Well I had a chance to read the demo review of Wolfram Alpha on Cycorp’s Blog (I guess it was written by Douglas Lenat) and without making sensational conclusion I will say that first impression is quite sound and justify the claims made by Dr. Wolfram. I will just point out major features-
1. Wolfram Alpha primarily rely on curated data and it does not depend on the current or future semantic web for answering the question, although third party information can be accessed using APIs.

Its inference engine is basically a large number of individually hand-engineered scripts for tapping into data which he and his team have spent the last several years gathering and “curating”.

3. Wolfram Alpha computing logic can answer question like DWIMM (“do what I might mean”), but it can not answer queries those require logically reasoning to glue the individual instance of information which the system can individually fetch for you.

4. Wolfram Alpha is not exactly natural language processing, but it gives a similar look and feel. Alpha lies somewhere between two extremes Google and Cys,

Wolfram Alpha is somewhere around the geometric mean of those two extremes. It handles a much wider range of queries than Cyc, but much narrower than Google; it understands some of what it is displaying as an answer, but only some of it

Final thoughts: Alpha is a complementary technology

I would invest in this, literally and figuratively. If it is not gobbled up by one of the existing industry superpowers, his company may well grow to become one of them in a small number of years, with most of us setting our default browser to be Wolfram Alpha.