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The Weather Channel Social, as the collaboration is officially called, brings weather-related tweets to the airwaves as well as to Weather.com and the Weather Channel iPhone app. The Weather Channel is also launching 220 custom local Twitter feeds to update Twitter users about their city’s weather forecast.

Tweets displayed on the Weather Channel properties will be curated to filter out any swearing not suitable for broadcasting. The Weather Channel’s properties will also only display content relevant to the location of a particular weather forecast — it just doesn’t help to know that it’s cold elsewhere if you’re braving the high temperatures in Austin, TX.

But even with those caveats, the network still has a lot of material to use. On an average day, Twitter sees about 200 tweets per minute just about the weather. If it gets a little hotter or colder than usual, that rate raises to about 300 to 500 tweets per minute. And when it rains really hard, it also pours tweets: “Significant weather events” can provoke up to two million tweets per day, according to Twitter.

One of the biggest challenges of the integration was apparently to separate weather-related tweets from observations about all the other things that can be hot, cool and foggy in this world. The Weather Channel is relying on technology provided by the New York-based real time data specialists from Wiredset, which also runs Trendrr.com, to curate the Twitter firehose. Wiredset built an AI engine based on the Maximum Entropy Method of data analysis to make sense of all these tweets. Another challenge was that only three percent of tweets come with location information, which is why The Weather Channel is relying on Twitter profiles and location information within the actual text of each tweet, rather than geotagged data.

Other networks have occasionally experimented with the integration of tweets into on-air programming, but those experiments have so far mostly been based on single events like the MTV Music Awards. Making tweets a constant part of your programming is definitely a much bolder step, and The Weather Channel is placing an interesting bet on the power of citizen reporting with this integration.

Tweets about your average sunny day will be part of regular forecasts on Weather.com and featured during select on-air programming, but the social integration will play a much bigger role for the network when things go awry. In other words: The Weather Channel essentially just turned millions of Twitter users into field reporters, ready to be put into the spotlight and featured on air whenever severe or even catastrophic weather strikes parts of the U.S.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Dennis Jernberg.

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garmin nuvi 3790 lmt gps

Weather you are camping, or hiking, a hand held GPS unit will benefit you. I can’t imagine going camping in the middle of the woods and not being able to find my way out. But with Nuvi 3790LMT you Know the Lane Before It’s Too Late. Lane assist with junction view leads you to the correct lane for an coming turn or exit, making new intersections and exits easy to navigate. No more questioning which lane you need to be in to make an coming turn. It really displays road signs and junctions on your road along with arrows that show the proper lane for navigation. A Nuvi 3790LMT GPS unit is the option for these persons.

TrafficTrends give your Nüvi 3790LMT quickly finds daytime trends for traffic movement to increase your tracks and better calculate your estimated time of arrival based on time of day and day of week. And even you get free trafficTrends update versions every time you link your instrument to myGarmin.

MyTrends allow you save your regular places in your “Favorites, ” your nüvi 3790LMT will, over time, begin to figure out where you are going even with out your telling it! It gives time of arrival and relevant traffic data. So whether you are driving to and from work or a regularly scheduled weekly event, your nüvi 3790LMT might help you get there on time.

One of the best features in the Garmin Nuvi 3790LMT GPS is Speak Commands. How much safer would you feel while driving on our roads if you could concentrate 100% on the traffic close to you, secure in the knowledge that your competent navigator is taking care of the ‘where and how’ to get you to your destination?

How much more relaxing would driving on our roads be if there was always someone sitting next to you giving you timely, accurate and easy to understand navigation instructions on when to turn and which road to turn into?.

That’s a 17 percent reduction in a consumer’s energy bill, too, and EcoFactor found it could reduce consumer’s bills by up to per month when its service was used. EcoFactor did many of its trials during demand response events for utilities, which are times (like a really hot day) when a utility wants to turn down the energy consumption of some users to better manage the grid. EcoFactor also found that it delivered better demand response events for utilities, providing a 36 percent increase in yield for utilities during the event.

