News

03.30.05

Pocket Express(R) Weather Forecast: Near 100% Chance Of Perfection
 
Independent Study Reveals Weather Service in Leading Wireless Information Suite From Handmark(R) Delivers More Accurate Five-Day Forecasts than Any Competitor

KANSAS CITY, Mo., USA March 30, 2005
Handmark®, the leading developer and publisher of software for smart mobile devices, today announced that its Pocket Express® news, sports, and information service for wireless mobile devices offers subscribers an amazing benefit in these uncertain times: near perfect weather forecasting.

CustomWeather, Inc., the supplier of weather services found in Pocket Express, has earned a near perfect record for precipitation forecasting for the 1-5 day forecasting period. The enviable score was amassed through a comprehensive study of Probability of Precipitation (POP) forecasts by ForecastWatch.com, a service of Intellovations, LLC. According to ForecastWatch.com, CustomWeather has beaten every major competitor in its study of 839 U.S. weather stations-including the National Weather Service.

ForecastWatch.com analyzed nearly 1.5 million forecasts made from February 2004 to February 2005. The study showed that the average error for the 105 day period between CustomWeather's forecasts and the actual recorded probability of precipitation was 3.51 percentage points. Error rates in CustomWeather's predictions dipped as low as 0.12 percentage points at 80% and never rose above an error of 5.53%.

In other words, when CustomWeather called for an 80% chance of rain, it did in fact rain 80.12% of the time. When the service predicted a 50% chance of rain, it actually rained 53.96% of the time -- a feat of accuracy almost unheard of in the weather industry.

"Handmark congratulates its partners at CustomWeather for setting a benchmark the rest of the weather industry will have a very hard time matching," said Douglas Edwards, Handmark co-founder and executive vice president. "Our goal has always been to provide Pocket Express subscribers with the most useful, the most accurate, and the most timely information, all in a format that is incredibly easy to use. It's nice when our efforts -- and those of our partners -- are affirmed as the very best available."

Handmark bundles seven wireless services into Pocket Express including news, stocks, weather, sports, 411 directory search, movie details, maps and directions. Weather functions in the service include current conditions for thousands of U.S. and international cities, Doppler radar images, marine forecasts, severe weather watches/warnings and much more.

As an Internet-based service, Pocket Express provides up-to-the-minute information, yet does not require a mobile web browser to operate. Its non- browser technology means information is delivered up to 30 times faster than browser-based information services and with up to 80% fewer keystrokes.

Pocket Express, winner of the DEMOgod mobile innovation award and a Codie Awards finalist, is available for BlackBerry, Palm OS, Windows Mobile, and Symbian handsets and as a Java application on many other mobile phones. The service is priced at just $6.99 per month, with a free 30-day trial version available.

To learn more about Handmark Pocket Express, go to http://www.handmark.com or http://express.handmark.com . A trail version of Pocket Express can be downloaded directly to mobile handsets by pointing the device browser to the http://www.hmarkx.com link. Additional information about the ForecastWatch.com study can be found at http://www.customweather.com/accuracy/2004_POP_study.html.