TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Wolfram Alpha just introduced a pro service, where users can use images and files as search inputs, and export the charts it creates in a variety of formats (including Excel and JSON). The Verge has an excellent review of exactly what it does. What particularly excites me, though, is Wolfram Alpha is building a service that understands what data is, and thus can be searched or combined in useful ways. For example, if you upload a file which contains prices, this is what happens:

It can figure out: is that sequence of dates and dollar figures likely to be an asset price? Or is it the amount of lemonade that people bought? It uses some heuristics based on seeing to what extent this looks like [random data] and to what extent it looks like independent samples to guess whether it’s actually an asset price — and given that it thinks it’s an asset price, it will go ahead and figure out a growth rate summary.

When Apple introduced the iPhone 4S, and Siri along with it, I wrote that I was most excited about Siri because it was a large step toward a time when all the world’s data is easily searchable and comparable. I wrote:

Let’s use Microsoft as an example again. Right now, if I wanted to see their operating profit as a percentage of sales from 1995-2005, I would need to find their financial statements, locate the data contained in them, and make the calculations myself. If I wanted to do anything useful, I would have to import it into a spreadsheet application (most likely by hand). Rather than doing this myself, though, I could just ask a future version of Siri for Microsoft’s operating margin between 1995 and 2005, and it would return that data to me in a table and chart.

Then I can ask it to compare Microsoft’s operating margin over that period compared to Hewlett-Packard’s, Dell’s and Apple’s.

Wolfram Alpha is getting there. We’re not very far away, and that’s a very big deal. The web has made access to data mostly free and accessible to everyone, but finding the right data is still a terribly hard thing to do. You have to manipulate a search engine to narrow its results down to what you want, physically look through pages and pages of links, and then—once you find the data you need—convert it into a usable format. That’s an incredible waste of time and deterrent to good research and real innovation. Where Wolfram Alpha is heading is where there’s none of that, because the service does it for you.

They’re one of the most exciting companies today.