Wunderground.com sold to The Weather Channel Companies
It's true. After 17 years as an independent company, Weather Underground has been sold, and will now be part of The Weather Channel Companies (TWCC.) As one of the founders of Weather Underground, I am excited about embarking upon this new chapter in our company's history. Having the infrastructure, resources, and content of The Weather Channel Companies will enable wunderground to create some great new products, and improve the quality and reliability of our existing content. We will now be called Weather Underground, LLC, and will maintain the wunderground.com web site as it is.
Figure 1. The original seven founders of wunderground.com, plus our first employee, circa 1998. In front, from left to right: Chris Schwerzler, Jeff Masters, Jeff Ferguson. In back: Dave Brooks, Alan Steremberg, Perry Samson, Chuck Prewitt, and Mike MacDonald.
The wild ride that began in 1995
Back in 1995, when the newly created commercial Internet put up for sale domains with a ".com" designation, and Weather Underground, Inc. became the world's first commercial weather web site, I could not have anticipated the wild ride that brought us to where we are at today. We registered the 2,000th domain ever taken, "wunderground.com", in 1995, missing registering "weather.com " by a month. Later that year, a group of executives from The Weather Channel visited us in Ann Arbor, inquiring on how we might work together. No sale resulted, but over the years, The Weather Channel and Weather Underground have had a number of meetings to discuss a possible merger. Many other companies have inquired about buying us, but we have always opted to stay independent, in order to nurture our creative, alternative weather web site and keep breaking new ground. The company's growth was slow at first, since we never took venture capital money. We grew from 6 employees in 1999 to 20 in 2009. But in the past three years, Weather Underground entered into a rapid period of growth that saw our staff more than double to 57 people. With a swelling user base around the globe, and with demands for our services to be made available across so many new digital platforms like mobile phones and tablets, the board recognized the need for an even greater injection of resources, and the decision was made to merge with The Weather Channel Companies.
How will the merger with The Weather Channel improve wunderground?
The Weather Channel is committed to keeping the Weather Underground brand and the web site in its current form. Weather Underground CEO Alan Steremberg will remain in charge, and our meteorologists and developers will continue to create the ground-breaking weather products that we're renowned for. The plan is to make both wunderground.com and weather.com stronger, by sharing content and infrastructure. Many Weather Underground features, such as our Personal Weather Station data, WunderMap, and my blog, are scheduled to also appear on the weather.com web site in the coming months. My blog's main home will continue to be wunderground.com, and I have been asked to continue to write the same variety of science-based posts on hurricanes, extreme weather, and climate change that I've provided since 2005. I enjoy communicating weather science, and am pleased I will be able to do this for both wunderground and The Weather Channel, which has an audience about three times as large as wunderground's.
Figure 2. One my favorite wunderphotos: a rainbow in Cyprus. With over 1.5 million wunderphotos uploaded, the wunderground community has helped make the web site far better than the employees could have done on their own.
For more information, see our press release, and WU meteorologist Shaun Tanner's blog.
Jeff Masters
Reader Comments
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Cajanoldmama in the great state of Louisiana.
This is just in line with 95E
Now let the unexpected shear kick in!!!!!
Seriously, i think this might be major hurricane number 2 for the E-Pac giving the 4-3-2
Not to contradict, but I would say don;t bet on it. Expect pre-digested valium-plastic products shoved at you by bikini-clad twink babes. Expect google-style censorship of outlier views. Expect higher user fees, and mandatory fees. Expect content-free experiences designed to make you feel as though something is happening but when you turn around and look, there was nothing there.
Ugh. Makes me wanna do the Joan Rivers gagging gesture.
Welcome. Yes I hate the TWC app update, the wunderground app is much better
TIA
hey nigel.
Hope you jamaicans are ready for the olympics
Is that pic by your house?
You must be a squeaky person to have stayed alive this long.
No in the larger sense. Water price increases appear inevitable.
BUT yes in the sense that those price increases could be lessened, especially at the regional levels.
eg LasVegas,Nevada and LosAngeles,California each have rights to a share of ColoradoRiver water. However, LosAngeles is entitled to a MUCH larger volume of water than LasVegas because when the water-rights were first split, LosAngeles was a MUCH larger in comparison to LasVegas than it is now.
Between the "drought"^ and its rapidly rising population, LosVegas is running out of water. And in its search for "new" water, LosVegas discovered that it is significantly cheaper to build a desalinization-plant in the LosAngeles region, then trade` that desalinated water to LosAngeles in return for a portion of LosAngeles's ColoradoRiver water.
Besides the efficiency savings in not having to build water-transport pipelines to new water sources, quite a bit of ColoradoRiver water heading for LosAngeles is lost to evaporation&leakage. And what isn't lost to evaporation&leakage can be used by LasVegas, decreasing its overall cost for "new" water.
* Hadda guess you're talking about prices, but it wouldn't do anything about sea-level rise... except raise it a smidgeon. Desalinating water has power costs. And producing that energy will raise Global temperature by a smidgeon due to generating inefficiencies (including greenhouse gas production in fossil-fueled generators) and pumping/pressurization inefficiencies that become heat.
^ The SouthWestern "drought" appears to be more in line with normal precipitation levels found in the geological/pre-historical record. The time around when the water-rights were first split through most of the 20thCentury were years of unusually heavy precipitation for the region.
` What's actually happening is that LasVegas is paying for the cost of building&operating a LosAngeles desalinization plant in exchange for a portion of LosAngeles' water-rights. But it's still a water-for-water trade at the fundamental level.
Click to enlarge
try sack-cloth & ashes.com
Yeah, we very much ready to dominate..lol.
Yes, in Kingston.
Totally agree!
I bought some this year, but we will see how dry my yard is tomorrow. I have been prepping by watering it for the last week or so, but will see tomorrow morning if it is still too dry. If it is... Guess we just have our fireworks for new years.
I dont see Michael Phelps coming home empty handed..Track teams looks stacked as well but I think we may struggle in gymnastics..
Swimming is loaded on the men's side, consider anything phelps or lochte swims a gold!
Ok, well said,
Here is the question.
Does Jeff Masters have ANY controll now? He may find his only option is moving away and I would bet that there was a no compete clause in that contract somewhere.....Maybee for 5 years "thats how long mine was."
Yes and diving
Ominous looking clouds this afternoon , South Sound, Grand Cayman.
I had a best friend that did it and no, it's not a funny subject. Quite the opposite, actually.
I think that we'll (Jamaica) take quite a few of those track and field medals.
Bolt lost too
sheri
he addressed that yesterday...his non compere allows him to work for univeraities or think tanks or other npo's
Very nice, Stormpetrol...what's up?
Yes haha
He'll be ready for the Olympics.
Hmmm I don't know, it's hard to taper for the trials and taper better for the olympics!
Here Here!!!!!!!!!!!!! +1000
I did not see that. I have not been on here for several days. Been installing a new floating sub floor.
that subway sponsorship may have had something to do with it..he is actually eating carbs..LOL
when are the trolls arriving?
It's OK.....everyone vents one here one time or another. Hope your fiend gets well soon!!
are ya on a house boat?
It was announced 24 hours ten minutes ago, once people sign up they wait 24 hours and then bamm
Yeah I know..very good competition this year but we Americans are up for the challenge! Im in awe at the speed that they run..just amazing!
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