IBM to Acquire the Weather Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/technology/ibm-to-acquire-the-weather-company.html

by ISL • 11 years ago

306 174 11 years ago

swanson3• 11 years ago

Hell, if Watson needs some weather data -- I offer the most precise weather forecasts already: http://mostpreciseweather.com/

Just send me a check.

lentil• 11 years ago

Just an FYI, that page is broken for me. JS error of: "Failed to load resource: Could not connect to the server."

swanson3• 11 years ago

Doh - thanks. Looks like the geoip library I was using has moved. Fixed now for all your critical precision weather needs ;)

callumjones• 11 years ago

http://j.maxmind.com/app/geoip.js no longer exists (at least the domain j.maxmind.com)

smt88• 11 years ago

Who cares about precise? We want accurate weather forecasts, which (as far as I've heard meteorologists say) is pretty much impossible for much of the world. Weather is just not very predictable yet.

swanson3• 11 years ago

Hi, it's a joke. :)

Alex39172• 11 years ago

Hopefully IBM can fix the weather data industry. It seems ridiculously broken right now that if I want to get a "prediction" of how much it's going to rain next week there are a million free sources, but if I want to see how much it actually rained in the past week then I need to pay thousands of dollars or else figure out how to parse a bunch of obscure and undocumented formats.

huhtenberg• 11 years ago

Wolfram|Alpha has the data you are looking for.

feider2• 11 years ago

...and operates like North Korea when it comes to openness.

jonknee2• 11 years ago

Wunderground has lots of data available. They may have actually been part of this deal as they were owned by The Weather Channel.

http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KSFO/2015/10/28/...

ISL• 11 years ago

International Business Machines on Wednesday announced an agreement to acquire The Weather Co.'s B2B, mobile, and cloud-based web properties, including WSI, weather.com, Weather Underground and The Weather Company brand.

Source: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/28/ibm-plans-to-acquire-the-weat...

hangtime793• 11 years ago

Wunderground is included in the deal.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/47952.wss

acomjean• 11 years ago

I use weather underground for my personal server (developer accounts are free up to 500 calls a day...). We used them for work to get weather data for lots of locations hourly ("drizzle" plan). Very reliable.

api: http://www.wunderground.com/weather/api/d/docs

National weather service, http://weather.gov is my goto weather forecaster, but at the time I wrote the code, getting hourly data based on lat/long for several thousand locations (some outside the US) was problematic. and XML..

rdtsc4• 11 years ago

Part of IBM now as well.

Redoubts2• 11 years ago

That doesn't look free, unless you want to scrape.

http://www.wunderground.com/weather/api/d/pricing.html

rconti• 11 years ago

That's what I love about wunderground. I actually have an Ambient Weather ws-1001-wifi weather station at my house, and I'm part of wunderground's weather station network. Whenever I pop open the weather app on my iPhone, it shows the weather in my backyard which I love.

deuill• 11 years ago

Have you tried using http://forecast.io/? You can get historical forecasts via the JSON API[0], which is, from what I can tell, free for low-volume use.

[0] https://developer.forecast.io/docs/v2#time_call

tertius• 11 years ago

I think he's trying to get historical data of actual weather, not forecasts.

Redoubts2• 11 years ago

That looks really nice.

cwal373• 11 years ago

Hey buddy, I use this resource[1] all the time (and they're actually housed into the building next to me here at work). It's the long-term climate records from monitoring stations across the country, the United States Historical Climatology Network, and you can get daily data going back over a hundred years in some cases.

For example, I've used it to crank out random temperature histograms in the past[2], and even plotted some long-term averages to decide on temperature and precipitation ranges when going on camping trips. It's really useful if you're willing to work with the data a tiny bit. You're getting csv files, so it's not terrible to work with in any way via Python or R, or whichever data-friendly language/tool you want to use.

[1] http://cdiac.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ushcn/ushcn_map_interface.ht...

[2] http://btus.us/decadal-histograms-of-monthly-yosemite-temper...

