
IBM to Acquire the Weather Company - ISL
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/technology/ibm-to-acquire-the-weather-company.html
======
Alex3917
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.

~~~
jonknee
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/...](http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KSFO/2015/10/28/MonthlyCalendar.html?req_city=San%20Francisco&req_state=CA&reqdb.zip=94101&reqdb.magic=1&reqdb.wmo=99999#calendar)

~~~
hangtime79
Wunderground is included in the deal.

[http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/47952.wss](http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/47952.wss)

~~~
free2rhyme214
Aww I love this app except their ads. I'm not sure what IBM's plans for this
is.

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myth_buster

      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.

~~~
nosnos
Uninstalled.

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

~~~
cryptoz
(I'm not the person you are asking, but): People often don't really know how
sensitive the barometric pressure data could be, if used for tracking
purposes. The barometer in your smartphone can help provide your physical
location to within 1 meter, if used for location tracking instead of weather
forecasting. If used for weather forecasting, the altitude data is treated as
noise and will not be used to find your location.

However, it is now mandated by the FCC that all barometer-carrying smartphones
will report your accurate altitude information to 911 emergency response if
you make a 911 call from your smartphone. So the location tracking element of
the barometer is a very real concern for a lot of people, as it can tell a
tracking company what floor of a building you are on at any given moment.

However I think it's quite clear that weather apps, and The Weather Company,
are much more interested in the local atmospheric trends than they are about
your current floor.

Edit: FCC citation: [https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adopts-new-wireless-
indoor-...](https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adopts-new-wireless-
indoor-e911-location-accuracy-requirements-0)

~~~
logicallee
> The barometer in your smartphone can help provide your physical location to
> within 1 meter, if used for location tracking instead of weather
> forecasting.

How can this possibly be true? Wouldn't the pressure around a couple of square
meters simply equalize instantly? You're not saying "within a mile" you're
saying "to within 1 meter", and I don't get it.

~~~
cryptoz
Well first, I'm in the weather industry, not the location-tracking industry,
but I will share some of the insight for how this could be done. The barometer
won't help with your latitude or longitude usually, because you are correct:
the pressure will be approximately equal in those dimensions when you are
looking at such a small area.

The barometer is sensitive to altitude changes much much smaller than a meter,
probably something like 0.1 meters. So if you are a person, with a smartphone,
and you are in a tall building, the barometer can assist with determining
which floor you're on. Other sensors would need to be used for calibration
(since the changes weather will affect the floor-level) and it doesn't help
with the x,y coordinates, just the z. But other location systems are now very
very good at x,y and they mostly lack the z.

So by adding the high-accuracy relative altitude capabilities of the barometer
to the existing x,y systems, you can get extremely precise locations.

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

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

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

~~~
mpdehaan2
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.

~~~
Milner08
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).

~~~
roymurdock
To add: they recently announced an investment of $3bn over 4 years in the IoT
division, which will probably be focused mostly on analytics & will somehow
tie in with Watson & Bluemix, which are the strongest pieces in their
portfolio at the moment. [1]

They also broke out an additional "Education" unit within the IoT business
unit, ostensibly to compete with PTC Thingworx, and Intel+Arduino, Raspberry
Pi etc. in the student/teacher/maker market. [2]

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/how-ibms-3-billion-
investment...](http://www.businessinsider.com/how-ibms-3-billion-investment-
will-drive-iot-growth-2015-4)

[2]
[https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/47660.wss](https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/47660.wss)

~~~
sanmon3186
To add further, IBM's biggest revenue source is not technology and software,
but its IT/business services & consulting wing which is no different than most
IT outsourcing companies in the world. Of course their products do influence
some of the work done by these.

------
giltleaf
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
> 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...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/upshot/hurricane-joaquin-
forecast-european-model-leads-pack-again.html)

 _" 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."_

~~~
giltleaf
Thanks!

------
radiorental
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?

~~~
hangtime79
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_C
That sounds like a problem that needs solving.

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ngoede
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)

~~~
cookiecaper
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.

~~~
ghaff
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.

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

Just send me a check.

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

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

------
sethd
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?

------
sgt101
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.

------
nealrs
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/](http://sparkathon.devpost.com/)

------
cryptoz
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://thesunshine.co)

[https://pressurenet.io](https://pressurenet.io)

------
asd
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI7ctWyXl5s)

------
acd
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...](http://research.metoffice.gov.uk/research/nwp/ensemble/concept.html)

~~~
jameshart
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.

~~~
sgt101
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.

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Hydraulix989
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)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_\(computer\))

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

------
skizm
Is this the default weather app that comes on ios?

~~~
acomms
Nope - I think this is the one they're referring to:
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/weather-channel-
weather.com/...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/weather-channel-
weather.com/id295646461?mt=8)

------
sarahh
Hope to see improvements in the weather industry.

------
OutsmartDan
Hope they finally fix weather.com.

------
deeths
Funny tweet on this by @Cryo
([https://twitter.com/Cryo/status/659369885991088129](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_

~~~
bostonpete
Except that according to the article, the bought the Weather Company and _not_
the Weather Channel...

~~~
Nicholas_C
The Weather Company owns the Weather Channel.

~~~
sethd
They bought the Weather Company minus the TV channel side of the business. So
I would assume The Weather Channel will remain an independent company just
without the digital assets.

