This case was prepared by Ruth Gilleran, Senior Lectu.docx

This case was prepared by Ruth Gilleran, Senior Lecturer,
Patricia J. Guinan, Associate Professor, and Salvatore
Parise, Associate Professor, of Babson College. It was
developed as a basis for class discussion rather than to
illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an
administrative situation. It is not intended to serve as an
endorsement, source of primary data or illustration of effective
or ineffective management.
Copyright © 2015 Babson College and licensed for publication
to Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights
reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced, stored
or transmitted in any form or by any means
without prior written permission of Babson College.
BAB168/ NOVEMBER 2015
THE WEATHER COMPANY:
CREATING CONSUMER APPS THAT LEVERAGE
BIG DATA
It was a gorgeous day in the fall of 2014 at the Atlanta
headquarters of The Weather Company
(TWC). In fact, with one glance at the oversized 10 on the
OutSider mobile running app his
team just released, Chris Huff, VP of Mobile and Consumer App

Development, quickly
confirmed it was a perfect day for a run. The 10 was the highest
score on the soon-to-be-
patented Run Weather Index (RWI). Touching the number
displayed the six components
comprising the RWI algorithm—wind speed, precipitation,
temperature, humidity, cloud
cover, and air quality. Weather was a key factor for runners,
and the inclusion of TWC’s
detailed and highly accurate weather forecasts provided the
OutSider app with what the team
hoped was a clear competitive advantage over myriad other
running apps.
In building this app, TWC was reacting to the mobile mind
shift, particularly among the 15- to
30-year old consumer demographic. Impatient and glued to their
smartphones, millennials
had very high expectations for immediacy. They wanted to
transmit or receive information
from anywhere, at anytime. Forrester Research referred to these
incidents as “mobile
moments,” and searching for weather information was a perfect
example. 1 In 2014, the
dramatic shift to mobile devices caused The Weather Company,
parent company of The
Weather Channel, to face the biggest challenge in its 32-year
history. Similar to the disruption
created by the movement from printed to digital books or DVDs
to streaming video, weather
consumption was moving quickly from TV to the smartphone.
Nielsen reported that the
network averaged a five-year low of 211,000 daily viewers in
2013, down from 273,000 in

1 “Forrester Research Publishes New Book: ‘The Mobile Mind
Shift’.” Professional Services Close-Up. Business
Insights: Essentials, May 19, 2014,
http://bi.galegroup.com.ezproxy.babson.edu/essentials/article/G
ALE%7CA368528939/48707a75e8111e213213ae
2efe6db51b?u=mlin_m_babson, accessed September 2015.
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This document is authorized for educator review use only by
THOMAS SCHMIDT, Bridgewater State University until Apr
2019. Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright.
[email protected] or 617.783.7860
The Weather Company: Creating Consumer Apps that Leverage
Big Data
BAB168 / NOVEMBER 2015
2

2012.2 Citing declining ratings and evidence of an increasing
number of individuals more
frequently using their smartphones to check the weather,
DIRECTV blacked out TWC to
DIRECTV’s 20 million subscribers, which represented one-fifth
of TWC’s total audience.3 In a
January 2014 email statement to SNL Kagan Media and
Communications, DIRECTV Chief
Content Office Dan York said, “Consumers understand there are
now a variety of other ways
to get weather coverage, free of reality show clutter and that
TWC does not have an exclusive
on weather coverage – the weather belongs to everyone.”4 A
few months later, DIRECTV
reinstated TWC because of consumer preferences, but the
company clearly needed more
innovative approaches to serving up its weather data. The
OutSider app, TWC’s first lifestyle-
related weather app, helped answer that call.
As Huff laced up his running shoes and headed to the elevator,
he imagined how he could
make the weather data more valuable to TWC’s running
customers by delivering information
that both interested and benefitted them. According to Huff,
“OutSider is much more than an
app, it is a way to learn about how the weather affects a
person’s body chemistry. Whether
one runs four or twenty-four miles, all runners are affected by
the weather. People
understand it’s not the best time to run when the newscaster is
saying it’s 90 and humid, be
careful, stay indoors. However, when it’s 82 degrees, with 90%
humidity, it can be just as
dangerous outside.”5

