WeatherTAP's History
WeatherTAP.com is an online weather service that is subscription based. It is a subsidiary of TAP Publishing Co. which is located in Crossville, TN. WeatherTAP was initially a cooperative creation between TAP Publishing and Harris Cooperation to service commercial and private aviators. The website went into production on July 26, 1998; since then the face of weatherTAP has evolved, as well as the content offered and the partnerships involved.
Today, weatherTAP services thousands of subscribers and free-trial memberships in many different industries in North America. Currently, weatherTAP has made available, in excess of, 10,000 different weather-related products. TAP Publishing began discussions with Harris Cooperation in the spring of 1997. Harris proposed a partnership that would make weather available to aviators. After nearly a year of discussions, development began on what is called weatherTAP. The first iteration of weatherTAP took a small team of developers close to a year to complete and was released on July 26, 1998.
Compared to what subscribers are used to, today; weatherTAP started off with basic weather products that were viewed as most beneficial to pilots. The first subscribers were only able to view Local, National, and Aviation weather. Also, available was flight planning using DTC DUAT. Although, the website offered minimal services in its beginning, they were a valuable resources for aviators. Over the next seven years, since the release of weatherTAP.com, many other products were added to the website making it useful for other industries, not just aviation. Developers incorporated products such as: lightning, RadarLab (classic), and Tropical weather. As the team of developers became more comfortable manipulating the raw weather data, they started rethinking their partnership with the Harris Corporation. The severance of the partnership was finalized in the fall of 2005; soon following was a redesign of weatherTAP's homepage and business model.
The dissolution of the partnership between the Harris Corporation and weatherTAP liberated resources that they were then able to reallocate toward a better infrastructure, more staff, and an updated homepage. The next four years, 2005 – 2009, were spent incorporating more specialized aviation maps and becoming QICP certified. As technology changed, weatherTAP followed along. In the late 90's, the closest gadget to a mobile device was the PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). In 2001, a version of weatherTAP was created for the PDA. It remained in production until 2008; when smart phones began to emerge and become popular. Today, the mobile versions of weatherTAP continue to be upgraded allowing for more users to access weather all over the country. On May 12, 2011, the iPhone app, was released.
WeatherTAP began as minimal service for pilots and has since grown and expanded into a large weather resource for many different industries. The sites hosts, currently, over 10,000 different weather related images. As the industry and technology changes, weatherTAP will continue to adapt and evolve.
Timeline
(click here to view a PDF version)