Alex39172• 11 years ago

So apparently in order to use this I need to enter a NESDIS ID. When I Google that, the first result I get informs me that a NESDIS ID is "an 8-character identifier assigned by NESDIS that becomes the RAWS identification number for use with the GOES satellite." Clicking on 'glossary' in the breadcrumbs then fails to take me to an actual glossary.

I realize that it's theoretically possible to get this working. But it's not easy. What I want is a way to enter a postal code and get a JSON response with the precipitation for the last week. Without having to convert to scientology, learn GeoDjango, license GIS software, read an 800 page manual on parsing a bytestream from a satellite, etc.

rgovind• 11 years ago

Try this http://www.forecastwatch.com/

I once bought data from them for couple of hundred dollars.

subnaught• 11 years ago

For the most part, the Weather Company is merely redistributing data collected by the federal government, specifically the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. You can easily access historical rainfall data here: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/oh/hads/

chinathrow• 11 years ago

Those formats are very well documented and standardised world wide. Commercial use is another thing though...

dublinben• 11 years ago

The National Weather Service makes historical weather data available for free in a standardized format.[0] I'm sure there's already a parser written for any language you might be using.

[0]http://w2.weather.gov/climate/index.php?wfo=mtr

lelandbatey• 11 years ago

That's true, but that data is for only a few locations.

vegardx• 11 years ago

You can actually get all that for free from Norwegian Meteorological Institute, both forecasts and observations. The only caveat is that it's all in Norwegian. Looks like that is a little intentional[1].

[1] http://om.yr.no/verdata/free-weather-data/

arikrak• 11 years ago

I once found a link that showed useful charts for historical weather data including averages and highs and lows. I can't find it right now, but Googling for it brings up a similar site: https://weatherspark.com

exelius• 11 years ago

I wouldn't be too hopeful; this situation is the entire reason IBM made this purchase.

IBM is in the business of providing data about a whole lot of things. I would expect the cost for access to this data to go up, not down -- the majority people who care about how much it rained in the last week only care because they can make more money by knowing that.

hangtime793• 11 years ago

I couldn't disagree more. I bet we actually see a service exposed via Bluemix in the not distant future.

Keats• 11 years ago

I scraped http://en.tutiempo.net/climate when I was writing the following article: https://blog.wearewizards.io/comparing-the-weather-of-places...

There is also a link to the python script I made to scrape it

PretzelFisch• 11 years ago

There is Noaa http://w2.weather.gov/climate/ you can get past results there.

vram222• 11 years ago

Check out products like ForecastWatch from Intellovations. Not sure, but might be of help. Not affiliated, just had conversations with the founder a while ago.

http://www.intellovations.com/products/

feider2• 11 years ago

Sorry for non value adding cynicism, but when has a big corp fixed any industry? Especially IBM? Sure, more competition is welcome, but I would not get my hopes up.

alphataraxian• 11 years ago

Free quality controlled historical data available from NOAA as well:

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/land-based-station-dat...

anderiv• 11 years ago

Weather Underground makes nearly all climatological data available in easy-to-consume formats (csv mostly). Using your rainfall example, here's how I'd get a listing of rainfall by day for the month of September, from my local National Weather Service monitoring site:

  $ curl -s "http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KMSP/2015/09/31/MonthlyHistory.html?format=1" | grep -v Precip | cut -d "," -f 20

pbreit• 11 years ago

I swear I have no idea what IBM does. Anyone know?

mesozoic• 11 years ago

Consulting mostly I think

jonknee2• 11 years ago

Win at Jeopardy, star in some commercials, contribute little revenue to IBM's business.

ngoede2• 11 years ago

Buy other companies.

Afforess2• 11 years ago

IBM is a financial services company that dabbles in tech.

vegabook4• 11 years ago

you're funny. Probably half of the tech you use every day has an IBM enabling technology behind it, thankfully paid for, directly or indirectly, by this "financial services" company.

let's not forget that x86 itself could have been a Motorola 68000 if this company had not decided in Intel's favour. That's the extent to which this company defined the computer era.

The notebook you're using right now will boot DOS, commissioned by IBM. And I'm not even starting on the fact that almost all programming language roots go back to languages for the IBM 360 mainframes.

I'll gloss over the extent to which the architecture of your modern computer is essentially a scaled down version of what was invented by IBM in its mainframe business. Disk? Check. Processor cache? Check. Asynchronous bus? Check. GPU (IBM 8514) check.

It's not unfair to say that this company invented modern computing's engineering, and even if it has (very sadly) lost its way, one can hope that some of the culture of well-financed innovation remains, and this Watson business might be one of those.

deelowe• 11 years ago

They are an engineering services firm providing everything from consultation to turn key solutions to PAAS and IAAS products. Most of their work is enterprise and governmental and covered by NDAs and contracts that aren't/can't be widely publicized.

mpdehaan22• 11 years ago

Good question :)

IBM used to make pretty good laptops but sold the laptop part off (Lenovo)

IBM used to have a pretty decent server line or lines, though they sold a good part of the Intel stuff off (now Lenovo for the server line, but had sold off many other parts earlier, such as storage, and started using more vendors)

There were things Software Group did like Websphere, which I imagine still does good money, but why you'd actively want to seek it out over free alternatives I have no idea. They also have DB2 in database land. Software Group used to be cooler and have better resources than hardware groups, or so we thought. I have no idea how well they are doing.

They also got rid of microelectronics and who knows what else. In general, innovative parts of IBM get sold off, and they keep the services parts? Feels that way.

Their margins on services and people are not good, so they also have the reputation of restructuring/laying-off like crazy and seemingly at random, with lots of pressure on stock price.

I was there in 2001-ish when they scrapped pensions, though the thought of pensions actually existing is a novel concept today. It used to be a place where people thought they could work forever, and that is decidely no longer the case anywhere, it shows how the views of what IBM was changed rapidly over time.

They also increasingly pushed for a contractor-heavy work force for more ability to make cuts and reduce benefits.

chrisseaton3• 11 years ago

when they scrapped pensions

IBM doesn't offer any kind of pension as a benefit? What does everyone do? Buy privately? I think that's even illegal in some countries like the UK.

Milner082• 11 years ago

They still do lots of storage products like SAN Volume Controller, Storwize, FlashSystems and XIV.

However they are currently focusing on cloud, for that they have Softlayer and BlueMix.

In terms of other products MQ is still pretty big, so its CICS and as you said Websphere (which I believe has a free offering?). They still have the Power business and the Z server offering. They have SPSS, Tivoli, Lotus and Rational. Then they also have GBS (Business services) and GTS (Technical services).

Obviously they also have Watson. Some of the Watson services are available on BlueMix and they're pretty good. Currently I think Watson is branching out into all sorts of new areas. Health care is a big area of interest.

They also have ETS (Emerging Technology) which does client stuff, research and the like.

There is also a fairly big IOT department (But I don't know what happens there).

rdtsc4• 11 years ago

I was there in 2001-ish when they scrapped pensions, though the thought of pensions actually existing is a novel concept today.

Novel. Hmm, I was working in software industry for 15+ years never seen place haven pensions. Do you mean 401k plans instead?

Thrymr• 11 years ago

They used to make punch card equipment and typewriters. They've been around a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM

chrisseaton3• 11 years ago

Did you know one thing IBM are doing is working on a JIT for Ruby? They're talking about it at JavaOne today.

rdtsc4• 11 years ago

One thing they do is not sell to consumers anymore. For better for for worse, they got rid of that. The margins were too thing and it was harder to compete with Apple, Dell and other overseas makes of consumer harder.

They sell services, main frames, cloud, software used by enterprise (storage, project management, ...) provide consultants, and even have a bank! that companies can get financing from (when they buy all that expensive other stuff from it).

vram222• 11 years ago

They also invented many fundamental computer hardware and software technologies. (I was a bit surprised when I first read that several years ago.) From the Wikipedia article about IBM:

IBM has 12 research laboratories worldwide, bundled into IBM Research. As of 2013 the company held the record for most patents generated by a business for 22 consecutive years.[16] Its employees have garnered five Nobel Prizes, six Turing Awards, ten National Medals of Technology, and five National Medals of Science.[17] Notable company inventions include the automated teller machine (ATM), the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the magnetic stripe card, the relational database, the Universal Product Code (UPC), the financial swap, the Fortran programming language, SABRE airline reservation system, dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), copper wiring in semiconductors, the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) semiconductor manufacturing process, and Watson artificial intelligence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM

slater• 11 years ago

Lotus Notes! Hey what's with the downvotes :(

nosnos2• 11 years ago

Shitty marketing platforms.

sgt1013• 11 years ago

IBM tries to sell things. It is not always clear what those things are, what they are for or what they will cost, but the main function of IBM is selling.

Things.

ngoede2• 11 years ago

Having had the fun that is working for a company that gets bought by IBM I wish their workers the best of luck.

Hope they enjoy the Blue Washing(TM)

radiorental3• 11 years ago

Yes, I wonder how many of those 900 will be replaced by watson?

cookiecaper• 11 years ago

It's said that Sun turned down IBM's buyout bid and went with Oracle because they thought that there'd ultimately be fewer layoffs with Oracle. Of course, no one really knows how things would've played out if IBM had taken over Sun.

ghaff2• 11 years ago

I was an analyst at the time and an IBM acquisition of Sun never made sense to me. The Oracle acquisition did--even if I didn't personally like it for a variety of reasons.

radiorental3• 11 years ago

This is a smart move and obvious application of the Watson engine if it can be applied reliably to the unpredictable 'global weirding' weather problems.

Does anyone know if organisations like Home Depot, for example, roll their own solutions or rely on 3rd parties to help move things like generators into stores ahead of storms?

dubcanada• 11 years ago

As far as I know it's 100% up to each store to watch the weather reports and determine the required action.

radiorental3• 11 years ago

Interesting, it was my understanding that HomeDepot HQ move stock around ahead of predicted near term need.

hangtime793• 11 years ago

I can't speak for Depot, but in the case of some of the larger retail organizations, major weather events will get coordination from HQ, but beyond those its typically left up to regional and store manager discretion.

Nicholas_C2• 11 years ago

That sounds like a problem that needs solving.

deeths• 11 years ago

Funny tweet on this by @Cryo (https://twitter.com/Cryo/status/659369885991088129):

IBM Board meetings notes: "We should buy the Cloud" "What?" "You know, the Cloud" "Why?" "We want to be the biggest"

buys weather channel

amyjess• 11 years ago

This reminds me a "joke" told to me by a friend who works at what used to be Softlayer (and has now been integrated into IBM) to explain why IBM bought Softlayer: "IBM wanted to have a good cloud business, so they bought one".

bostonpete2• 11 years ago

Except that according to the article, the bought the Weather Company and not the Weather Channel...

Nicholas_C2• 11 years ago

The Weather Company owns the Weather Channel.

cryptoz8• 11 years ago

There has been significant consolidation in the weather industry over the last 10-20 years, and it's a very interesting space right now with smartphones coming online as weather sensors. IBM's acquisition of The Weather Company is the joining of two huge behemoths, I wonder how well they can work together.

The company also has a popular mobile app, which Mr. Kenny said collected barometric pressure from its users’ phone sensors. Millions of locations are turning in information 96 times a day.

Fascinating...The new-weather startups like Sunshine and PressureNet are going to be watching this closely.

https://thesunshine.co

https://pressurenet.io

asd• 11 years ago

Hopefully they'll be able to harness all of this delicious weather data and squirt forecasts to our watches as depicted in BTTF II.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI7ctWyXl5s

baakss2• 11 years ago

Wunderground and weather.com were owned by the same company? For some reason I never would have guessed that just based on my experience on those sites.

Wunderground generally feels clean and on-topic.

Weather.com is often filled with "Doomsday scenario with newest hurricane season" and "Check out this massive shark jumping" news stories.