In addition to the temperature, the sun, and the rain, air quality
and pollen levels affected
everyone greatly. With the app released, Huff pondered his next
move. Should he continue to
develop OutSider further and if so, what features should be
added to make it a go-to running
app? Consumers downloaded several apps, but they used few on
a regular basis. Should he
target other outdoor enthusiast segments? Or, should he persist
down the learning path,
studying the run analytics and marketing what Huff calls
biometrics insights (see Exhibit 1
for definition) to other organizations? But right now, the RWI
of 10 was all he could think
about. The Weather Channel slogan, “It’s Amazing Out There,”
could not be more apropos.
Time for a run.
The Weather Company
TWC represented the most well-known name in the weather
business. Three divisions
comprised the company: TV, digital, which included website
and mobile, and professional
services which sold data services, software, and hardware to TV
stations, retailers, airlines,
and energy traders. During his keynote address at the 2014
annual Association of Business
Information and Media Companies, The Weather Company
COO, Chris Walters, remarked,
“digital and specialized business information products, not
television, are two of the biggest
drivers of growth for The Weather Company, parent of The

Weather Channel. Today, b-to-b
products represent 10 percent of revenue. In the next three
years, that percentage will double,
2 J. J. McCorvey, “A Storm Brews Over Weather,” Fast
Company, February 2014,
http://www.fastcompany.com/3023354/weather-channel-a-
storm-brews-over-weather, accessed July 2014.
3 Rodney Ho, “Big Storm Brewing for Weather TV: Weather
Channel Fight with DirectTV just One Challenge.
Network Convinced Snow Proves its Worth,” The Atlanta
Journal – Constitution, February 02, 2014,
http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.babson.edu/docview/149333
7386?accountid=36796, accessed July 2014.
4 Sarah Barry James, “Weather Channel Stuck in Eye of
Carriage Fee Storm,” SNL Kagan Media &
Communications Report, January 14, 2014,
http://www.snl.com/InteractiveX/Article.aspx?cdid=A-
26532718-
13608, accessed November 2014.
5 Chris Huff, telephone interview by author Ruth Gilleran,
Wellesley, MA, August 21, 2014. Do
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Big Data
3
thanks to big data and the ability to integrate into customer
workflows.”6 One year earlier in
January of 2013, Digital Division President Cameron Clayton
stated, “The Weather Co.'s
revenue from non-TV sources is now ‘not far away’ from being
half of total revenue.” 7
Launched over 30 years ago in 1982 as the first 24-hour
network devoted to weather
programming, The Weather Channel’s 2013 audience totaled
more than 100 million viewers
and the network generated $350 million in annual income.8 Its
popular weather website,
weather.com, boasted 8 million daily visitors and was the go-to
website in 2013 for obtaining
weather information.9 In fact, the website commanded an
impressive 51 percent of the
market share, followed by AccuWeather with just 14 percent
(see Exhibit 2 for the top

weather brands).
TWC’s weather data came not only from the National Weather
Service, which owned the
radar system in the United States, but also from data TWC
gathered on its own and from data
supplied by 100,000 private individuals with their own weather
stations. Aided by
sophisticated computer models within TWC’s forecasting
engine, over 200 meteorologists
analyzed this data and generated highly accurate weather
forecasts. The recent growing
granularity of data from an increased use of weather sensors
allowed for greater accuracy in
TWC’s weather forecast. 10 According to the Forecast Advisor
website which graded the
accuracy of U.S. weather forecasting outlets, in 2013 TWC
“blew away its competition” which
included the National Weather Service, Accuweather, and
Custom Weather.11
TWC was owned by a consortium consisting of NBC Universal
and the private equity firms
The Blackstone Group and Bain Capital. In 2011, The Weather
Channel Companies became
The Weather Company, recognizing its diversity of products
and services and its broad appeal
to consumers and businesses.
TWC Revenue Streams
Like most media sites, TWC employed an advertising-based
revenue model. Consumer ads
were displayed alongside TWC’s weather data, regardless of

where the data was served up—
on TV, its website, or its mobile app. TWC’s CEO David Kenny
was no stranger to advertising.
As a former CEO of Digitas, a global marketing and technology
firm, he knew better than
most how radical the coming changes were. As he explained in a
New York Times interview,
6 Matt Kinsman,“ABM Annual Keynote: How The Weather
Channel Saves and Makes Money for B-to-B Markets,”
May 6, 2014, http://blog.siia.net/index.php/2014/05/abm-
annual-keynote-how-the-weather-channel-saves-and-
makes-money-for-b-to-b-markets/, accessed June 2015.
7 Todd Spangler, “Nearly Half of Weather Co.’s Revenue
Comes From Digital Division,” Multichannel New,
January 15, 2013,
http://www.multichannel.com/news/mobile/nearly-half-weather-
cos-revenue-comes-digital-
division/306174, accessed June 2015.
8 J.J. McCorvey.
9 John Swansburg, "It's Ugly Out there," New York, Mar 10
2014,
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/03/can-the-weather-
channel-survive-its-competitiors.html, accessed
July 2014.
10 Kim S. Nash, “Big Data from Above. CIO, May 24, 2013,
http://www.cio.com/article/2385814/big-data/how-to-
profit-from-the-ultimate-big-data-source-the-
weather.html?nsdr=true&page=3, accessed July 2014.
11 Rueben Fischer-Baum and Dennis Mersereau, “What Parts of
the Country Get the Worst Weather Predictions?”
The Vane, May 2, 2014, http://thevane.gawker.com/what-parts-
of-the-country-get-the-worst-weather-predict-
1568905474, accessed October 2014. Do