As I noted back when the company launched: finally a smart way to control thermostats. I’m not sure why every utility, energy service provider and consumer wouldn’t want to use this. The only requirement is a connected thermostat (well, and waiting for the service to be available in your area).

Here’s how it works: EcoFactor collects thousands of data points — from weather to regional building codes to home value — that give a clue about how an individual home might use energy and also respond to a service that promotes energy savings. EcoFactor then combines that service with the consumer’s ability to manually override the system (i.e., press up and down on the thermostat). When a consumer signs up for the service, EcoFactor uses the first couple of weeks to set a baseline for how that individual user prefers the temperature in their home: When a person pushes up or down on the thermostat, the original baseline starts to get set.

Then EcoFactor’s service automatically makes over 1,000 micro adjustments per month to the thermostat, bumping it up and down every so slightly, so that the user doesn’t notice the temperature change but also reduces her energy consumption. During demand response events on a particularly hot day in the summer, EcoFactor can precool some houses, turning on the AC a bit before the demand response event; then it can turn down the power use of the house during the event while the house acts essentially as a thermal battery, and the residents don’t notice the inconvenience of having their energy use curbed.

EcoFactor is first and foremost targeting consumers as its end customers, but it is working via distribution channels like utilities, broadband service providers (cable, DSL) and home security systems companies to reach those customers. The only reason EcoFactor isn’t in more widespread use today is probably because partners like utilities and telcos are notoriously slow-moving when it comes to adopting new services. EcoFactor worked with Oncor in Texas and other unnamed utilities for its trials.

It’s still in the early days for the service. The demand response trials included hundreds of homes, and EcoFactor says by the end of the year (after its summer trials), it will have been tested in “tens of thousands of homes.” In the utility world, that’s still a small footprint.

But EcoFactor is one of the only companies out there in the energy and utility world that is truly leveraging big data tools and the cloud to make energy use smarter. (To learn more about cloud computing, come to our Structure event on June 22 and 23 in San Francisco.) And for those not used to reading energy reduction metrics, 17 percent is actually really high for an energy management service. In comparison, OPower’s smarter energy bills on average reduce consumer energy consumption by 2 percent. EcoFactor is backed by RockPort Capital Partners and Claremont Creek Ventures.

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Year-old Geostellar pulls together at least 25 different types of data into its platform, including information about weather, shadows, roof slope, closest transmission lines, property values, land use, electricity rates, solar subsidies, and solar hazards. In addition, the company is constantly adding in more data sets like information about brownfields — a sudden hot area for solar installers — and data from pertinent recent legislation explained Geostellar CEO David Levine in an interview with me this week.

All that data goes into a system solar installers and utilities can use to search for useful data to target solar customers. For example, a solar installer could search Geostellar’s system for the locations of rooftops of a certain size in New Jersey or California and hone a mailing list down to the best potential candidates. The system can also estimate the amount of solar power, in kilowatt-hours/per year, that any rooftop would be able to produce if it had panels on it.

The solar rooftop companies are all fighting over a few select markets right now — California, New Jersey and Massachusetts — noted Levine, and Geostellar’s platform can help increase their sales. The company sells access to the software via a monthly license and then also charges the users for the data, depending on how extensive it is. So far pilot customers include CleanPath Renewables, Community Energy and AES Solar in Northern Virginia.

Eventually Geostellar will offer a consumer facing site, so interested solar buyers can search their own home — or their neighbors — to see how solar-friendly it is. RoofRay is offering a similar idea. Levine said Geostellar wanted to launch the industry section first to grow its revenues, before it launched a consumer site, which would likely be free to access.

Geostellar, based in West Virginia, has raised million from a group of angel investors including Flash Forward Ventures, and the company plans to start raising a Series B round after it has closed a couple more customer deals.

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