Everyone talks about the weather, including investors. Weather data isn’t just for weather geeks anymore, with it rapidly becoming a crucial source of data about retail trends, hurricanes, catastrophe bonds, event insurance, resort traffic, and on and on. And with the rise of web-based data and related services, it is finally cheap and realtime too.
How do you separate the weather signal from the noise? If you can’t do anything about the weather, how do you make money from it?
David Friedberg currently serves as the CEO of WeatherBill, having founded the company in 2006. Prior to founding WeatherBill, David was with Google, where he joined as one of the founding members of the company’s Corprate Development team. David managed a number of strategic projects for Google, including identifying and leading several of Google’s largest acquisitions. David also served as a Business Product Manager for AdWords – Google’s primary revenue source. Prior to Google, David spent several years working in private equity and investment banking. He has invested in and advised dozens of companies in the technology industry. Earlier, David worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he led several projects as a mathematical programmer. David received his BA in Astrophysics from UC Berkeley.
Michael Ferrari is the Vice President of Applied Technology and Commodity Research at Weather Trends International. He has several years of research experience which span the theoretical and applied domains of the geophysical and biophysical sciences. At WTI he extends these ideas, and incorporates new ways to visualize the data towards the construction of trading strategies in the global commodity sector. Before joining WTI, Michael was a commodity research scientist and trader where he was primarily involved with global climate forecasting, remote sensing analysis and algorithm development, applied technology research, and commodity analysis/modeling. In addition to his role at WTI, he is currently completing his PhD from Rutgers (post qualifying exam) where his research focuses on physical hydroclimatology and environmental evolution. Michael has published and presented research findings in several areas, including global climate modeling, pattern recognition, biometeorology, environmental metagenomics, and climate economics. He likes anything to do with water, in liquid or frozen state.
Bob Marshall co-founded AWS Convergence Technologies, owner and operator of the WeatherBug brand, in 1993 and currently serves as company President and CEO. Marshall pioneered the networking of weather instrumentation and cameras using the Internet-parlaying this capability into the single, largest network of weather stations and Internet cameras and one of the largest private weather companies in the world.
Under Marshall’s leadership, WeatherBug formed a strategic public/private partnership with NOAA’s National Weather Service, whereby the federal government relies on WeatherBug data for mission critical severe weather alerting and homeland security response. WeatherBug’s professional solutions are also relied upon by more than 100 state and local government agencies, energy traders, electric utilities, schools, broadcast media partners and businesses. Additionally, WeatherBug is a leading digital media property as the number one provider of weather on mobile phones across all US carriers and a top four news and information site on the Web with more than 16 million monthly unique users, as reported by comScore Media Metrix – November 2007.
Prior to launching AWS, Marshall served as a program manager and lead engineer at BBN (formerly Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the company credited with starting the Internet) on a number of advanced military sensor, signal processing and networking programs.
Marshall is a cum laude graduate of the University of Maryland, College of Engineering.
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