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Wolfram Alpha Launches Tonight, On Camera

Posted by Soulskill on from the nuts-and-bolts dept.

future.nerd tips news that Wolfram Alpha is set to be launched tonight at 8PM EST (00:00 GMT), and the entire process will be broadcast live, via webcast. Steven Wolfram said to PCPro, "We've been rather surprised that we haven't been able to find even a single publicly available record of the commissioning of any large website at all. So we thought we would document our own experience. We can't guarantee that everything will go smoothly. We fully expect to encounter unanticipated situations along the way. We hope that it'll be interesting for people to join us as we work through these in real time." In a related blog post, he explains how Wolfram Alpha interacts with Mathematica.

3 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. Step by Step by eddy_crim · · Score: 5, Insightful

    1. create complex new search engine type technology
    2. create webcast of launch
    3. announce on slashdot
    4. fail!

    I wonder why people dont create records of sites going live... perhaps its cos the poop always collides with the fan!

    --
    hmmm.
  2. Idiots - exactly the wrong way to launch a website by Sanity · · Score: 5, Insightful
    You can be pretty sure that this wasn't the idea of the engineers who built the website. The worst possible launch from an engineering standpoint is a high-profile one where your traffic spikes immediately on going live. The likely outcome is that your site goes down and all your PR effort results in nothing other than ridicule.

    When I've been involved in launching websites I've always had to talk down the PR people from some kind of high-profile launch, to something as gradual as possible.

  3. Re:Google Killer by DragonWriter · · Score: 4, Insightful

    He specifically said it's not a google killer.

    Well, people have said its not trying to compete with Google, even though its designed to do something better that people currently use Google for. They are either simply hoping Alpha won't to be compared to Google, perhaps for fear the comparison will come out negative, or they know what "compete" means.