wolfram alpha and vodafone(com)

After my hardly-debauched weekend two things caught my attention today, the release of the much anticipated Wolfram|Alpha search engine and the listing of Vodacom on the JSE (Johannesburg Stock Exchange). I was so eager to jot some notes on this but Mondays are focus-on-work days.

Firstly in the bloggerati over-hype style, I was tempted to call this post- “Wolfram Google killer released.” I’m sure there are many similarly named posts at this very moment and of course those really in the know bloggers have already covered this topic and it’s terribly old hat. To those, far from the bleeding edge, Wolfram|Alpha is a search engine that in their own words has long-term plans “to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone”.  Very ambitious. It’s the brain child of that gifted mathematician Stephen Wolfram, who has already blessed us with the very popular Mathematica programme. In simplified terms, this search engine uses specially collected information and algorithms that spew out information such as weather, gross domestic product of a country and similar facts. It’s pretty amazing when it works but the fact that all this information must be verified first means that there are big gaps in what they have been able to collect and not very much that would be local to South Africa.

Which in a very convoluted way brings me to my other bit of news. The Vodacom/Vodafone saga with Cosatu over the weekend. I’m still not sure how Cosatu (Congress of South African Trade Unions) managed to convince ICASA (the communications sector regulator of South Africa) to suddenly spring into action and block the sale of Vodacom shares. I mean no one has got ICASA to do very much  of this kind of concern-for-the-citizen behaviour throughtout its history. Anyway, Cosatu ended up with pie on its face and a very expensive lawyers bill as they lost the case with costs. Was all this the first test of how much power Cosatu will be afforded in a Zuma government? I’m curious to see if and how government will respond. With all this excitement, I thought I would play with my new toy and quickly typed in a search for “Vodacom”. Wolfram Alpha hasn’t yet learnt of this company and suggested Viacom. When I put in “Vodafone”, it did spew out a rather impressive list of financial information. Maybe the flexing of Cosatu will have shone a very bright light on this newly listed media darling and soon Wolfram will recognise what I’m talking about.

I couldn’t resist. My ego got the better of me so I also quickly tried “Bantam”. How insulted I was, it told me amongst other things that the word was a noun for “any of various small breeds of fowl”. Small!? It may be remarkable as the beginning of a new way of processing the intelligence in the web, but with such responses it still has a way to go before understanding the nuances of the real world.