“So this was the first time that there was what we thought was a good offer, and we decided to go with it.” “They got a new CEO in January, and they wanted to move aggressively to improve their website, and before then, their leadership … was never that serious about acquiring us,” Masters said. He added that The Weather Channel has had an interest in the Weather Underground since 1995 when a group of executives visited them in Ann Arbor. “We’re going to be called Weather Underground LLC, and we will be a pretty much independent company with our own CEO, and the goal is to keep doing what we do because we’re very innovative,” Masters said. Masters said while Weather Underground sold its resources, technologies and employees to the much larger Weather Channel, their website will maintain independence, using their large staff in San Francisco made up of developers and meteorologists.
“Back in the early ’90s, when it was just this little educational project at the University, Samson thought it would be a cute tongue-in-cheek reference to the old radical group because it also got its start at the University of Michigan,” he said. Masters explained that Samson had suggested the name as a play on words referencing the 1960s radical political group The Weather Underground, founded by University alum Bill Ayers. As dot-com names went on sale, the group missed the domain name by one month. The weather service spread to K-12 schools and added graphics to their text before 1995, when the company dissociated from the University and became a public company. Perry Samson to create a text-based University weather service in 1991, before the Internet hosted such services. While working on his doctorate in air pollution meteorology, Masters worked with Engineering Prof. In the early 1990s, the company was founded by University alum Jeff Masters - Ann Arbor resident and director of meteorology at Weather Underground - along with several other University students, including Weather Underground President Alan Steremberg. Today, Ann Arbor-based weather company Weather Underground announced that they have been sold to The Weather Channel -owned by NBC Universal, Bain Capital and The Blackstone Group - for an undisclosed price.
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