Long before the era of iPads and Snapchats and holographic Tupacs, some of the greatest minds in tech and science spent their life trying to understand weather patterns. Since, we’ve evolved to have an almost overwhelming amount of data on what today’s weather will be like, and it’s entirely possible that we’ve gone overboard with the notion of being ready for a little rain.
That’s exactly the premise that Poncho, a new startup launching out of BetaWorks, operates under.
Sure, you could download apps or log in to weather sites and get all kinds of hourly forecasts for the whole country, Doppler radar readouts, weather news (which is usually the most boring type of news), and a host of other types of information. Or you could see a daily breakdown of the weather in a way that’s meaningful to you, and only to you.
Poncho works by first learning about your daily routine. When you sign up to the service, you’re asked a series of easy questions about the flow of your day: when do you wake up? Do you have any pets you need to walk? When do you head into work? What time do you take lunch? When do you leave work? How do you commute?
After you’ve answered, you can choose to receive your daily weather updates by SMS or email.
“The core objective is to have Poncho become a default part of your routine,” said co-founder Kuan Huang. “We want to take you away from the noise of other apps and clients and give you the weather in a simple way.”
Updates from Poncho are clean and easy to understand. You get a general outline of the day, along with specific temperatures for the times Poncho knows you’ll be out and about in the world.
Huang led the team that developed Poncho out of BetaWorks, which is a program that aims to pull talented engineers into the BetaWorks family in order to co-found and develop great ideas into full-fledged service. Unlike most accelerators, there is no application process and there really aren’t any strict curricula either.
Rather, BetaWorks gives entrepreneurs everything they need to turn an idea into a business, at no up-front cost to the engineer (or Hacker in residence, as BetaWorks calls it). BetaWorks does provide a team, co-working space, and mentorship like a traditional accelerator, and they also take an unspecified slice of equity in the business, but generally the program operates very differently from traditional accelerators and incubators.
Poncho is just the first in a string of forthcoming product launches for BetaWorks, so stay tuned.
To sign up for Poncho, head over here.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/wZMuZVSsSQk/
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