All you questions answered

Have you ever wanted a system that answers almost your every factual question at home and on the go. For example:-

• What day is the day after tomorrow
• What is DCXCV – 25
• What is the cheapest toaster
• What is brown minus red
• Who stared in Desperate Housewives season 1

Wolfram Alpha is an online system that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than redirecting users to reference material potentially containing solutions. So unlike Google, this system looks within. It does this by considering a great deal of information ranging from every weather data point ever collected to the chemical structure of nearly every compound to the names of the notes in a D minor chord, and just about anything else that matters - colours, sports games, shopping, language, etc etc etc. It's not so much a search engine as it is a "knowledge engine."

You submit questions and computation requests via a text field and the system computes answers and relevant visualizations from a knowledge base of curated, structured data. Alpha thus differs from semantic search engines, which index a large number of answers and then try to match the question to one.

Wolfram Alpha is built on Wolfram's earlier flagship product, Mathematica, which encompasses computer algebra, symbolic and numerical computation, visualization, and statistics capabilities. The answer usually presents a human-readable solution. Wolfram Alpha is based on the computational platform Mathematica, written by British scientist Stephen Wolfram in 1988.

This thing is so versatile that Apple even integrated some of Wolfram Alpha's basic functionality with Siri to give factual answers to the user's questions. Guys, give this a go.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

An iPhone app is also available.

Mobile phones of the near future

Jack Dikian

December 2011

Mobile phones are now used to make more than just phone calls. With an estimated 3 billion subscribers worldwide, more and more users now put the mobile phone to uses that would have been regarded fanciful only a few years ago.

Who would have imagined, for example, that your phone would be able to eavesdrop a short sample of music and report back the name of the song, the artist, the album, and even let you purchase the music and listen to it on the run.

And did we see mobile phones snapping pictures, let us send and receive emails, chat, get directions, and even watch television. The mobile phone certainly has come a long way since the days of brick-shaped analog phones that barely fit in a briefcase, let alone your shirt pocket.

So it’s never easy to gaze into a murky crystal ball to get a glimpse of what might be in store in the not-too-distant future. Here are, possibly, those features that are very likely.

• Mobile Phone becomes your wallet - Near-field communications will turn mobile phones into credit or debit cards.
• The World Wide Web in our pocket - Mobile phones supporting full HTML browsers and making the browsing experience as good as that achieved on other devices such as desktops.
• Global positioning - system locating you and your phone anywhere on the globe.
• TV on the run - Mobile TV in all its forms is expected to explode in the next few years.
• Wi-Fi technology allowing us to use our phone in any Wi-Fi network hot spot.
• Better picture quality