Crowdsourced weather reporting platform Weathermob has been acquired by Weathernews Inc., a private weather data company headquartered in Japan.
Founded out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2011, Weathermob has often been called the Waze of weather, notching up more than 400,000 app downloads and a 100,000-strong active community who report on the local conditions where they are, using a dedicated iPhone app. The service basically combines social and meteorologic data in real time across 140 countries to try to convey a more accurate picture of the weather.
Launched in Tokyo way back in 1986, Weathernews is a major weather data company that employs hundreds of meteorologists around the world, and secured $110 million in revenue last year. The company provides weather data to a myriad of industries, including airplane operators, ship routing, road management, and disaster prevention for local governments.
Weathernews has dabbled in the social weather realm too, introducing a mobile app called Sunnycomb back in 2013. Similar to Weathermob, it's basically a community of "weather enthusiasts" who report on the conditions where they are. In addition to traditional metrics such as temperature, emotion also plays a part -- the app asks users how the weather makes them feel.
While terms of the deal were not disclosed, Weathermob only has a couple of small angel funding rounds under its belt amounting to $1 million, so this would have made the company particularly appealing from an acquisition standpoint, given that there isn't a huge number of investors to appease.
Ultimately, it's a big win for both companies -- Weathermob can scale a lot more quickly with the backing of a major company, and Weathernews can turbocharge its existing crowdsourced weather data.
Crowdsourcing the weather
Crowdsourcing has become a hugely powerful means of acquiring large amounts of data quickly. Wikipedia has more than proven the model with its online encyclopedia, while the now Google-owned Waze has shown how crowdsourcing can improve real-time traffic reports. Companies such as Weathermob are doing the same with weather.
While it's still early days, the coming together of Weathermob and Weathernews could create one of the preeminent weather forecasting and reporting platforms, one that ties together data strands from a myriad of sources, including emotions, direct observations from those on the ground, and actual scientific data.
The company says that it's now well-positioned to "become a major worldwide weather cooperative with enough truly global critical mass to generate very precise weather data through integrating diverse datasets and user-centric weather reporting."
There are a number of other players operating in the crowdsourced weather space. It's worth mentioning London-based startup OpenSignal's own WeatherSignal app, which adopts a more passive approach to crowdsourcing weather data -- it reappropriates the sensors from users' mobile devices to serve as weather-capturing tools. For example, a phone often employs a barometer to improve GPS positioning, but it can also be used to record atmospheric pressure, the instrument's original purpose.
It would be interesting to see whether Weathermob and Weathernews could automate data collection in a similar way, as it would scale things massively.