask questions during the call. Subsequently, I received an invitation-only access to use the Wolfram|Alpha test application. The following is based on my notes […]

Based on his previous groundbreaking successes in the fields of computational science and mathematics, my expectations are high for Wolfram|Alpha, a new venture by Stephen “Mathematica” Wolfram, also author of 2002’s soaring 1280-page book entitled A New Kind of Science. Mr. Wolfram’s blog entry states:
It’s going to be a website: WolframAlpha.com. With one simple input […]

In a strange twist of fate, the annual MySQL Conference was just getting underway in Santa Clara, California, USA, when news hit that Oracle Corporation was acquiring Sun and, along with it, MySQL. That the most aggressive enterprise software company was buying the world’s leading open source database struck like lightning. After all, it had […]

Israel Gat and Bob Furniss have joined Cutter’s team of expert Senior Consultants. Most recently, Israel Gat led the Agile transformation at BMC Software. Under his leadership, BMC software development increased Scrum users from zero to 1,000 in four years. [Michael Mah and Mike Lunt of BMC Software described this transformation in an Executive […]

In the light of the hype over Web 2.0 this past year, I want to stress that organizations are making use of the techniques to improve the collaboration capabilities of their BI and business performance management initiatives. In fact, according to the results of our recent survey, slightly more than one-quarter of end-user organizations are […]

Is information technology accelerating the wild swings in the market?
Oil barrel prices, thought to cross over $200 are now around $50. The stock market jitters 5% - 7%  in a day looking like warmed-up jello. The talking heads on TV are talking with more emotion and I can see their veins popping on […]

The majority of organizations that have implemented or are planning to implement business performance management solutions rely on a data warehouse to support the data integration requirements of their performance management initiatives. This finding comes from a Cutter Consortium survey conducted in January 2008 of 101 end-user organizations based worldwide. The survey was designed to […]

I read a lot about Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0–about how companies need to fully embrace the concept of “openness.” And I agree that Enterprise 2.0 offers companies an innovative way to foster significantly better collaboration. But the truth of the matter is that a lot more control is needed in the business/Enterprise 2.0 world (compared to […]

Last week’s webinar “Web 2.0 and Rich Internet Applications” discussed the characteristics of various development approaches for building new-style, “live look-and-feel” web apps using Ajax, Flex or Google Web Toolkit (GWT). In particular we discussed how GWT alone among these alternatives provides a “single system image” to the developer, allowing him or her to […]