As part of a plan to build a global crowd-sourced weather service with hyper-local information, Weathernews Inc. Japan has announced a partnership with Moji Co. Ltd. in China to collaborate on weather data.
The alliance follow Weathernews’ recent acquisition of U.S.-based social weather app Weathermob and a partnership with Netatmo, the world’s largest home sensor weather network.
Moji’s MoWeather app is the largest social weather app in China.
Data from its users will further expand the weather information available to Weathernews, which now has access to over 100 million weather observations, 420 million users and over 100 million active monthly users across 175 countries.
“The weather industry is ripe for disruption and as crowdsourced information becomes more available and mobile infrastructure improves around the world, so does our ability to build on our mission to accurately predict the weather around us,” said Tomohiro Ishibashi, director of Weathernews. “[H]aving access to the additional datasets from MoWeather’s vast user community allows us to provide more accurate and safer weather forecasting for all. Our advanced algorithms analyze these new datasets and put them in our existing computer forecasting models. We use this to deliver the most accurate forecasts to smartphones, the web and TV.”
