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Idea: Weather Girl Widget for Slovenia

Developing Umbrella service for Koornk, got me thinking, how could I expend this service even more, to give it more meaning?

What I came up with, is a simple extension of existing data-sets that had to be acquired already to make the basic service work. Inspired by all the talks of Widgets in recent times, I decided to make an effort and design a widget!

The basic layout is simple (drawing by r8r: Morticia – CC-BY-NC):

WeatherGirl Facebook mockup
WeatherGirl Facebook mockup

The next step is, to get a graphic artist and draw about 20 different poses and clothes for the girl. Idea being here that you take into account what kind of temperature/weather is there, and then depending on need for umbrella add it to her clothes or make her wear a rain coat!

Recipe list is then quite simple:

  • Get weather forecast data from one of different sources
  • Find an artist to draw you weather girl or assemble yourself from free cliparts
  • Figure out FBML or iGoogle XML
  • Write a script that ties it all together and updates weather information each morning
  • Add some social/viral features
  • Spam all your contacts
  • ???
  • Profit!
The Profit step
Since we’re living in uncertain times it’s important to ask, where’s the profit in this little exercise? I believe there are many groups that could benefit from building such application in Slovenian widget space:
  • Weather parts of TV stations (24ur vreme, RTV Slo vreme) as a way to extend their online offerings and to promote their weather online and TV offerings. Since everyone already knows they both have weather it’s more of a branding effort for them.
  • As an exercise for Domenca team (btw: they have a new page!) to promote the fact that they sell umbrella’s (well, at least one) on Mimovrste and gain customers with that (+ branding).
  • For a new team on a market, to show that they’re able to build a “viral” Facebook app and a way to prove that they can build Facebook and other widgets.
  • Fun afternoon project for a local geek, to speed up his or her job creation.
  • Well, there’s always an option – because, it’s fun and a way to unwind.
Lessons learned
While documenting this idea, I’ve learned a few new things:
  • OmniGraffle has incredible stencils and there are even more on Graffletopia
  • You don’t need a designer to create mockups. A bit of thinking gets you a long way (Creative Commons Flickr images in this case, combined with OmniGraffle stencils)
  • Adding social and sharing features to widgets is tricky. I’ll leave this for a later exercise.
  • For any idea, you can easily find lots of potential groups you can try and sell it to.
  • This is fun! 🙂
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3 responses to “Idea: Weather Girl Widget for Slovenia”

  1. How funny to see a drawing of mine pop up here! Using it as a 'weather girl' seems like a good application for the style.

    And I can tell you that a developer who cut in the artist for a part of the profits would find an eager participant.

  2. Yes you are trying something different . Keep on doing it , because when you walk away with a difference you get the gestures of others.

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