Wolfram Alpha Pro democratizes data analysis: an in-depth look at the $4.99 a month service by Dieter Bohn.
From the post:
On Wednesday, February 8th, Wolfram Alpha will be adding a new, “Pro” option to its already existing services. Priced at a very reasonable $4.99 a month ($2.99 for students), the new services includes the ability to use images, files, and even your own data as inputs instead of simple text entry. The “reports” that Wolfram Alpha kicks out as a result of these (or any) query are also beefed up for Pro users, some will actually become interactive charts and all of them can be more easily exported in a variety of formats. We sat down with Stephen Wolfram himself to get a tour of the new features and to discuss what they mean for his goal of “making the world’s knowledge computable.”
Computers have certainly played a leading role in the hard sciences over the last seventy or so years but I remain sceptical about their role in the difficult sciences. It is true that computers can assist in quickly locating all the uses of a particular string in Greek, Hebrew or Ugaritic. But determining the semantics of such a string requires more than the ability to count quickly.
Still, Wolfram created a significant tool for mathematical research (Mathematica) so his work on broader areas of human knowledge merits a close look.