Steve Outing on Web weather
The
San Francisco Chronicle's
Dan Fost has an
interesting media column today about the Web weather wars -- where upstart
WeatherBug is starting to overtake powerhouse
Weather.com, the website of the Weather Channel. As Fost points out, WeatherBug has grown so quickly thanks to an innovative business strategy: "Weatherbug employs a clever business model in which its parent company sells weather stations to schools. A school, or a sponsor for the school, buys the $12,000 station for use as a learning tool in science classes. The company then collects the information, and sells it to television stations, which use it in their nightly weather reports. And now the company is putting the data on the Web for anyone to see, and selling ads to support that endeavor."
I like the WeatherBug story, because it teaches that innovation still holds great potential on the Internet. Innovation shouldn't have stopped with the dot-com crash -- yet for many companies innovation slowed down mightily as a result of budget cuts. There's still gold to be found online. Keep innovating!
