The Wolfram Language provides a unique opportunity to revolutionize programming education, and we've been working on ways to deliver the language for students and educators. Today we're making available a beta version of Wolfram Programming Lab. You can access it free on the web in our Wolfram Open Cloud. There are subscription versions that provide additional capabilities on the web and that include native desktop versions for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Wolfram Programming Lab is an interactive programming environment that contains dozens of "Explorations"---step-by-step guides to creating programs with tiny amounts of code. Each Exploration gives the starter code for a program, and students are encouraged to dive in and change the code to create something new. Students can also challenge their understanding by solving exercises in the Go Further sections available in most Explorations.

Community is about to turn 10,000! Members, not years. We launched Wolfram Community in July of 2013. After two short years, it has grown to just a hair's breadth away from 10,000 participants. Join now and help us reach this milestone! We'll award prizes to new members with the most creative profiles who join until the day we hit 10,000. The five people with the most detailed and creative profiles will get a one-year subscription of Wolfram|Alpha Pro and one million Wolfram Cloud Credits. Wolfram Community profiles allow flexible formatting (here is an example), so use it fully. An additional grand prize will go to one of the winners---a personally signed copy of Stephen Wolfram's upcoming book, An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language. In your Wolfram Community profiles, tell us about what you've done and dream to do with Wolfram technologies. The best dream wins! We have seen many great posts and built new features for the convenience of our members. Today we're excited to unveil a number of usability improvements, starting with what we call "email notifications."

In March, we launched the Wolfram Data Drop, an open service that makes it easy to accumulate data of any kind, from anywhere—setting it up for immediate computation, visualization, analysis, querying, or other operations. Now we are announcing the release of the Wolfram Data Drop Channel, which lets you track and accumulate data from your everyday apps, devices, and services available in IFTTT wherever and whenever you want. IFTTT—which stands for "if this then that"—is a service that coordinates apps and other services, triggering one to do something when something else happens in another. IFTTT products and apps are organized in Channels of triggers and actions that are used to create personalized recipes and buttons on your mobile devices. A typical recipe could be "If anyone posts a new Instagram photo from Central Park, then add the photo's URL to a databin":

The Wolfram Technology Conference 2015 is just a few weeks away, and we're excited to demonstrate the latest in cloud computing, interactive deployment, mobile devices, and more as we explore how Wolfram technologies are pushing the boundaries of computation. If you haven't already reserved your spot for this year's conference, there's still time to register. As the conference draws closer, we're putting finishing touches on the event schedule, which will include in-depth presentations, hands-on workshops, "Meet-Ups" for attendees with similar interests, recognition of 2015 Wolfram Innovator Award winners, and lots of networking opportunities. Here are some of the topics we'll be highlighting October 20–22: