Slashdot Mirror
IBM Acquires the Weather Company's Digital Business (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Times reports that IBM has agreed to acquire the Weather Company's data and digital properties including Weather.com and Weather Underground news sites. The deal does not include the Weather Channel. Techcrunch reports: "According to IBM, the acquisition helps it to harness one of the largest big data opportunities in the world: weather. That's something that impacts one-third of the world's GGP and in the U.S. alone, accounts for about half a trillion dollars in impact, the company notes. The deal will combine two big data platforms, IBM's cognitive and analytics business with that of Weather. Currently, The Weather Company has the fourth-most visited mobile app in the U.S. and handles 26 billion inquiries to its cloud-based services daily, generating about 4 GB of data per second. Following the acquisition, IBM's Watson will be able to tap into more data sets, including Weather's mobile and web properties, which analyze data from 3 billion weather forecast reference points, over 40 million mobile phones, and 50,000 flights per day."
data! data everywhere!
It is full of shitty ads, takes forever to load, every "story" is just clickbait bullshit garbage.
Congrats on buying Buzzfeed for weather, IBM.
Someone please say it's true?!? IBM please revive Wunderground classic! The new framework is an atrocity, give me back my Wunderground!
Sincerely, A weather nerd
moox. for a new generation.
Can't wait to see how IBM outsources the fucking weather.
Replacing the realty shit with automated screens will be better.
Muslims: they're bad and they're black and on the attack.
I found a picture of you
C'mon, Big Blue has it now. My guess - they'll try to find a way to charge for the weather widgets/desktop gadgets. Either that, or make 'em so complex it'll take a SME and a support team to get it working.
(N/T)
Wunderground hosts private weather stations across the U.S. in a broad brushstroke data collection that deepens the weather data pool. IBM obviously has the power to submarine down into those depths revealing chaos patterns and resolving a weather picture unattainable. For a price!
Fun to see WallSt. takeover the backcountry reporting stations, backyard weather rigs and blend them into a special sauce just for paying customers. What are the chances JonQPublic finds free access benefit from their free contribution? What are the chances local impacts can be forecast better with IBM?
Probably the only way they could keep the contract...
The article you linked mentions Weather Central, which is not The Weather Company. The Weather Company is owned by Blackstone, Bain, and NBCUniversal.
this tells you how badly IBM is hurting these days. They can't win against Cloudera and Hortonworks. People are moving away from their expensive software and IBM global services can't retain the top talent. Looks like the real death spiral for IBM really has begun.
Weather forecasting is done in the following fashion:
First, a random-number generator running on a networked cluster of Commodore PET machines in a basement in Poughkeepsie, New York applies random small changes to historical weather data from the last 50 years for any given area, to produce the prediction for 10 days out.
Then, as each day passes, those numbers are adjusted depending on whether the predicted temperature was above or below the temperature previously predicted for THAT day. This is why if you look at Friday's predicted low and high temperatures on MONDAY, then again on TUESDAY, and so on, it will subtly change as Friday approaches, getting closer and closer to the actual value as the day draws near. They pretend it's because the data gets more accurate as the day approaches, but the reality is, unless there's a GIANT storm approaching whose track can be guessed at, the predictions even more than 3 or 4 days out might as well have come straight out of the 1978 Farmer's Almanac.
Finally, whenever by sheer, random chance they NAIL a prediction, they go on about how right they were that one time, and repeat it until people forget it's all just GUESS-WORK.
You can do this yourself. Get a fake degree in weather forecasting, (which is a close relative of divination,) call yourself a "meteorologist" to make it sound like you've studied, and if you're particularly unscrupulous, sell people COPPER and FERROMAGNETIC NICKEL TORNADO REPELLANTS, or scrolls of FLOOD PROTECTION, or whatever, to nail to their doorways to scare the raindrops away.
This all works because only stupid, highly credulous people live where bad weather strikes. All the smart and savvy types have moved to places that don't have BAD weather, though when too many do this, there doesn't end up being enough WATER where they are to sustain them all.
Amazon is also interested in cloudy big data: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/a...
Perhaps the assistance from The Weather Company is not completely unrelated to today's announcement.
Sounds a lot like I Am AWAKE (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00H7H75BQ)...AI computer has the ability to tap into big weather data. Interesting concept with huge money-making possibilities of seeing market moves before some analyst has the time to estimate the weather's impact on the price of tradable commodities.
Shame...I love the photo side of that website.
From the linked article: "In 2012, Weather Services International, a sister company to The Weather Channel, announced an agreement to acquire Weather Central." If The Weather Company has acquired Weather Central, doesn't that mean E.L. Rothschild LLC no longer owns it?
Originally the weather underground was started at The University of Michigan. It was named after the sixties domestic terrorist group that also started at u of m as an offshoot of the students for a democratic society (sds). I thought The name was a clever bit of fun. U of M sold it to weather.com, which has sold it to ibm. The original weatherman (their motto was "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, implying that revolution was imminent) would be horrified. I love the irony but it's probably lost on most people lol.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground
Not counting on huge improvements in forecasts just yet. Watson is about 80 Teraflops. The European Center for Mid Range Weather Forecasting has about 3840 Teraflops. Not sure IBM has 50 Watsons just lying around to dedicate to this problem.
4 Gb of data per second - and that's probably just the metadata from the client queries.
Sounds like par for the course for the MBA's running IBM these days. They convinced themselves "cloud" is the next big thing, so they picked up their iPhones and asked Siri "What is an established company that has a lot of experience in cloud analytics?". Siri came back with "Weather.com" - and the rest is history (unfortunately big blue is history too...)
Headed up by IBM researchers Isidore Parsons and William Allen. They call it the "Allen-Parsons Project".
Wow! What a leap. Combining Cognitive platform with IoT wherein millions of devices churn in data per second... Practical, precious data. I'll not be surprised if by the same time next year, the met department shuts shop.
cloud-based services
I see what you did there.
Keep in mind, the Big Boys are using weather when it comes to the stock market now, too.
IBM's gonna make a killing selling this data to brokers and HFT.
-