Wolfram Alpha will be launching on May 18, 2009, almost exactly a year after Powerset launched. Unlike other big
flops launches, I am totally stoked about the Wolfram Alpha launch, especially after reading all of great posts written about pre-demos. In the spirit of nostalgia for Powerset's launch, I thought I'd toss my hat in a ring (unfortunately never having had a live demo), focusing on Wolfram Alpha's pre-launch from a marketing perspective.
Branding. In launching a new search service, a comparison to Google is inevitable. We explicitly told reporters that Kosmix and Powerset were not competing with Google, but they cannont resist the siren song of a controversial headline. Wolfram Alpha is wisely branding themselves as a computation engine, suggesting questions that crunch numbers instead of better search. Also, despite comparisons to Google, Wolfram Alpha is trying to be humble and remind people that the road to computation is a long journey, not a quick win. Wolfram's post The Quest for Computable Knowledge: A Longer View sets the right tone in a historical context.
Audience. There have been a lot of complaints that the name "Wolfram Alpha" is too long and complicated. In demos, they've been showing off chemical formulas, population graphs, and calculus. This will not appeal to my mom. Instead of going after consumers, they are going after geeks who love data. Most geeks associate Worlfram with Mathematica (and the ueber-geeks associate him with NKS). I like the name, for now.
Competitors. Notwithstanding comparisons to Google, I'm surprised that few have compared Wolfram Alpha to True Knowledge, which is currently live and can answer inferential questions like who are queen elizabeth ii's grandchildren and who was the first woman to climb mount everest and what time is it in Boston. Note that both of these questions require inference, but TK knows about QEII's kids and their kids (and that kid's kids are grandchildren). Unlike Wolfram Alpha, TK has a system for users to enter and curate information in their database. If TrueKnowledge can get enough editors, this is potentially a much more flexible system than manually curating government data. Another obvious competitor is Metaweb's Freebase. It'll be interesting to see who else pops up in this space.
Benefits. This is where Wolfram Alpha is going to have some problems. It's just not very often that I have questions about chemical formulas and when I type in "Seattle, WA" the graph of the temperature might be interesting, but probably not what I'm looking for. What is it that I should use a "computation engine" for? At least in the short term, they're going to rely on geeks getting lost in all of the cool things that Wolfram Alpha makes possible.
Scope. As a corrolary to the above, Wolfram Alpha better do a phenomenal job on day one of explaining what data is availabe and what kind of computations can be done on that data. If they're smart, they'll have tons of example queries that show off the power of the engine, lots of screencast and tutorials, and maybe even a contest to get users to generate cool queries. Based on what I've seen, here are a few demos that I'm gonna try (of course I'm going to take my own advice and not rate Wolfram Alpha based on the results):
- Chemical formula of water
- Number of moles in a gallon of water
- What happens when you mix bleach and ammonia?
- What states are in the Pacific Daylight time zone?
- What's the time difference between Tokyo and New York City?
- What animals have a cloven hoof?
- Is it colder in San Francisco or Seattle in May?
- When did the wooly mammoth live?
- What were the top 10 largest cities in the US in 1990?
*waiting with bated breath*
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