From the New York Times:
IBM to Acquire the Weather Company
IBM hopes it has a new use for Watson, its artificial intelligence business.
The company announced on Wednesday that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire most of the assets of the Weather Company, including its Weather.com website, a large number of weather data collection points, consumer and business applications and a staff of over 900 people.
IBM would not say how much it was paying for the business, but an earlier report in The Wall Street Journal put the deal at over $2 billion. The Weather Channel, a cable television outlet, was not part of the deal, but it would license weather forecast data from IBM.
David Kenny, the Weather Company’s chief executive, said his company’s data had many corporate uses. “Airlines use it to manage turbulence,” he said. “Insurance companies use it to judge risk. Agricultural companies use it to manage crops.”
If combined with Watson, a computing system skilled at parsing unusual types of data and making statistically based decisions across a range of industries, the data could be more valuable, he added. “We can process it better,” Mr. Kenny said. “Forecast whether someone should fly or delay a trip. Exactly where to evacuate people from a hurricane. Be more cognitive.”
This is a major score for IBM - they have the number crunching ability and the Weather Company has the sensors and data-collection network.
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