I briefly mentioned Drizzoo in an earlier post where I noticed that the lead developer for the company was an IST graduate. Drizzoo seems to be in private alpha because the search results return only jobs and more jobs but nothing about an available product. I was immediately intrigued to find out more about this instance of entrepreneurship in the College of iST, so I emailed Scott Ayres (Class of ‘07) for some more information.

Scott Ayres graduated from Penn State University in December of 2007 in the Design and Development option of IST. He worked on Drizzoo as his internship requirement for IST, but continued to pursue it after graduation. Drizzoo is Scott’s first startup.

Scott describes Drizzoo in his own words as,

When I started with Drizzoo, the goal was to fix the current problems with weather sites and change the way people get their weather. We wanted to create a website that allows the user to customize their weather and provide relevant weather information for the user based on their lifestyles. Essentially, we wanted to give weather a web 2.0 spin by allowing user-driven data, such as sharing opinions, photos and videos, and providing an opportunity for weather enthusiasts to predict their own forecasts. The users will also have an opportunity to create custom weather pages, similar to a myspace page that will give them meaningful weather data rather than just a bunch a numbers and meteorologist jargon.

When asked what type of skills learned in IST helps him in his current line of work, Scott responded,

Since this was a development project, I utilized my computer science skills in writing the code for the website. The usability engineering classes were also very beneficial when designing the site. The one class that I found the most useful for a web project like this was IST 462: Database Applications. This class covered PHP, database modeling and building data driven web applications as well as working with web services. The projects in this class were very similar to the projects I worked on with Drizzoo.

Startups are rare at Penn State University, despite the size of the student population and the amount of research going on within. In the College of IST, our students seem to be influenced by the corporate culture to follow the route of diving into a professional career upon graduation. There’s nothing wrong with being a professional, but I know that many of our students have the talent and the ability to succeed in a startup company as well. The College of IST is young, and I’d like to see more success stories like Weebly coming out of our College in the near future.

If you have further questions about Drizzoo, leave a comment below and I’ll be sure to forward it to Scott.

Tags: drizzoo, Entrepreneurship, weather, web 2.0

Categories: Entrepreneurship, News