IBM announced earlier this week that they’re buying the Weather Channel’s business to business, mobile, and cloud-based properties. One of these is my favorite place to find weather forecasts – Weather Underground.
I’ve been a user of Weather Underground and also uploading my house’s weather station data to the site for over 13 years. I’m not sure what this news ultimately means for WU. NBC dumped money into the site a while back and modernized the user experience – although I’m not sure how much usefulness was added. I’m hoping that IBM buying the properties means a continued interest in open and crowd-sourced weather data source.
I’d hate to think me uploading data is only helping IBM play the stock market better and not the general public with prediction improvements.