AccelGolf

We all want to improve our golf game, shave a few strokes off our score, and impress our friends on the green. Short of hitting the ball farther and straighter, there doesn't seem to be much we can do on our own without spending our hard earned cash on lessons and better equipment. The only thing we can do is practice, practice, practice. The hard part however is knowing where to practice and what areas to focus on. The secret lies in understanding more about your game and there are a few key statistics that can make this easier. Just like the pro's you can utilize these PGA tracked statistics to gain deeper insight about your playing ability and dominate on the course.

Greens In Regulation

A green is considered hit "in regulation" if any part of the ball is touching the putting surface and the number of strokes taken is at least 2 fewer than par, i.e. by the first stroke on a par-3 hole, the second stroke on a par-4, or the third strokes on a par-5. Greens in Regulation percentage is a statistic kept by the PGA Tour.

GIR is considered the most important stat in golf and can be a great way to quickly measure how effectively you are approaching the green. Combining knowledge of how many greens you hit with your total score can tell a complete story on what went right or wrong in your last round. If you hit a high amount of greens but still get a poor score, you can figure out pretty quickly that you need to work on your putting game. This may seem obvious, but keeping a record of this hole by hole and looking back at your trends over a season can help show you aspects about your approach that you may not realize.

3 Putt Avoidance

3 Putt Avoidance measures the percent of time a player has 3 or more putts for a hole.

A quick measure of how well you are doing once you get on the green and another important statistic to keep track of. This is where the amateurs are separated from the pros. The lower this number is, the quicker you are sinking your putts. Keep this in mind: most amateurs have a 50% or higher 3 Putt Avoidance, most pros are under 4%. If you can keep track of this number and get it down, your golf game will dramatically improve and your score will quickly drop.

Putts Per Hole

Putts per hole measures the average amount of putts a player makes per hole. Also known as your Putting Average.

In the same vein as 3 Putt Avoidance, Putts Per Hole is another great way to drill into your short game and find your weaknesses. Keeping track of your average putts will also allow you to predict with some degree of accuracy how you are going to do in a given round, and adjust your game for that. 36 putts is par for the round, so if you know your average per hole and round you can compare it against par to see how much you need to focus on your long game. Your putting average helps you separate your long and short game abilities so you can practice where it counts.

Scrambles

A Scramble occurs when you miss Greens In Regulation, but still manage to finish the hole par or better.

This statistic is a great measure of your ability to recover from a bad start. Scrambling provides a metric of your ability to correct your early mistakes once you get on the green. Recovery stats are best looked at in a larger time frame. Recovery events aren't as common, and there is more to be learned from viewing a whole season of scrambles than one or two rounds.

Sand Saves

Getting the ball in the hole in two or less shots after landing in a sand trap.

Let's face it, we all get stuck in the bunker way more than we'd like to admit. Skilled players can get out of the bunker quickly and save the hole by getting in good position on the green from the bunker. Tracking your sand saves can show you how much work you really need to put in practicing bunker strokes.

Keeping Track

The more you know about your game, the better your decisions will be on the course. Traditional scorecards give you the option to track these scores, but they don't make it very easy. AccelGolf's stroke tracking method, in which you record the lie of each stroke as you hit the ball, makes calculating these stats effortless. With AccelGolf you can store your entire play history, see trends, and get deep insight into your game on numerous levels.

There you have it, 5 stats that can help you get deeper insight into your golf game, and make you an all around better golfer. Keep these in mind next time you're our on the green, start looking at your trends, and we guarantee you'll be able to shave a few strokes off your score.

Best Luck,
The AccelGolf Team

Newcomers to the AccelGolf application might be a little surprised when they take a look at our scorecards. Unlike traditional paper scorecards, we track your score by recording the lie of each stroke. Every time you swing the club and hit the ball, you record on your mobile device (or the web scorecard) where you hit the ball from. This simple change allows us to calculate in-depth statistics for you without asking any further questions. With this information we can provide you with your Greens In Regulation, Sand Save Ratio, Handicap, and many other PGA tracked statistics that help you drill into your game.

Symbols

Each stroke in our system is represented by the first letter:

T

Tee

F

Fairway

R

Rough

G

Green

S

Sand Trap

P

Penalty

Note: Stokes from the fringe of the rough/fairway should be recorded as a fairway shot. Similarly strokes from the fringe of the rough/green should be recorded as a green shot.

Recording Strokes

• BlackBerry

  

  On the blackberry, use the keys T, R, F, G, S, and P to enter your stroke lies.

• iPhone

  

  On the iPhone, press the Tee button to record your tee shot and start the hole. Then press the label correlating to each stroke.

• Web Scorecard

  

  When entering or editing scores on the website you can navigate using the mouse or keyboard arrows. You can then use the mouse to select the appropriate button or the letters T, R, F, G, S, and P on the keyboard to enter each stroke.

If you need any help or assistance, you can ask in the forums or contact us via support@accelgolf.com. In our next post, we'll be explaining what the statistics we track mean and how they can help you understand more about your game.

