The very first Wolfram Mathematica Virtual Conference was a great success! Held in two sessions at different times to accommodate global attendees, this free event included 25 talks with Q&A and access to virtual networking. The conference started with Stephen Wolfram's keynote speech, which provided insights into the background and vision of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the new Computable Document Format (CDF).

Only four weeks to go until the Wolfram Technology Conference 2011 in Champaign, Illinois, and in order to help you prepare, the full conference schedule is now available online—fully interactive and customizable. As of this year, you can create your schedule, network with fellow attendees, arrange meetings with Wolfram staff and other participants, and rate talks and share comments throughout the conference.

Only 10 more weeks to go until the Wolfram Technology Conference 2011, and we have just added details for nearly 50 talks and interactive sessions to the conference website. We will cover a broad array of topics across mathematics and statistics; finance, business, and social sciences; education; software development; science and engineering; electronic publishing; visualization; and more! Presentation titles and abstracts are being added every day! See our current list of talks and workshops here.

Things are really moving fast at Wolfram these days. Mathematica 8 introduced 500 new functions and 7 new or extended application areas, including the revolutionary free-form input, Wolfram|Alpha integration, and a direct way to create our groundbreaking Computable Document Format (CDF), which was officially released to the public in late July. To help keep current users and those who are interested in Wolfram technology up to date, we will be hosting a free half-day Wolfram Mathematica Virtual Conference. With our global audience in mind, we are offering this event on two separate days in two different time zones: Monday, September 26, 2011:Noon–4:15pm Eastern Daylight Time Tuesday, September 27, 2011:Noon–4:15pm Central European Summer Time This virtual event is packed with tips, tricks, and techniques from Wolfram developers and Mathematica experts and will help you get the most out of Mathematica—regardless of your discipline or familiarity with Wolfram technologies.

Today we launched our Computable Document Format, or CDF, to bring documents to life with the power of computation. CDF binds together and refines lots of technologies and ideas from our last 20+ years into a single standard—knowledge apps, symbolic documents, automation layering, and democratized computation, to name a few. Disparate though these might appear, they come together in one coherent aim for CDF: connecting authors and readers much better than ever before. The idea is to provide a knowledge container that's as easy to author as documents, but with the interactivity of apps—for CDFs to make live interactivity as everyday a way to communicate as spreadsheets made charts.

There are two great principles to Mathematica's parallel computing design. The first is that most of the messy plumbing that puts people off grid computing is automated (messaging, process coordination, resource sharing, fail-recovery, etc.). The second is that anything that can be done in Mathematica can be done in parallel. With this week's release of gridMathematica 8, which adds the 500+ new features of Mathematica 8 into the shared grid engine, one nice example brings together both ideas—and that is driving CUDA hardware, in parallel, over the grid.

“Every conference brings reunions with old friends and a chance to make new ones among the many attendees who use Mathematica in a wide variety of industries and application areas.” ---Sal Mangano, Author of Mathematica Cookbook If you are interested in the latest and future technologies that are shaping computation and algorithm-rich development… would like to keep current on how to most efficiently develop and deploy with Wolfram technologies… want to see how others are solving computation challenges across industries and fields… Then join us for the Wolfram Technology Conference 2011 from October 19 through 21 in Champaign, Illinois, USA. Just steps from Wolfram's headquarters, the conference will provide three days of pure productivity, featuring talks by Wolfram developers, users presenting real-world solutions, interactive workshops, developer kitchens, and the opportunity to exchange ideas with fellow Mathematica enthusiasts. This year’s conference schedule will feature even more interactive and hands-on sessions and will cover topics that include: