IBM has agreed to acquire most assets of the Weather Company, including consumer and business apps and 900 employees. Financial details were not disclosed, but the Wall Street Journal pegs the deal at over $2 billion. IBM
The Weather Company’s data is used for numerous corporate purposes, from airlines measuring turbulence to insurance companies judging risk and farmers to manage crops.
The company says the data could be even more valuable paired with IBM’s Watson super computer, which is expert at making decisions based on data. The analytics it performs could find even more uses for the data.
In addition to publicly available sources, the company also has 147,000 small weather stations and a mobile app that collects barometric pressure from user cell phone sensors. It collects information from millions of locations 96 times a day.