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http://thevane.gawker.com/what-parts-of-the-country-get-the-
worst-weather-predict-1568905474
http://thevane.gawker.com/what-parts-of-the-country-get-the-
worst-weather-predict-1568905474
Big Data
4
“platforms like his were working directly with companies to
develop advertising campaigns,
especially on mobile devices, essentially bypassing ad

agencies.”12
A second revenue stream for TWC was the weather data and the
expert analysis it marketed
to corporate clients. The Professional Services arm of TWC
helped its corporate clients profit
from its weather forecasts by enabling them to anticipate the
impact of weather on their
bottom line. Blue chip customers included national retailers,
global airliners, automobile
manufacturers, emergency services, utilities, insurers, and
media giants. Two clients, Home
Depot and American Airlines, incorporated weather data into
their buying decisions so they
could more accurately predict what products or services would
be needed when and where.13
Starting with the release of iOS8, Apple incorporated The
Weather Channel data, replacing
Yahoo Weather. At the 2014 International Consumer Electronics
Show, General Motors
announced plans to include The Weather Channel app within its
OnStar concierge dashboard
screen.14
With the current emphasis of mining big data to make more
fact-based decisions, as well as
the availability of modern tools to process this data, the
company was betting its future on the
Digital and Professional Services divisions. Both divisions were
headed up by Cameron
Clayton, President of Product and Technology.
Consumer Apps Ideation Process
To address the dramatic shift to mobile, The Weather

Company’s Digital Division was tasked
with leveraging the company’s big data to obtain new
customers, establish more binding
relationships with existing ones, and increase advertising
revenue. For a 30-year-old
company with 1,300 employees, this new products group
resembled a start-up. In the
summer of 2012, Huff invited all company employees to a
hackathon, a marathon session
where software designers and programmers developed an
application prototype in a
condensed period of time. As Huff explained, “between the over
200 meteorologists, weather
scientists, and technologists, there are a lot of engineering-
minded folks walking the halls.”
When the group gathered on day one, they were given
deliberately broad instructions, “build
some weather-related working software that our customers will
love.”15 Specifically, Huff was
targeting one super-user group—the outdoor enthusiasts.
Some employees came with ideas they were hoping to
implement, while others, for example
programmers, were eager to construct a prototype. After
forming teams and brainstorming,
they spent the next day and a half developing the idea and
building out the software. On day
three, the teams were given three minutes to present their
concept to a panel of judges
consisting of the VP of Engineering, the VP of Product, the
President of the Digital Products
group, and an on-camera meteorologist. The judging criteria
included whether the prototype
solved a problem the company wanted to help solve, whether it
was innovative, and whether
it functioned. Several ideas emerged from the hackathon, but

the one that garnered the most
12 Tanzina Vega, “Advertising mega merger driven by the rise
of Big Data,” The Global Edition of the New York
Times, July 30, 2013, p. 15.
13 Kim S. Nash.
14 Jeff Bennett, “Car Makers at Consumer Electronics show
Tout Ways to Plug Autos into the Web; Moves Raise
Worries among Highway Safety Regulators,” Wall Street
Journal (Online) January 5, 2014,
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304887104579
302880279339184, accessed July 2014.
Wellesley, MA, August 21, 2014. Do
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Big Data
5
enthusiasm was a weather-centric app for cyclists. TWC later
pivoted the idea to focus on
running. Similar to how Red Bull created a series of gaming
apps rather than an app focused
on its energy drink, TWC sought out an entirely new experience
for its customers. By building
a running app, when the OutSider user pressed the Run button,
he or she was engaging with
the TWC brand.16
The OutSider App
When work on OutSider began, most of the running apps on the
market were fairly
utilitarian. Users had running statistics they could share with
their social network, but the
apps did not provide insights as to why their runs were better on
some days than others. The
apps lacked any indication of the plausible reason for the
runner’s time. The weather data
provided one explanation. Besides being a motivating force to
nudge people off the couch
when good running conditions prevailed, a major benefit of the
OutSider app was its planning
aid. OutSider provided accurate and real-time weather forecasts,

