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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."
Basically the original Wunderground.com site was very, very data dense, and had lots of links to specific views of weather data, data patterns, forecasts including aviation and maritime. You also got a post-it note sized wundermap view of your local area with all of this data. Rather than getting a TV man weather report, they gave you a full weather station with all the relevant data feeds. It was very transparent and if you disagreed with the weather report, there was enough data go dig in and decide if the model was off, or if that weather pattern would impact your local area.
The new "web 2.0" redesign dumped most of that data deep in the website, or hid it completely. Rather than having an all-in-one page, you were forced to hunt for relevant information. Data density dropped way, way down as well, which made it harder to put together a coherent picture yourself. If you just wanted to know if it was going to be sunny on Saturday, the new Wunderground was for you. If you were a hard core weather junkie who helped build up the site by telling all your friends about it for the last 15 years, it was total garbage. Since wunderground's primary audience was talented nerds, the new design did not go over well, and it didn't offer anything special (other than Wundermap which is a polished feed of the high resolution radar data now avalible for $$$ from NOAA) so it just kind of died due to absolutely shit management not understanding their core audience, and then alienating them by turning off classic.wunderground.com earlier this year.
Here's a NYT article on the topic
Here's a blog post detailing the changes
OLD - Here is a screenshot of "Classic" Wunderground, essentially unchanged from 2002 or so when the site really took off: https://i.imgur.com/7PA9TQF.png
NEW - Here is the site with it's "web 2.0 redesign" that went in to beta around 2010 and finally completely replaced Wunderground Classic in 2015: https://i.imgur.com/P7SU61J.png
The old site had it's fans for their reasons and it wasn't for everyone, but it was still the best online weather station data aggregator when they finally put it down. The only thing that could have made it beter was some sort of integration with stormpulse (I reccomend Cyclocane as a free alternative)
moox. for a new generation.
Did someone say classic?
$ telnet rainmaker.wunderground.com
Trying 38.102.137.140...
Connected to rainmaker.wunderground.com.
Escape character is '^]'.