• June 4, 2009

Stephen Wolfram, WolframAlpha co-founder, provided a live update Thursday through streaming video on the search engine and services it plans to offer. Three weeks after the official launch, the roadmap now includes subscription-based and premium data services similar to Lexis-Nexis, as well as up-to-the-minute flight schedules and travel information for planes.

Wolfram says the computational engine also plans to release more information in multiple languages. Today, the engine recognizes something typed into the search engine in English, but doesn't know how to interpret in another language. The underlying algorithms have the capabilities to do the translations, but the grammatical structure of certain languages will become a challenge. The next step will be to understand "international language sensitizing output" to provide more information in different languages. -- Laurie Sullivan