The Wolfram Alpha iPhone application price has just became more reasonable. Originally the price of the application is $49.99 and now the price is $19.99, just in time for the holidays. However the application cost will go back up to $49.99 on January 1st.

Although the company does not reveal financial details of how well the app is doing, the company said that they are beating expectations.

[Wolfram Alpha blog]

Stephen Wolfram made an announcement today giving an update about his search engine.  For those of you that do not know about Wolfram Alpha, it is one of the most sophisticated search engines that exist today.

It can calculate complex math problems and can even use A.I. to output anything related to a keyword search.  Wolfram Alpha originally launched back in May.

Over the summer Wolfram Alpha classified over 54,000 bugs and suggestions and fixed what was not working in the past.  The company even launched a partnership with Microsoft to license technology over to Bing.com.

Wolfram Alpha’s search technology licensing to Bing.com will also be beneficial for Yahoo! users.  Bing.com will be powering Yahoo!’s search technology for at least 10 years.

I haven’t talked about Wolfram Alpha much in the past because I had not quite looked into it until recently.  But after watching the demo video, I was quite impressed and could see myself using it for math purposes.

Wolfram Alpha is named after the founder Stephen Wolfram.  The search engine is able to input information that is typed in by the user and use A.I. to output anything related to that keyword.  You could type in a full geometry problem and it would output the solution and give you graphs.  I’m excited to see the project evolve.

From a venture capital standpoint, the first thing you would ask yourself is how would this make money.  Like every other search engine, the easiest way to monetize is through advertising.  StartupMeme caught an advertisement by Lenovo appearing on the side (picture above).

Wolfram Alpha is ready to accept sponsored advertisements right away even the project is still being developed.  If you aren’t able to find search results within Wolfram, the website encourages you to search the web via Google.