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Veteran golfers may seethe at the idea of watching someone fiddle with a smartphone in the middle of the fairway, but Portland, Maine-based mCaddie Inc. co-founder William Sulinski, 25, says his mobile application will speed up play.
The mCaddie application for Research in Motion Ltd.’s Blackberry phones, now in a beta-testing stage, turns a smartphone into a range finder that calculates the distance to the hole from any point on a golf course, and tracks a golfers’ performance. Developers plan to add an Apple Inc. iPhone version, and a social feature so players can compare how friends and PGA pros hit from each spot along the course.
Compared with GPS rangefinder devices that sell for $200 and up, the mCaddie application costs $6 a month, said Sulinski, an admitted non-golfer who founded the company with fellow University of Maine alum James Daniels. For now, the company is bootstrapped, and earlier this week won an award from the Maine Technology Institute that will give the startup $240,000 if it can raise $200,000 from outside investors.
Unlike GPS devices, mCaddie relies on satellite images and lets the golfer find his location based on landmarks. The battery-saving satellite approach is just as accurate and no more time-consuming than GPS systems, Sulinski said.
Range finder use appears to be on the rise. For the first time this year, the Massachusetts Golf Association will allow the devices in tournament play.
“There’s a lot of traditionalists in the game who didn’t want to see this kind of device. I’ll raise my hand and say I was one of them,” said MGA executive director Joe Sprague Jr. However, he said the devices do speed up play by helping golfers select a club faster.
“It’s pretty unobtrusive,” Sprague said, “and if it helps players speed things up a little, why not?”
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