dotty blah: Stephen Wolfram says he almost had a deal with Google, but it 'blew up'

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Stephen Wolfram says he almost had a deal with Google, but it 'blew up'

As you may recall, Wolfram Research signed a deal with Microsoft a few years back that saw some Wolfram Alpha functionality integrated into Bing. As it turns out, it very nearly found its way into a certain other search engine as well. In an interview at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam today, Stephen Wolfram revealed that his company had tried to work with Google and "almost had a deal," but it "blew up." Unfortunately, he didn't provide any further details about when those talks took place or exactly what the potential deal entailed, and it doesn't sound like we can expect that deal to be revived anytime soon -- especially considering Google's own efforts that are increasingly overlapping with Wolfram Alpha. As Wolfram himself notes, though, the two companies do have something of a longstanding connection: Google co-founder Sergey Brin was actually an intern at Wolfram way back in 1993.

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