Leanne Skrabacz 106301926
ACH 102 Digital Dreams

One of our talks in the Tabler Performance Space was with Matthew de Ganon, SVP, Emerging Businesses The Weather Channel Interactive. Matthew de Ganon is the senior vice president of weather.com and he is the consumer applications software manager for The Weather Channel Interactive. He talked about his work in his field of business. He talked about the different stages that the company went through to get to the final product for weather.com.
In his presentation he brought up the web page and showed weather.com. He asked us “how many people use the other sections on the web site like the “Travel section” or the Sports and Recreation section?” Not many people said they did. I know I don’t. I just use weather.com to look at what the weather is going to be the next day or for the upcoming week. He showed us this section that had a three dimensional picture of certain mountains for skiing and snowboarding. Matthew de Ganon then mentioned how long the process actually is, that brought them to the final product. I must say that the final product is impressive. The final ski and snowboarding mountain was in three-dimensional and could be rotated around to see the different slopes that could be used. He also discussed the different people that helped developed features like this.
He then showed us parts of the process that helped develop the final products of different weather channel downloads that are available. Some of the downloads are “weather toolbars” and “weather gadgets.” The “weather gadgets include “Mac Dashboard Widget”, “Vista Sidebar Gadget” and the “Google Gadget.” Matthew de Ganon showed us the different processes that the various people went through to get to the final product of the download available where you can get the weather right on your desktop.
The process involves many different prototypes. On the very first one, the ad size was too small for the ad to be displayed on the screen. The ad had to be scrolled in order to see the whole thing. Next they tried to space everything out, but not too much, because the first prototype of the desktop weather was too cluttered. There were many different people in the many sections of work that helped come up with what the weather desktop is today. The weather desktop is very easy to find things on and it’s easy to navigate through, to find what you want. Now there is no need to scroll through to see the whole ad. The weather desktop is very easy to use and is very useful.
Matthew de Ganon was a very interesting speaker and I learned about the different processes that companies go through to get to a final product like they have for the weather.com. Their weather desktop is very useful for people like me who check the weather everyday. Since I need to see what to wear when I go to my outside practices. Matthew de Ganonn was very informative on his topic and kept me informed of the processes that are performed in order to get the perfect product.