Nick Austin at FreightWaves tells a great story about how a weather app used by truckers came to be. It’s a perfect example of how serendipity aligns with technical know-how in free markets and leads to the creation of valuable products that improve people’s lives.
The story is about an app called Drive Weather. It was created by a man named Paxton Calvanese. He’s an amateur pilot, and in 2014, he had a near-death experience due to a change in the weather while flying, Austin writes. He made it through unscathed but saw an opportunity to make things better for other pilots in the future.
Professionally, Calvanese is a software developer. He started working on an app called Wx24 Pilot. Austin writes that the app “simplifies the process of reading aviation weather reports by visually consolidating terminal area forecasts (TAFs) and other weather data on one screen. Information is displayed in a circular format representing a 24-hour clock.”
The same basic idea behind the Wx24 Pilot was applicable to trucking. Truckers also want to have high-quality weather forecasts along a pre-planned route that takes into account the time it takes to get to each point along the way. Austin writes:
It took about a year to develop the app, which launched in late 2019 in the U.S. Calvanese changed the look and logo to reflect road maps and the new name, as well as removing the aviation jargon. He said it was a hard sell at first with so many other road weather apps on the market, but his seemed to have something unique.
The app allows truckers to compare routes and it uses a high-resolution display, meaning the app gathers observations from a large number of weather stations, limiting data gaps. It also contains an algorithm to determine when roads may become icy based on atmospheric conditions, and there’s an option to adjust travel speed for more accurate weather predictions.
Calvanese saw an opportunity to improve on what was currently available given his skills and experience, and it resulted in a very successful app. “According to Calvanese, the app had 55,000 downloads and 3,500 new subscriptions in 2020, 200,000 downloads and 15,000 new subscriptions in 2021, and 120,000 downloads and 10,000 new subscriptions as of late April this year,” Austin writes. Austin talked to a truck driver who regularly uses the app, and he said that aside from the benefits to him as a driver, it helps give his family peace of mind when he’s on the road.
When Calvanese got in his plane in 2014, he didn’t expect to invent an app that would come to be used by thousands of truckers. The success of Drive Weather is a classic example of how innovation isn’t planned. Free markets allow people to act on their experiences and invent new technologies to solve specific problems that workers face.