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THE (BALTIMORE) SUN
BALTIMORE--One vehicle kept gaining traction the more it snowed during the recent storm: WeatherBug.
Made in Maryland, it isn't a hot, new sport utility vehicle or a bug, although it resides in a place where bad bugs occasionally do, in a computer.
It is the name of one of the hottest sources of weather information on the Internet and one of the most popular tools on the Web.
Gaithersburg-based WeatherBug has become the second-most-visited source of weather information on the Web, behind the site of cable television's The Weather Channel, according to Internet analysts comScore Networks Inc. and Nielsen Net Ratings.
WeatherBug was the 38th-most-used Internet property of any kind last month, ranking ahead of sites for the heavily advertised Travelocity.com, bookseller Barnes & Noble, and NBC News, comScore reported last week.
WeatherBug is gaining enough new users on a typical day--35,000--to fill a baseball stadium. And unlike many, WeatherBug is said to be profitable in just its third year, according to AWS Convergence Technologies Inc., the private weather-reporting company that created it.
WeatherBug's parent company was formed in 1992 after two 25-year-olds, Bob Marshall and Christopher D. Sloop, suggested to their boss, William R. Mengel, that a series of air monitoring stations could become a weather network.
The company, EAI Corp., had begun air monitoring for various clients, including the United Nations' oversight of Iraq's chemical munitions after the Persian Gulf war.
Their boss turned down the idea, but the pair devised a plan to have schools buy the stations for science instruction--an idea inspired by their schoolteacher spouses.
Reckoning that schools are rarely flush with cash, the pair further proposed that EAI pitch the concept to television news stations. Broadcasters could donate the equipment and use the "neighborhood weather" data on their newscasts, they suggested.
That finally convinced their boss.
The school-based system closed huge gaps in monitoring. It also revealed unusual "microclimates" in places such as Ellicott City, where steep elevations cause temperatures to vary 10 or more degrees within only a mile or two.
AWS has grown to 115 employees from about 60 a year ago and projects $33 million in revenue this year, up from $16 million last year. Half of that is because of WeatherBug, Marshall said.
He and his partners foresaw the Internet as the perfect medium to transmit data between their now 6,000 stations and their subscribers billions of times a day.
The name for the service came from a colleague who saw an early mock-up of the temperature beside a clock on a computer screen. The colleague said it reminded her of a "bug" in TV news parlance and proclaimed, "Look at the weather bug!"
The name stuck.
Several decisions turned out smart for WeatherBug, which began just as technology funding turned cold in spring 2000.
The service was launched not as a Web site but as a "Web application," so it doesn't rely on someone revisiting a Web address. Users register to download it for free, keyed to their ZIP code. A small, buglike icon remains on the bottom of their computer screen and signals alerts from the federal National Weather Service, sometimes with a chirping sound.
AWS received $15 million in venture capital from HarbourVest Partners LLC of Boston in 2000. The money was used to develop WeatherBug and buy out Mengel.
AWS also has advantages that eluded many other recent technology startups: quick profitability and scant competition, Taylor said.
"These are two of the brightest guys I've run into in my 30 years in private industry," Mengel said.
"WeatherBug's a clever little thing. I wish I had thought of it, although frankly, I would have missed on bottled water, too."