San Francisco based WeatherBill, the service which lets you bet on the weather (it can also be used for insurance), took down their landing page and launched today. We wrote about the company two weeks ago while it was in private beta. WeatherBill is combining an ecommerce site with a complicated weather forecasting algorithm to sell weather insurance policies to individuals and businesses. The company is not disclosing the size of their round of funding. However, it includes venture firms NEA and Index Ventures, as well as a number of well known individuals: del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter, Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom (through his Atomico fund) and Howard Morgan (idealab and First Round Capital), as well as others who declined to be named. WeatherBill is perfect for small and medium sized businesses who’s businesses are affected by the weather. If a golf course wants to be paid $1,000 per rainy day, WeatherBill will create a policy on the fly for them. The company was founded by former Googler David Friedberg. On a side note, WeatherBill is doing some really nice things with Flash (see the tools section). Even if weather and insurance isn’t your cup of tea, you should check it out. Particularly if you are creating Flash applications yourself (I said the same thing about Jobby with their use of Ajax back in March). → Read More

David Friedberg, a former Googler, is set to launch an ambitious new site called WeatherBill, headquartered in San Francisco, in the next few weeks. WeatherBill won’t be a consumer site; rather, they are combining an ecommerce site with a complicated weather forecasting algorithm to sell weather insurance policies to individuals and businesses. And having a business isn’t a requirement to purchase a contract on WeatherBill – users can also use it to simply make a cash bet on the weather swings in a given geographic area. Weather insurance is difficult to get and even harder to customize. Enron began to dabble in weather-related securities, who’s value would fluctuate based on actual weather down the road, but that all ended in 2001 when the company went bankrupt. Today, large energy companies trade weather policies back and forth to hedge against high or low temperatures, but everyone else is left out. That’s where WeatherBill will come in. Anyone can buy an insurance policy for weather in a given area. Choose a weather station via a Google Maps mashup (see screenshot to right) and choose whether you want it to pay out for each hot, cold, rainy or dry day. Temperatures are set by the user by degrees, precipitation by inches. As an example, if I want to be paid $100 for every very rainy day (1/4 of an inch or more) in San Diego in March 2007, that policy will cost $370.64 and will pay up to a maximum of $3,000. Every option is variable, and so the user can decrease the amount of rain required, increase the maximum payout, etc., via an Ajax interface. A contract for a payout of as little as $1 can be created. WeatherBill hedges their own risk via their weather algorithm, which Friedberg tells me they use to simulate 20,000 years of weather daily for each weather station. They also sell their risk on the back end to a number of hedge funds. The result is guaranteed profit for them, regardless of the weathler. All they have to do is sell policies. WeatherBill may be useful for golf course owners, movie theaters, amusement parks and other businesses whose business varies significantly based on that day’s weather. I would imagine that having this built into things like Quickbooks and other online accounting software would be a great feature for many small businesses. The only requirement to purchase → Read More