allowing users to plan
better—when to run, what to wear, and how to hydrate. While a
few of the popular running
apps, like Runtastic, provided current weather data, none
provided highly accurate detailed
weather forecasts, a fact that TWC hoped to capitalize on (see
Exhibit 3 for a features list of
the popular running apps).
When the app opened, it displayed the current weather based on
the runner’s latitude and
longitude as detected by the GPS on his or her smart phone.
Even the app background photo
was based on location. The runner in New York might see
skyscrapers while the Vermont
runner would be looking at rolling hills. Users entered profile
data, including typical run
distance, gender, age, height, weight, and body type. Through a
series of slide bars, they
specified how their runs were affected by air quality, humidity,
temperature, rain, and wind.
This information altered the RWI, an indication of how well the
runner would perform and
therefore enjoy his or her run.
Upon pressing the Plan a Run button, the runner was presented
with hourly run conditions
for the next three days and morning and evening conditions for
the next ten. This was
especially important when the runner was visiting a location
where he or she was unfamiliar
with the weather patterns. According to Huff, the planning
aspect of the app was one of its
major differentiators, “If you can pinpoint in advance the best
times to run, you can more
easily convert people into runners.”17 For example, runners

often think, “I need to get three
runs in this week, so I’ll wait for better weather.” The
temperature may be good, but the
humidity could be high, which users cannot see by looking at
temperature alone. The
planning data allowed runners to change their running clothes,
hydrate more, or postpone
their runs to later in the day. To further aid planning, the app
included videos. An
information symbol was right below the RWI; pressing the
button displayed short articles and
TWC videos addressing the condition associated with the
current RWI. For example,
according to Huff, “If it’s a five because of the heat, then you’ll
see something about a
hydration strategy.”18
16 S. Gupta, “For Mobile Devices, Think Apps, Not Ads.”
Harvard Business Review, 91, no. 3 (2013): 70-75.
Wellesley, MA, August 21, 2014.
18 Ibid. Do
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Big Data
6
To track their run, users pressed the Let’s Run button and
selected a run type—basic,
distance, timed, or heart rate. While running, the weather data
refreshed every 1 km or five
minutes. Historical performance could be viewed on the Run
History menu, and the runner
had the option to share this data with friends and family via
Facebook. The app also
connected to the Wahoo fitness heart rate monitor, which
provided information on the
runner’s heart rate, cadence, and speed. In an attempt to
improve the runner’s state of mind
and hence their run statistics, the OutSider app also integrated
with the Google app Songza,
suggesting playlists based on local weather conditions (see
Exhibit 4 for images of the
OutSider app).

The OutSider App Development Team
The development of TWC’s consumer mobile apps was the
responsibility of TWC’s Digital
Product Group, not its centralized IT department. This group
had proven that it had the skills
to design and produce top selling apps. In May 2013, Apple
named The Weather Channel app
the second most popular iPad app and the seventh most
downloaded iPhone app of all time.
In 2014, TWC’s weather app surpassed 100,000,000 cumulative
downloads. This success,
however, did not necessarily translate into a successful running
app.
Huff reported to the president of the Digital Product Group and
his development team
consisted of thirty TWC employees plus 10 individuals from
Mobiquity, a professional
services firm that helped organizations create, design, develop,
and implement mobile
strategies. Since TWC had previously worked with Mobiquity to
design and help develop the
user experience of TWC’s core weather app, the company was
chosen to help create the
running app. The front-end development effort was led by
Mobiquity Project Manager Chris
Decker. Decker was aided by the Mobiquity User Experience
(UX) design team consisting of
three senior designers and architects led by Mike Welsh,
Mobiquity’s Creative Director (see
Exhibit 5 for information on Mobiquity). The UX team was
focused on ensuring that the
users’ interactions with and perception of the application was

