Weddar: People-powered, Accurate and Local Weather Prediction App - 100K Downloads and Counting!

Friday November 25, 2011 , 3 min Read

Weddar people-powered weather app — With everyday increase in pollution and as more and more tree and forests are cut and burnt down, its becoming difficult to predict the climate and weather accurately for any given region. Even if we get the prediction right for a particular region of the country or state, we have seen that the weather behavior is different between cities and sometimes within as well. The Weddar team is trying to solve this problem by crowd-sourcing information from people and providing an accurate and localized weater prediction, so that you can be prepared and plan your day better. YourStory.in team got in touch with Ricardo Fonseca, co-founder of Weddar to know more about their app.

Hey Ricardo, So, What is Weddar all about?

Weddar is a people-powered weather app for iOS and Android where anyone can make their own weather reports and share them with their friends.

How is it different from other weather apps in market?

What makes Weddar different is that it doesn't go get general broad information to weather stations: it's real people, in real places, telling others how they actually feel about the weather. Because the weather can be different even within the same city.

How did you get the idea to develop Weddar?

It came from the junction of several aspects, one of them being the information we get from traditional weather services (and apps) are too generic, and many times wrong. "How about you, telling me how do you feel, right now, and where you stand?" That's got to be more accurate and relevant, right?

So that was one aspect. From then on, thinking about how so many people nowadays we carry smartphones around, with GPS and internet, if they would have a platform to tell others how the weather feels like for them, then we'd have an alltogether different system in place. And that's what we did!

Tell us about the team behind Weddar

It's myself, Ricardo Fonseca, I have an academic background in Psychology, but then steered towards marketing where I pursued a MBA and started working for startups.

Gonçalo Catarino as co-founder and designer of the app. He has an extensive experience in web design and business - he's now been running his own company, and was web art director at Ogilvy prior to that.

Luís Confraria on front-end and server, Arturo Vergara on iOS, and Pedro Veloso on Android.

How has been the traction till now?

Consumer adoption as been pretty great! Last week we reached the 100,000 downloads mark and growing. iOS (where we first launched) is still a majority of downloads but Android (launched about a month ago) is gaining some terrain.

India is on our top 20 of countries but growing too, and we'd love to have more users from India!

As it is a free app, how do you plan to monetize and sustain?

Something like Weddar makes more sense when you have a big number of users, so we knew from the start that we had to have a free app to have as many users as possible. Also since the start, we have some plans on how to monetize the service, but again only will make sense when we reach a bigger number of users, and right now we're focused on getting them and building more into the app

To get an accurate prediction of your local weather, download a free Weddar app here - http://www.weddar.com/

Chandan Raj

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