Print
Email
Print Edition Stories
Courtesy photo
MHT's Galen Moore: Boston high on cybercrime list
MHT's Julie Donnelly: Gemvara launches custom-made jewelry over the Internet
MHT's Galen Moore: MBTA expands bus tracking feeds
Just in time for game three tonight of the Lakers-Celtics NBA finals series, an Attleboro company thinks it has the key to understanding what makes Rajon Rondo a better guard than Kobe Bryant – or vice versa.
InfoMotion Sports Technologies Inc. has built a small device that, embedded inside a basketball, measures a player’s ball-handling skills and spits out scores in real-time to a coach’s laptop. The company has raised $680,000 in new equity financing, its CEO reports – part of a planned $750,000 round it intends to use to develop a version that can be sold on the mass market to schools and athletic training facilities.
“Skill in our world is not just athleticism,” said CEO and co-founder Michael Crowley. “It’s things like muscle memory – things you can’t see with the naked eye.”
InfoMotion’s technology is designed to measure fundamental skill in ways other metrics, like speed or jumping ability, cannot.
“The ball in sports is really a great measurement device,” Crowley said. “It’s the recipient of force. When you measure the ball you’re really measuring the player.”
The latest round of financing brings total investment in InfoMotion, which does business as 94Fifty Sports Technologies, to $916,000, including a $316,000 tranche of a planned $650,000 round the company reported it raised last November.
Crowley co-founded the company with president Mark Shary, an Indiana-based serial entrepreneur who co-founded two healthcare-industry startups – Bostech Corp. and Incept Biosystems. He declined to discuss revenue figures, name the company’s investors or say how much the startup has actually raised in total. InfoMotion has been earning revenue since last June, providing its technology in the form of a service, mostly to school athletic organizations, he said, adding that 4,000 to 5,000 players have gone through the company’s training program to date.
If its effort to go mass-market with the technology is successful, InfoMotion plans to move on to soccer next – but probably not in time for the World Cup, Crowley said. “It’s the same platform, but a different type of pattern recognition software,” he said.
Comments
If you are commenting using a Facebook account, your profile information may be displayed with your comment depending on your privacy settings. By leaving the 'Post to Facebook' box selected, your comment will be published to your Facebook profile in addition to the space below.
RSS Feeds
