You need to get to dinner. It's only a dozen blocks, totally walkable. Just as you're about to head out the door, your phone buzzes: There's a thunderstorm coming. Not just to your city, to this street corner. Scratch the walk. You order a car, just before surge pricing kicks in as everyone else scrambles to avoid the rain.
Hyperlocal weather forecasts don't just keep you dry. They play a huge role in the US economy. Your decision to purchase a rideshare is just one financial decision among dozens, hundreds, maybe millions prompted by that thunderstorm. Airlines reroute flights, insurance companies adjust algorithms, clothing retailers rotate stock---and they all want data to help make those decisions. The Weather Company has data. And now, it has put its entire weather API on IBM's BlueMix development platform, making it easier for developers to put weather forecasting into theirs programs.
Weather is big business. Big enough that last December, computing giant IBM spent a reported $2 billion to acquire the forecasting (but not television) aspects of the Weather Company, including 150 data sources, like more than two hundred thousand personal weather stations. That purchase didn't just give Big Blue all that data: It also bought them all the Weather Company's expertise in hyperlocal forecasting.
Today's announcement—putting the Weather Company API on BlueMix—means it will be less of a hassle for developers to add weather data to their next great app. "If you were building an app on BlueMix and wanted to add weather prior to this Weather Company add on, you’d have to open a new window go to the Weather Company's platform, get an API key, deal with billing, subscription services, all the normal administrivia that comes from sourcing data from many places," says Bryson Koehler, the Weather Company's chief information and technology officer. Which isn't necessarily a huge pain, but think about it this way: If you were building a couch, would you visit one store for the lumber, another for the screws, another for the saws to cut the lumber, another for the drill to use the screws ... or would you just go to Home Depot and grab all that crap at once?
But hey, not everyone likes Home Depot. So how is BlueMix as a one-stop API shop? (If you don't know, APIs are programs that let other programs and apps talk to each other.) Well, it's IBM, so it is pretty thorough. Beyond the basic starter kits for various API fucntions (banking, Internet of Things, cloud computing), it lets you access cool stuff like Watson's cognitive computing tools, so you can do creepy things like build psychological profiles of the consumers using your app.
Forecast.io (same company behind DarkSky) is probably the only other weather API that comes close to having the same hyperlocal power as the Weather Company. The biggest thing to consider is price, and how you like to be charged. BlueMix has several pricing schemes for the Weather Channel API. The most basic lets you make up to 10 calls (a call is whenever your app sends a request for data) to the API each minute for free, up to a limit of 10,000 a month. Once you hit the limit, your access stops until you upgrade to a pay-to-play account. could get a little annoying. Paying for access to Forecast.io's API is a little more flexible—You get 1,000 free calls a day, and each call after that costs you $0.0001. And at low usage rates, that's cheaper than the Weather Company API. But as your activity picks up, Forecast.io eventually gets more expensive.
OK, so what if you are a consumer? First, congratulations on persevering through all the tech lingo. Second, this mostly just means that hyperlocal weather data is going to continue trickling into your apps and devices. The Internet of Things is especially ripe for weather integration. "Sprinkler control, lighting, home temperature, are all weather connected," says Koehler. And try to think outside yourself. Energy, insurance, travel, retail, basically any business with a presence in the physical world is going to be integrating more and more weather until forecasting becomes one of the axioms underlying the ability to do business. And in this version of the future, when a thunderstorm threatens, it will be the car that calls you, asking if you'd like to stay dry on your way to dinner.