DavidAdams• 11 years ago

That, my friend, is known as effective market segmentation.

jazzyk2• 11 years ago

Yup, it is all about giving consumer a "choice".

rstupek• 11 years ago

Prior to being acquired they were a much lighter weight and usable site. Now they are almost as bad as weather.com with ads and unnecessary UI clutter

thrownaway2424• 11 years ago

I agree. These days the wunderground site drags my 2009 iMac to an almost total standstill. I don't really understand how they screwed it up so bad :-(

heartbreak2• 11 years ago

They've been owned by the same company for less than a year, I believe.

mikeyouse3• 11 years ago

For less than a year now

More than that now, I ran into a guy in the Haight wearing a WUnderground fleece about 3 years ago, right after the buyout and told him it was my favorite weather website and that I hoped Weather.com wouldn't ruin it.

He then told me he was on the Weather.com team who led the buyout -- Oops. He still offered to send me a WUnderground hoodie though, so kudos to him for having a sense of humor.

First article I found re: the buyout in 2012;

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/04/us/as-weather-channel-buys...

silveira• 11 years ago

Once I visited weather.com and every image, literately every image, was a reference to an imminent cataclysmic event. Volcanoes exploding in fire, meteorites exploding over cities, etc. It's hard to differentiate weather.com from a parody of weather.com.

wavefunction• 11 years ago

I have no problems using Weather.com. I just type in the url, they've got my locations of interest up at the top, I click on one, get a quick forecast and can drill down into different segments like "The Weekend" "10-Day Forecast" and easily get the "Map-In-Motion" doppler.

Any extraneous stuff I notice but filter out automatically. I love the site and don't have any of the sort of issues you've described. I do seem to have a higher tolerance for the minor inconveniences of life when I compare my experience to those of the people who surround me, so maybe I'm just lucky. I think you can develop this attitude though, and it sounds like it would help ease your way through the world.

baakss2• 11 years ago

Unless I'm misreading your last sentence, I think you vastly overestimate how much it annoys me.

The only issue I described was extraneous noise on the website (most of which has nothing to do with weather). It's just less usable/aesthetically pleasing than the alternatives.

I'm not losing sleep over it or anything. I just use the alternative site instead.

eeeeeeeeeeeee• 11 years ago

The Weather Channel acquired Wunderground.com in 2012: http://www.wunderground.com/about/pr/news.asp?date=20120702

They probably didn't want the competition anymore because I don't think the Weather Channel has learned a damn thing about how to run a clean website since acquiring Wunderground. On the plus side, it appears they have left Wunderground to do their own thing and not interfere.

n0us• 11 years ago

Inspite of being completely superfluous I kind of like the entertainment on the Weather Channel and their website. They have done a good job making an otherwise boring topic entertaining.

Zelphyr• 11 years ago

Whatever you do DON'T buy the ad free Weather Underground app! If you forget your password they will ignore any requests to reset it or, for that matter, any support requests. Sure it's just $.99 but as far as I'm concerned they rip people off.

giltleaf2• 11 years ago

This sets up IBM to compete directly with Monsanto's new Climate Corp in the ag-tech space. My hopes is that this drives the entry price of this tech down so it can actually benefit small farmers (who may have higher margins due to crop choice but lower profits due to size and economies of scale) and not just larger agribusiness operating on economies of size.

A question: how has the accuracy of weather prediction improved overall?

sampo• 11 years ago

A question: how has the accuracy of weather prediction improved overall?

Here is a recent New York Times article on that topic, with emphasis on hurricane prediction:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/upshot/hurricane-joaquin-f...

"Over the last few decades, faster computers, superior models and new data have allowed all weather forecasting to improve, by a lot. But the United States hasn’t quite matched that effort. It didn’t invest in computing power and models that kept up with the potential for better forecasts."

giltleaf2• 11 years ago

Thanks!

jdelsman• 11 years ago

Not sure about anyone else, but this would make me actually want to work for weather.com or wunderground.com.

myth_buster2• 11 years ago

  The company also has a popular mobile app, which Mr. Kenny said 
  collected barometric pressure from its users’ phone sensors. 
  Millions of locations are turning in information 96 times a day.

