Weather, Risk, Analytics

I have been looking at probabilistic approaches to success in sport performance.
Whilst researching some ideas around rule based behaviour I came across this advertisement.
My interest was piqued and I sought out WeatherBill.
David Friedberg is the company’s Chief Executive Officer. David was with Google, where he joined as one of the founding members of the Google’s Corporate Development team. He managed a number of strategic projects for Google, including identifying and leading several of Google’s largest acquisitions. He has served as a Business Product Manager for AdWords. He has a degree in Astrophysics from UC Berkeley.
Siraj Khaliq is the company’s Chief Technology Officer. Siraj worked at Google in multiple technical lead roles, from the company’s distributed computing infrastructure to the high-profile Google Book Search project and other offline content search initiatives. Siraj has an M.S. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University, and a B.A. (Hons.) in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, England.
WeatherBill offers insurance policies that allow farmers to protect themselves from “losses caused by Mother Nature.”  There are “no claims to file, no adjustment needed—if bad weather happens, WeatherBill will send you a check automatically, within 10 days of the end of your policy period.”

I listened with interest to David Friedberg’s discussion of WetherBill’s use of local data to assess and manage risk. He was a guest on Radio National’s Bush Telegraph.
I followed up with a visit to a post about WeatherBill’s use of Google Analytics.
WeatherBill has released news about recent investment in the company.
I am very interested in WeatherBill’s model for assessing and managing risk. I think it has some important resonance with discussions about home advantage in sport and more general discussions about performance in relation to ranking. The key appears to be rich local information in the context of a global system.
 
Photo Credits
Farmland 1
 
Tasmania Landscape
 

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