Ever since we launched the Computable Document Format (CDF) last summer, people have been excited about the ease of deploying interactive documents to their clients and on their websites, and we're seeing CDFs used to enhance blogs, textbooks, and other applications in many different areas. Now we're holding a virtual workshop where you can hear from the author of an award-winning CDF textbook, chat with Wolfram experts in publishing and application development, and learn how to get started with your own projects. The Wolfram CDF Virtual Workshop will feature a keynote by Conrad Wolfram plus talks and Q&A sessions with Wolfram experts. The virtual event will be held Tuesday, April 24, at the following times: * 8am–noon Eastern Daylight Time (EDT); 1pm–5pm British Summer Time (BST) * Repeat session: 1pm–5pm EDT; 6pm–10pm BST Virtual seats are limited—see the event schedule and register today!

It is no secret that Mathematica has a big user community that is alive and kicking. It may, however, surprise you that the global user community has successfully organized 10 international Mathematica conferences around the world. It all began 20 years ago in the city of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, about two meters below sea level, where Wolfram Research had organized the Mathematica Days. The Mathematica Days were a small sibling of the larger annual Mathematica Conference, which in those days had its venue 8,800 km farther west in the Bay Area. Among the participants in Rotterdam were Peter Mitic (The Open University, UK), Gautam Dasgupta (Columbia University, New York), Pertti Näykki (Finland), Klaus Sutner (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh), Robert Kragler (Fachhochschule Ravensburg, Weingarten, Germany), and Veikko Keränen (Rovaniemi Institute of Technology, Finland). Most of them met for the first time and came from different walks of life, but they all shared the same enthusiasm for algorithmic mathematics. The lack of an academic conference targeting innovative work in, with, and about Mathematica triggered Peter Mitic to propose the idea of a symposium. His new friends very much supported the endeavor, and in 1994 Stephen Wolfram became the godfather of the new event by suggesting the name "International Mathematica Symposium" (IMS). In July 1995, the first IMS in Southampton, England, began an uninterrupted streak of biannual, and for some years even annual, symposia. In contrast to the Wolfram Developer/Technology/User Conferences with their venue in Champaign, Illinois, the IMSs have roamed the world. The second IMS took place in Rovaniemi near the polar circle in northern Finland, followed by Hagenberg near Linz in Austria, Tokyo in Japan, London—the one in England, Banff in Canada, Perth in western Australia, Avignon in the south of France, Maastricht in the Netherlands, and Beijing in China.

I get to show off the power of Wolfram|Alpha, Mathematica, and our other technologies to lots of interesting people, but last Friday was more interesting than usual, as David Cameron, the UK Prime Minister, came to our European headquarters. [caption id="attachment_9824" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron with Conrad Wolfram"][/caption] We have been growing consistently, and our UK location finally ran out of room for the extra staff that we were hiring, so we built a brand new set of offices on a former film studio site (I am told an underwater scene from one of the Superman movies was filmed under my office location). The Prime Minister came to perform the official opening.