Well, this is news to me.

theseatoms• 11 years ago

Does anyone know if it asks for these permissions on install?

cryptoz8• 11 years ago

Specific permission to access the barometer is not required by Apple or Google. The weather app already does ask permission for location services in general, so yes it is already there. Since they have already been tracking your latitude and longitude, the barometer gives altitude as well - along with current atmospheric pressure trends.

cryptoz8• 11 years ago

Yes, I think that news is about as big as the news of the acquisition itself. Very exciting news! I have been trying to get the leadership of WU and TWC to do this for the last 3-4 years, and I'm very happy they are finally doing it. In the beginning[1], they made comments suggesting that they thought it was a dumb idea or a waste of time, and that the barometric pressure data from smartphones could never be used in a weather forecast model. I was flabbergasted and could not understand why they wouldn't even consider trying it.

Well, four years later here we are! Finally. We are at the beginning of a revolution in how we understand our atmosphere. There are now billions of internet-connected barometers that can be used in weather models - this should provide a revolution in our ability to forecast short-term mesoscale events like thunderstorms and tornadoes, among other things [2].

[1] http://gizmodo.com/5851288/why-the-barometer-is-androids-new...

[2] http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2015/10/apple-computer-could-r...

Some startups working on this are Sunshine, PressureNet, Weathermob, WeatherSignal:

https://thesunshine.co

https://pressurenet.io

http://weathermob.me

http://weathersignal.com

InvisibleCities• 11 years ago

Maybe this is a dumb question, but how does the weather app know if the user is outside? Many buildings have HVAC systems that are designed to have positive pressure relative to the general environment, and most phone GPS systems are not accurate enough to tell the difference between being inside a building and outside of it on the sidewalk.

nosnos2• 11 years ago

Uninstalled.

badloginagain3• 11 years ago

Why? Do you find your barometric data to be particularly sensitive?

jes5199• 11 years ago

Installed!

joe5150• 11 years ago

When will phones begin to also incorporate thermometers? And don't most already include hygrometers?

arjunrc2• 11 years ago

I'm also interested in this question. Can someone with this expertise answer?

Is there a reason why we haven't seen a thermometer in a phone so far?

acd• 11 years ago

Weather is a chaotic system, due to it being chaotic and the lorenz attractor maximum three days of weather can be forecasted.

"While we can typically predict general weather patterns up to 3 days ahead, predictability for detailed local weather such as rainfall or fog formation is much less."

see more here http://research.metoffice.gov.uk/research/nwp/ensemble/conce...

jameshart• 11 years ago

If you think IBM may be unaware of the nature and consequences of chaos theory, you might want to look into Benoit Mandelbrot's employment history.

sgt1013• 11 years ago

The thing is, is IBM as a corporate entity unaware of it? I know people who work for IBM who are much smarter than me, and who will always have a high level job as innovators in the IT industry, but they have 0 say in what IBM does, says or wants.

wensing• 11 years ago

Unless your forecast is probabilistic.

nealrs• 11 years ago

FYI, if you're interested in USING Weather Company data & building apps with Bluemix, Devpost just launched a new online hackathon all about that (and Spark!) with $30K in prizes.

http://sparkathon.devpost.com/

sethd2• 11 years ago

I'm assuming The Weather Channel was left out of the deal to die a slow death on it's own. I wonder if they will launch a new website and set of apps just focused purely on the TV content. You can't have a TV channel without a web presence, right?

skizm• 11 years ago

Is this the default weather app that comes on ios?

acomms• 11 years ago

Nope - I think this is the one they're referring to: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/weather-channel-weather.com/...

MBCook• 11 years ago

That's built by Apple but it does get it's data from The Weather Channel.

sgt1013• 11 years ago

I had a discussion with some weather forecasters about how we could enhance their datasets with IoT sensors (80k of them over ~200,000km^2. The answer was no enhancement whatsoever. Because they can infer an infinity of points from satellite data (all day every day), calibrated with about 1000 sensors.

sarahh• 11 years ago

Hope to see improvements in the weather industry.

OutsmartDan• 11 years ago

Hope they finally fix weather.com.

Hydraulix989• 11 years ago

I'm confused. WATSON is a specific NLP-based question answering system. [1] How can WATSON help predict the weather?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)

IBM to Acquire the Weather Company

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