Our History

Tyler Allison and Melissa Hintz are married and move to the "Bay Area" of California for Tyler's job at the NASA Ames Research Center. This is included in the History of the company because without Melissa in the background this entire venture would have been a failure. Tyler eventually convinces her to officially join the venture with her own creativity 23 years later.

Tyler and Melissa move to Northern Kentucky to start a family. AllisonHouse.com is registered. And the first website is built over the next several years. It was intended to be a personal website to host personally relevant and important information.

Having lived in California for most of his life where the weather rarely if ever deviates from great, Tyler begins storm chasing in Southern Indiana after experiencing his first true thunderstorm. Even though he lived in Northen Kentucky it was the progressive leadership (at the time) of the Ripley County skywarn group that accepted him as a mobile spotter that kept him going when others looked down on storm chasers and what they where doing.

In search of how to get quality real-time weather data in the field and how to tell his wife where he was for safety reasons, Tyler begins working on how to translate the complex and non-standard weather data from the National Weather Service into something he could understand. This became the horribly named "NOAH Weather" project. This is also around the time Tyler experiments with Amateur Radio and GPS plotting, the pre-curser to what would eventually become the Spotter Network

While Tyler is working on weather data, and unknown to each other, Mike Gibson is working on a better way to view radar data at Gibson Ridge. Tyler and Mike jointly work on how to expand the access to data while Mike focused on the visualization and Tyler on getting, converting and distributing the data.

Tyler and Melissa move to the Chicago area and through contacts at the meteorology program at the College of Dupage (COD), Tyler is introduced to several key individuals in the future of AllisonHouse: Paul Sirvatka, Gilbert Sebeste and Gerry Creager. Paul taught Tyler the basics of meteorology, the power of data and safe storm chasing. Gilbert and Gerry where instrumental in getting AllisonHouse connected into the Unidata LDM program for access to real-time weather data and both spent countless hours guiding and advising and listening to Tyler rant about how stupid the data formats are that the NWS is using.

The foundational years for the company. Still working full-time at a "day job", Tyler spends most evening and weekends building hundreds of parsing engines in Perl/PHP and a fault tolerant infrastructure that allows for low cost data and near 99.999% uptime. While also handling all support questions and billing/backend systems.

On the verge of taking a new job that would put a strain on his free time, Tyler puts a call out to Twitter looking for someone to help with AllisonHouse. Some random guy on the Internet responds back and unbeknownst to either of them, the next evolution of AllisonHouse has begun.

BoltMeter, the first low cost mobile app for lightning alerting launches in the Apple App Store. It never really takes off and is eventaully pulled from the market several years later. Tyler asks his father Joe Allison to retire from corporate America and do sales and financials for the company.

AllisonHouse expands considerably...Tyler asks Ryan Hickman to be the first full-time employee and begin the rebuild of all the underlying technology, Gilbert Sebenste is asked to officially be a consulting meteorologist and Ryan's brother Justin Hughes to take on the job of customer support. Leaving Tyler to deal with back office systems, contracts and long-term strategy.

AllisonHouse aquires access to two satellite dish to get access to NOAAPort over the air as part of the committment for realiable data. With this acquisition AllisonHouse starts feeding back into the Unidata network. Bringing the support they gave AllisonHouse 8 years prior full circle.

Joe Allison offically retires for the second time to do what he loves...cruising.

After handling customer support for 7 years, Justin moves on to a new company and a new challenge.

Tyler begins work on a new venture called BaitsNow. A research and education portal for the angling public.

Ryan becomes a full partner ending the boss/employee relationship of the prior 10 years and AllisonHouse LLC is renamed to Allison Hickman Holdings LLC.

After spending the previous 10 years dabling in costume creation for children theatre productions, Melissa creates her own division of the company and takes on her first solo project with WeGo Community Theatre leading the costume work for Cinderella.

Tyler learned to Scuba dive and after spending 2023 learning the basic ropes of the dive community in Chicago and the basic conceptual models, he did what he always does and tries to provide that information to the general public and a new website is born.