EarthRisk Technologies has developed a new model for predicting extreme weather events. The model identifies weather patterns based on over 82 billion calculations and 60 years of data. It then compares those patterns to current conditions and uses predictive analytics to predict the weather up to 40 days in advance.

The technology is derived from research at the University of California at San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Cofounder and CEO John Plavan said the old standard for weather prediction is built on subjective forecast models that are not accurate beyond a week.

“Hundreds of thousands of atmospheric variables are changing constantly around the globe and the old models aren’t robust enough to take these into account,” Plavan said in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “If there is a change to the initial conditions, the whole thing breaks down. We use statistical relationships to predict eventual outcomes and this technique is not subject to the same chaos. We are applying analytics to an industry that is begging for reinvention.”

EarthRisk has collected data from the U.S. and U.K. governments as well as observational data from thousands of scientists and researchers working in the field and the database is updated every day. EarthRisk’s engine searches for correlations and patterns of “statistical significance” and generates forecast probabilities based on this information. The approach uses the past to predict the future.

“Utilities corporations, energy traders, and energy producers are majorly impacted by big temperature changes and spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to predict them,” Plavan said. “If they know there will be an extreme cold event a month from now, they can use that data to make an actionable decision, and these guys will do anything to gain a small edge.”

EarthRisk’s flagship product TempRisk is the first commercial application of this technology and is geared towards the research and energy trading communities. The company has been developing, refining, and testing the technology for a few years and now plans to expand the business dramatically and explore more commercialization opportunities. There could be more consumer-focused applications down the road, like the ability to check weather in a tropical location before booking a vacation.

What will that Google user do now?

According to some testing code that Google Operating System caught in the wild, Google is testing a Google Now experience for its home page. Google Now, of course, is the home screen on the latest versions of Android, which brings together relevant and contextual information like weather, traffic conditions, how your favorite stocks are doing, whether your sports teams won, and so on.

“Just the right information at just the right time,” Google said. Now it’s testing that mobile experience on the web.

Sounds almost … Yahoo-ish?

The code on the page in testing shows functionality that will allow Google users to set and edit their home and work locations, as well as their current location, and “Discover Google Now.” Presumably, those location settings — as well as other preferences entered — would create a customized page with news, events, personal information, and perhaps even Google offers or deals close to you.

Google has long had iGoogle, a personalized homepage with your latest mail, calendar events, weather, tweets, bookmarks, and more. It’s — frankly — an ugly, almost awkward widget-ized implementation of what Google Now has become on Android phones, and nowhere near Google’s current level of user interface sophistication.

It has also conveniently been scheduled for “retirement.” In an announcement dated April 8, just a couple of weeks ago, Google said it will retire iGoogle on November 1, 2013. The reason? A Google Now-like experience on mobile:

We originally launched iGoogle in 2005 before anyone could fully imagine the ways that today’s web and mobile apps would put personalized, real-time information at your fingertips. With modern apps that run on platforms like Chrome and Android, the need for something like iGoogle has eroded over time …

Almost certainly, a Google Now for the web would include integration with Google+, the social glue between each of Google’s services. And in fact, this might be seen as a way to drive more of the social features of that network to the average user of Google’s search engine who does not currently use that social network.

If Google is planning to release a Google Now product for the web, presumably it would do so some time before iGoogle is fully retired.

I’ve asked Google for comment and will update this post with the company’s response.

Image credit: Google

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The Weather Channel has updated its Android app for smartphones and tablets with the biggest redesign since 2009, with a cleaner interface, better maps, and unfortunately, more advertising.

While The Weather Channel might be one of the less exciting apps out there, it is one of the most popular mobile apps across all platforms due to, you know, people needing to know the forecast. As of mid-January, The Weather Channel’s tablet and smartphone apps have been downloaded more than 100 million times. The company also did a heavy redesign of its website in May 2012 and that site alone attracts more than 1 billion pageviews each month from 60 million unique visitors.

The company spotlights the following new features:

• Easier access to current conditions, severe weather information, hourly forecasts, 36-hour forecasts, and 10-day forecasts
• An immediate narrative of what to expect, ie. “dry conditions will continue,” “expect rain until 4 p.m.,” gives users a better idea of how weather will affect their day.
• New localized maps and map layers include past and future radar, severe weather bulletins, and tropical cyclone tracking.
• Weather-triggered backgrounds
• Simpler user interface for navigation and quicker access to information
• Improved management for saved locations enables a more intuitive user interface. Set up your favorites to take full advantage of new weather widgets and notifications.
• Option to expand detailed weather data that is collapsed for a better visual experience
• Share weather forecasts, maps, alerts and more with family and friends to Facebook, Twitter and other major social networks.
• Automatic updates of localized weather, using your current TruPointSM location, and a new refresh button for immediate updates

While that is a lot of new features, some early user reviews of the new app aren’t flattering, with many of those who have updated now seeing many more ads and app crashes:

To be fair, some reviews are positive as well, with a few users praising the redesign and the new interface.

Check out a few more screenshots of the app below:

With blizzard Nemo bearing down on the East Coast, Mother Nature is showing once again that consumer technology is on her hit list.

