WolframAlpha

History
Wolphram|Alpha is known as an “answer engine” and uses the tagline, “computational knowledge engine.” The company, Wolfram Research, was started by scientist and author Stephen Wolfram in 1987. The company is also known for the product Mathematica, which is used in a number of mathematical and scientific fields and serves as the base engine that Wolfram|Alpha is built on. The engine was released in May of 2009, and also has mobile applications that have access to the engine. Rather than scouring the web for information and serving it up to people using the engine, millions of documents and sources of data are tagged by the 500+ employees of Wolfram Research, including the full text of Wikipedia. The engine can solve calculus problem, but rather than just show you the answer, it will also show the steps to get the answer.

Audience
Users exist among all ages that use the website or download the app. When the feature launched to analyze a Facebook account, more than 400,000 users tried this feature in the first two weeks.

Platform uses
This platform is used for solving mathematical equations, chemical reactions, comparisons, and other questions that use text and mathematics to solve answers, such as “When did George Washington die?"

Number of users/other statistics
Wolphram|Alpha runs on over 15 million lines of Mathematica code, and the processing server has 10,000 CPU’s.

In the news/interesting facts
Wolfram Research served as the mathematical consultants for the CBS television show Numb3rs. Wolfram Research licenses the use of the engine to many companies, including Microsoft (Bing Search), DuckDuckGo (web search), Apple (Siri), Google (Android Iris), and Research In Motion (BlackBerry voice control).

Similar platforms
Similar platforms include: IBM's Watson cognitive engine