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Custom Weather Alerts Straight to Your Inbox

Custom Weather Alerts Straight to Your Inbox

By Jenna Wortham, The New York Times | Updated: 26 July 2014 11:41 IST

Every morning when I wake up, there's a peppy text message waiting in my inbox, letting me know that the summer storms are over, and that the sky will be blue and clear for the day.

And each afternoon, as I am preparing to head home from work, another message arrives, telling me to expect a cool, dry evening, one that might be best suited for a light jacket.

Both messages come courtesy of a new service, Poncho, that delivers customized weather updates via text or email.

There are hundreds - perhaps thousands - of weather applications available for smartphones, laptops and tablets. And there is no shortage of ways to find the day's forecast by turning on the radio or television.

But Kuan Huang, one of Poncho's creators, is betting that people will use his service for its convenience, and the customized information it provides. Poncho asks its new users questions about their daily habits, like what time they wake up, how they commute to work, whether they have pets they need to take out, and whether users prefer to receive their daily weather reports via text or email. From there, Poncho builds out a schedule of alerts and updates to deliver.

"I wanted to make something that pushes information to people and they don't have to check it," he said.

The app, which was developed at Betaworks, an organization behind Digg.com, was released last April and still has a relatively small following, with users in the tens of thousands. That is partly because the service is available only in New York and Boston. But the app's five-person team is working on expanding to a handful of major U.S. cities this year.

(Also See: Researchers Use Smartphone App to Study Factors Affecting Gut Bacteria)

Huang has been encouraged by the early response, and indicators of momentum. For example, few users have unsubscribed, which Huang sees as a sign that people like the service.

He also thinks that people will be won over by Poncho's personality, which is chipper and occasionally sassy. Poncho's voice comes from a team of human editors who write the messages. They often add humor, Internet slang and the occasional graphic to spice up the alerts.

In addition to weather, Poncho can give tailored information about traffic and train delays, as well as others details like the daily pollen count.

Huang joined Betaworks last January as part of its hacker-in-residence program, which recruits talented engineers to experiment with different ideas and concepts in the hopes of devising a service that could eventually become a stand-alone company. The effort has given rise to Dots, a popular mobile game, and Giphy, a search engine for animated images called GIFs.

Huang had no experience in weather. He heard that the Betaworks team was interested in a better forecast experience, which struck a chord with Huang, who almost always got his daily report from his mother. She knew his schedule and would tell him if it was going to rain or if he should bundle up. He originally wanted to name the service "WeatherMom," but his team persuaded him to choose something a little more mysterious and sleek.

(Also See: Microsoft Launches Climatology App for Android and Windows Phone)

Huang worked with data scientists at Betaworks to build a service that pulls weather information from 10 sources and can aggregate ZIP codes with similar forecasts into groups, which helps minimize the number of messages to be written each day.

The company has also been testing ads on the service. When the pollen count is particularly high, for example, Poncho shows an advertisement for allergy medicine at Duane Reade, a chain of New York drugstores.

Eventually, the service could expand its advertising platform and let brands target ads based on conditions or the season.

But Huang says the company's priority is scaling Poncho nationally.

"We want to roll it out city-by-city and keep learning what works," he said.

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