Topping that list is Microsoft, which intended to show off the Surface Pro at a launch event in New York City today. Mother Nature, however, had other plans.

“Surface Pro launch activities in NYC have been cancelled due to weather; our best wishes for everyone impacted by the blizzard,” Microsoft said in a statement.

A similar fate befell Google in October, when Superstorm Sandy forced the company to cancel the press event for its Nexus 10 tablet and Nexus 4 smartphone.

So, does Mother Nature have it in for the gadget companies of the world? Probably not. But both the Google and Microsoft event do have something else in common — New York City. As the biggest city in the world, New York is an obvious target for big product unveilings, but it’s clearly also a target for rather inconvenient storms.

Perhaps Microsoft and Google should learn from Apple and host all their big events in California, far from the cold, damp mess known as the East Coast. They’d certainly have to cancel fewer events that way.

That’s what Hurricane Sandy is doing for Weather.com. As panicked coastal residents up and down the Eastern seaboard are wondering what mother nature is going to bring them, they’re going online. And Weather.com is a big beneficiary.

AdClarity, the advertising analytics tool, studied Weather.com for the past three days. It’s clear that big storms mean big traffic … and big ad numbers.

Weather.com is already the biggest and heaviest trafficked weather site in the U.S., an AdClarity spokesperson told me. But in the last week, its already-high traffic has jumped 20 percent.

Wondering how The Weather Company survived? We asked them.

And just yesterday? Almost 30 percent:

Source: Alexa

Weather.com traffic, as guesstimated by Alexa

That’s big news for the advertisers on the site, says AdClarity, who are now accessing even larger swaths of the population. Top advertisers include NationWide, with the insurance giant taking 11.5 percent of the available adspace, Travelers, and Advil.

Source: AdClarity

Travelers’ ad on Weather.com

AdClarity’s snapshot shows how marketers are reacting almost instantly to changing circumstances.

Travelers’ ads, for instance, highlight Hurricane Sandy by delivering almost a public service message: what your emergency kit should contain, how to prepare your home for a disaster, and so on.

Instant tailoring of ads and quick buying to jump on an opportunity shows the possibilities in real-time advertising, in which marketers adjust campaigns on the fly to fit news, trends, and even, in this case, weather.

The challenge in jumping all over advertising opportunities when a disaster is looming, of course, is avoiding the inevitable ambulance chaser comparisons.

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Weather is normally really dull, but it’s a tad more exciting when there’s lots of money involved.

Weather provider The Weather Channel is scooping up online weather veteran Weather Underground. Exact details of the deal weren’t disclosed, so our references to “Make it Rain” will have to remain vague. 

Weather Channel says that the buy will allow it to improve its weather forecasts. The company will also make use of the Weather Underground’s popular Wundermap, an interactive weather map and radar that allows users to overlay over a dozen variables.

With the buy, The Weather Channel will also pick up a valuable brand, user base, a slew of mobile apps, and the personal blog of Weather Underground co-founder Jeff Masters.

The Weather Channel will also acquire Weather Underground’s entire staff, along with its San Francisco office, which The Weather Channel will use as regional office of its own.

Weather Underground has been around for 17 years, and fortunately for longtime fans the site won’t change at all. The company’s new name will be Weather Underground, LLC.

In all, the move has all the telltale signs of a smart acquisition: A large, well-known player grabs a lesser-known but highly esteemed and knowledgeable veteran along with its loyal user base. Best of all, the acquired site remains  largely the same. No storm clouds here.

Photo: Raining cash/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Fashion-forward types seem infatuated with photographing their outfits. You can scoff at the practice all you want, but the overwhelming number of fashion blogs tells us that sharing outfits is popular, especially in a world with Instagram. Cloth, an iOS app available since last December, goes a step further and catalogs your entire closet based on outfit pictures. Today, it adds weather-tracking features and photo filters to its app.

Cloth encourages users to snap a picture of their outfit each morning and add descriptions, such as clothing brand and style. As you snap pictures, the app gives you points and badges. Eventually, the goal is to catalog your entire closet with Cloth so you never again have to complain that you have nothing to wear.

Cloth is partnering with Weather Underground to connect your outfits with the weather outside. When you photograph an outfit, Cloth will automatically tag it with the current weather. Then you can go back later and choose a weather category to see which of your outfits will keep you comfortable based on the forecast.

Cloth is also teaming with Aviary to add fancy photo filters to the app, Instagram style. Outfit pictures are sharable on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.

Cloth’s free redesigned app launches today in the App Store (it used to cost 99 cents). The weather features and photo filters are available with an in-app 99 cent purchase.

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The company, which was founded by two ex-Google employees in 2006, offers what it calls “disruptive” technology that delivers personalized weather insurance products for the $3 trillion global agriculture industry. In a statement, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla said WeatherBill has the potential to “fundamentally change the risk profile” of agriculture. The company’s products is aimed at helping farmers protect their business and crops from weather changes brought on by climate change.

