Siri, Apple’s digital assistant technology exclusive to the iPhone 4S, currently accounts for nearly 25 percent of all search queries conducted through the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine. According to The New York Times:

Less than three years ago, Dr. Wolfram created a new kind of search engine, called Wolfram Alpha . Unlike Google or Microsoft’s Bing, Wolfram Alpha does not forage the Web. It culls its own painstakingly curated database to find answers. [...] the technology has come a long way, including delivering many answers for Siri, the question-answering personal assistant in the Apple iPhone 4S.

Originally geared towards math and science queries, Wolfram Alpha has expanded functionality to cover tasks like unit conversions, statistical data aggregation, and consumer-oriented activies such as displaying local show times or calculating distances. This has made it far more useful to mainstream consumers — the kind likely to have an iPhone 4S and Siri.

Apple sold over 37 million iPhones last quarter and the iPhone 4S took the top spot in terms of smartphone popularity, so it’s no surprise that a full quarter of searches on the service are from Apple’s digital assistant. And with smartphone adoption hitting massive growth — paired with speculation that Apple has plans to bring Siri to future iOS devices — it doesn’t seem all that far-fetched to imagine Wolfram working overtime just to provide curated results for Apple products.

Source: NYT

I spend a healthy portion of my time at Macworld doing the following:

1. Thinking about Google’s fixation on the iPhone and
2. Looking for a really good iPhone dock / Alarm clock.

…Keeping the iPhone in a dock by your bed seems like a no-brainer – charges it up, lets you play a song from your library to wake you up, maybe even lets you catch a quick movie before you fall asleep. Right? Apparently it does all of those things except the last part – the falling asleep part:

A study in Sweden and the United States finds that using a cell phone just before bedtime interferes with sleep patterns. – study

The deal is that the radiation from cell phone radios gets into your head and prevents you from getting into a deep sleep pattern. If it ain’t deep sleep, it don’t count. So maybe leaving that dock on the desk, next to your computer, and far from your sensitive squishy brain is the right idea after all.