positive.
TWC’s IT organization, headed by Chief Information and
Technology Officer Bryson Koehler,
was responsible for the storing and processing of the company’s
weather data, as well as
developing and maintaining its internal enterprise software.
This group played a crucial role
in the creation of the OutSider app by providing a services layer
that delivered current and
forecasted weather conditions to the app (see Exhibit 6 for the
management team bios).
The OutSider App Development Methodology
Right from the start, the development team focused on the user
experience. Consumers were
task-oriented on their mobile devices. Even for those with the
tiniest fingers, entering data or
even responding to push buttons or slide bars can be a
challenge. According to Welsh, “one of
Mobiquity’s differentiators is its extensive, in-depth, user
experience team. More than the
app’s features, it’s about the user experience. First impressions
are extremely important when
it comes to mobile apps. Users quickly grow wary with multi-
step processes.”19 The UX team
19 Mike Welsh, interview by author Ruth Gilleran, Wellesley,
MA, August 6, 2014.
Do
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Big Data
7
took the information from the hackathon and created
storyboards and then wireframes,
images representing the skeletal layout of the mobile app along
with its navigation. Next, the
team conducted a focus group in which five or six runners were
invited to view a clickable
prototype created using proto.io. After several design iterations,
development began.

The development team followed the agile software development
method with a goal of
creating a minimally viable product that they could learn from.
“Agile” was an umbrella term
that referred to a few different iterative software development
methodologies, such as Scrum
or Extreme Programming (XP). These methodologies were
committed to feature-driven
development and they shared the common goal of delivering
small pieces of working software
at set intervals, generally from two to eight weeks. Agile
software development contrasted
with the Waterfall methodology where all the business
requirements were designed, coded,
and tested before any software was released to the end user.
This resulted in a lengthy
product release cycle that did not allow for the ability to react
to changing business
conditions. With The Weather Company’s commitment to
continuous innovation and the
entrepreneurial process, the agile software development method
was the only viable option.
While Mobiquity was building the front-end, Huff’s developers
were securing the connections
to the back-end big data weather services platform and working
on the app’s core functions,
such as the RWI algorithm. According to Huff, “we pulled every
data element we had and
said, what is that? Is that useful? And so we went down the list
of all the data we had, and
tried to understand how useful it would be.”20 Development of
the app took place over three
months, with the team initially working in two-week sprints,
later shifting to one-week.

Coding was done in Objective C, the main programming
language used by Apple for the OS X
and iOS operating systems. Quality Assurance technicians
performed internal testing, and
running enthusiasts from Mobiquity and TWC beta tested the
app. The OutSider app was
released in June of 2014, and just a few days later, Mashable
referenced it in its article, “5
Can’t Miss Apps: OutSider and More.”
The Weather Company’s Big Data Platform
Much of the success of the OutSider app could be attributed to
the company’s big data
platform and processes. When interviewed by InformationWeek,
Bryson Koehler, CITO at
The Weather Company remarked, “Weather is the original big
data application, when
mainframes first came about, one of the first applications was a
weather forecasting model.”21
The Weather Company had been dealing in “big data” long
before the term was popular. Each
day, TWC processed 20 terabytes of weather data, a figure that
the company expected to get
bigger. The data included a wide range of information,
including temperature, wind speeds,
rain, snow, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, barometric
pressure, wave height, and more.
The weather data met all three criteria of big data—volume,
velocity, and variety—and
therefore TWC needed a modern technology architecture to
store and process it. The Weather
Company employed the cloud infrastructure-as-a-service model,
commissioning four Amazon

Web Services availability zones: U.S. East, U.S. West, Europe,
and Asia. The company chose a
NoSQL environment over a SQL environment for its scalability
and its ability to store and
August 21, 2014.
21 Doug Henschen, “The Weather Company Builds a New
Forecasting Platform with Basho’s Riak NOSQL
Database and Amazon Web Services,” Information Week,
November 25, 2013,
http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/software-
platforms/big-data-reshapes-weather-channel-
predictions/d/d-id/1112776, accessed May 2014. Do
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Big Data
8
process large volumes of semi-structured data that included not
just weather statistics, but
also images and videos. The Weather Company used the open
source Riak NoSQL database to
store the bulk of its weather data. It also used the open source
Cassandra NoSQL database to
serve up weather data through its application programming
interface (API) to its own apps,
as well as to third-party weather-related apps. The API served
the OutSider app and was
available for future consumer app development projects.
Key Challenges Ahead
Huff was pleased that his team had the vision and expertise to
leverage the company’s big
data, create exclusive content in the RWI, focus on the user
experience, and work with the
centralized IT department to build a platform that supported not
just the OutSider app, but
also future apps targeting outdoor enthusiasts. Upon returning
from his run, he looked over
the latest OutSider reviews on the iTunes store. Realizing that
TWC must work hard to secure
a spot on the much-valued smartphone real estate, Huff jotted

down the suggested
enhancements in the reviews before heading into his staff
meeting.
Getting to this point was exhausting, yet exhilarating for the
team. Long hours resulted in the
initial …

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