As we wrote last year, data is the next big thing in cleantech. WeatherBill is one of the companies leveraging weather and data to produce new products aimed at billion-dollar industries. WeatherBug is using weather data to make smart grid offerings. A number of lighting systems, home energy management and building energy management startups also factor in weather to determine how to program lighting and air conditioning systems for the maximum amount of energy savings and tenant comfort. Others use data in other ways — Genscape, for example, uses sensors to provide data about the grid that energy traders pay to use. And while WeatherBill’s weather and data technology is currently used for agricultural insurance, it could one day be used for energy markets as they become more weather-sensitive.

Farming and food supply is, of course, very sensitive to the weather. More than 90 percent of crop losses happen because of unexpected weather, and WeatherBill expects things to get worse as the effects of climate change increase the frequency of those events, says CEO David Friedberg, pointing to recent droughts in Russia and China and flooding in Australia. Friedberg co-founded the company with other ex-Googler Siraj Khaliq, now WeatherBill’s company’s chief technology officer.

The company’s technology enables the real-time pricing and purchasing of customizable weather insurance by using weather modeling and local weather monitoring systems. WeatherBill’s programs pinpoint weather conditions expected to affect adversely affect farmer’s land, and automatically pays the farmer if those weather incidents happen. The company’s technology also powers Raincheck.com, an automated weather insurance program for travelers worldwide.

Investors in this financing round also include NEA, Index Ventures, Allen & Company, First Round Capital, Atomico and Code Advisors. The company plans to use the capital to support product expansion in the U.S. and worldwide.

[Images via Flickr/Sony200boy and NatalieMaynor]

This article is brought to you by Thomson Reuters and the Knowledge Effect. To learn more, please click here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity. Thomson Reuters had no involvement in the content of this post.

Could information be the ultimate renewable energy source?

Perhaps. According to Jennifer Pulliam, director of innovation for electricity retailer TXU Energy, data is one of the most exciting opportunities in the smart grid — a much-needed upgrade to our power infrastructure driven by information technology.

Data, Pulliam told me, allows customers to understand how they use energy — which in turn guides them to pick the best option from a broad menu of energy efficiency and pricing options that TXU has been working to cultivate in order to stay competitive in the deregulated Texas electricity market.

Of course, making energy use data interesting and engaging is part of the challenge of selling consumers on the power of data. But opportunities in data go far beyond just what’s presented to consumers.

Data was the biggest theme at VentureBeat’s GreenBeat conference last year. Software and services that will enable smart-grid analytics “will represent one of the largest growth opportunities in the utility sector over the next few years,” according to Pike Research. The market  – with contenders from IBM to Accenture to Siemens to Itron — will balloon from a size of $356 million last year to $4.2 billion in annual revenues by 2015.

The use of data to yield energy savings is also core to many of the most promising segments of the energy efficiency market, from greening data centers to better building controls. Not coincidentally, all three sectors are expected to do well this year.

Redwood Systems and SynapSense use sensors to find energy inefficiencies in energy-hogging data centers, while JouleX offers building controls  monitoring and analytics. The latter two companies have attracted investment from GE.

Weather will be a huge part of the opportunity, too, with companies like Genscape and even Google looking to use weather data to play in energy markets. One startup, Onsemble, wants to use weather and sensors atop wind turbines to produce more accurate weather forecasts. Better accuracy in weather forecasts are then used by building controls data-crunchers and analyzing software to help users save money on their energy bills.

Building controls players like BuildingIQ, for example, loop in weather forecasts and past energy use to predict a building’s energy needs — and recommend actions to offset them, such as pre-cooling a building in the morning, when load is lighter and electricity prices cheaper, say on a day expected to get hot in the afternoon. SCI recently nabbed $15.6 million for itsbuilding predictive analytics.

Of course, it’s not just companies that can get hooked on data. Players like Motorola’s 4home, Verizon, Tendril and Intel are betting that their engaging displays will win over consumers and get them to adopt home energy and security management systems. Consumers love raw weather data too — smart thermostat maker Ecobee’s CEO Stuart Townsend told me today at the Smart Energy Summit in Austin that it’s one of users’ favorite features in home energy displays.

If data can capture energy consumers’ imaginations, then perhaps it can power much-needed change across the sector.

[Image via Flickr/LaMenta3]

Boeing will test biofuel made by PetroChina, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Chinese solar stocks have stumbled since Friday’s news that the U.S. government is investigating subsidies that the Chinese give its solar companies, Investors Business Daily reports. The United Steelworkers unions filed a complaint saying the subsidies have allowed Chinese solar companies to undercut American companies in price.

WeatherBug announced a suite of smart grid products that will use the company’s real-time weather forecasting to help utilities better predict and forecast demand.

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group published a report saying its wireless technology is well-poised for a move to the smart grid, and could be used to provide wireless connectivity to smart meters.

Thin-film cadmium telluride solar panel makers are likely nearing an efficiency wall, Greentech Media reports. Cad-Tel manufacturers like First Solar and Solexant are likely to pursue lower costs per watt in order to compete.

Hydrogen-powered fuel cell company ClearEdge Power has raised $10 million, the Portland Business Journal reports.

Smart grid software company GridPoint announced it has appointed a temporary CEO, transitioning the founder and former CEO to non-executive chairman of the board.

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