Have a great game,
The AccelGolf Team

For many of you the golf season is starting to wind down, but for us, things are starting to heat up.

The passion you have demonstrated for the greatest sport in the world has astonished us. Over 6,000 courses have been mapped in 52 countries, and over 2 million strokes have been recorded in just 3 months. In the past month, we've been making a lot of changes to the site, and we've heard a lot of questions. We've been experimenting, asking where we can improve, and listening to feedback. We are positive that we've hit upon the right formula to help build the best golf community online.

Lets dive into what's new:

New Design

We are proud to announce the new designs for our homepage, the forums, and statistics. We've organized sections of the website into more coherent tabs in an effort to make the website simpler to use. We aren't stopping there, and will be continuing to refine these pages and implement new designs. Keep an eye out for changes, and let us know what you think on the forums.

While you're on the site, make sure you check out the new statistics and rounds page. It has been completely overhauled to provide deeper analyses and a cleaner understanding of your golfing history.

Your New Golf Bag

The Equipment tab will allow you to create, rate, and customize your clubs. Future releases of our mobile applications will allow players to record which club they are using for each stroke. This information will then be fed back into AccelGolf and analyzed to generate statistics and reveal tendencies. You will be able to see how each club impacts your game, as well as accuracy trends. For premium account members your effectiveness with each particular club will define the kind of player you are, and further tailor the suggestions AccelGolf provides in reports.

The Target is a key aspect of our new Equipment system. It builds upon the rest of our statistics model by providing more detailed information to analyze. The Target records the result of your stroke in relation to your intended location. The result of this analysis is a detailed history of hitting patterns which can provide valuable insight into ways to improve your game. This information will also be used for club suggestion based not on intuition, but hard data.

As always, thank you for your continued feedback and support. We have many plans for this fall, and we hope you'll join us as we continue to build the best community of golfers in the world!

The AccelGolf Team

This post was inspired by Fred Wilson’s article on ycombinator, "Best deal in startup land".

Drinking a beer at Flat Top Johnny’s after the TechStars’ Investor Day, I couldn’t help but laugh. We were celebrating the culmination of three months of intensive startup bootcamp with David Cohen, Brad Feld, Rich Miner, Bob Frankston, Shawn Broderick, and many other TechStars’ mentors. How could a small team from Maine be so fortunate to be in the company of some of the smartest people in the startup world?

AccelGolf is a TechStars Boston 2009 company. We were also a pain in the ass during the acceptance process. First, we poked at the term sheet (largely non-negotiable), and then continued to delay the decision as we did our diligence—we were confident that nothing could be as good as TechStars sounded.

We couldn’t have been more wrong.

For those that don’t know who or what TechStars is, here is the synopsis from their website:

TechStars is a mentorship-driven seed stage investment fund. Each year we run a summer-long program in Boulder, Colorado and Cambridge, Massachusetts. We’re very selective – each year hundreds of companies apply to the program and we only take about ten per city. These companies get up to $18,000 in seed funding, a summer of intensive top-notch mentorship, and the chance to pitch to angel investors and venture capitalists at the end of the summer.

Some of the questions and reactions that emerged from our research follow:

"We have advisors, and we can network"

TechStars surrounds you with almost seventy mentors who’ve very likely made the same mistakes (probably more than once), eight other teams that will be facing the same struggles, and direct integration into a tight-knit startup community with one the highest concentrations of motivated, intelligent people in the world.

The mentors have built and funded insanely successful companies, but more importantly, they’ve failed. Between them, they’ve failed A LOT. When you can reach someone who has learned the hard way, you don’t have to.

Starting the first day of the program, TechStars pairs you with mentors so you can build strong relationships. This is, in some sense, stacking the cards; the majority of the mentors also have the ability to invest as angels.

Fundraising as a first-time entrepreneur is seemingly impossible, and yet 70% of TechStars’ companies are successful at raising early seed-stage capital. Why is this? In addition to the mentor connections, TechStars’ companies have been through several stages of due diligence. First, they made the cut (less than 4% are chosen). Second, they lasted the three months and produced something meaningful. Third, they are focused on the things most contributory to the success of an early-stage startup.

"Sounds like Road Rules/Real World"

We assumed that since the mentors and investors would naturally gravitate to the most exciting companies, that there would be an inherent competitiveness. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Entrepreneurship is an experience of ups and downs. The three months of TechStars amplifies these ups and downs. The people around you are experiencing the SAME emotions and challenges. No one understands what you’re going through like them. TechStars has existed for three years now, almost forty companies, all just an email or phone call away.

I’ve never met a successful entrepreneur that didn’t have an almost divine dedication to success. That said, TechStars steps that up. By participating, you’re making a vow to your investors, mentors, and peer companies that you’ll succeed. If you want others to have the same opportunities you’ve had, work harder. In addition to being held accountable for financial returns, you’re now responsible for building the TechStars reputation, and justifying your acceptance into this program.

"We don’t want to lose control"

We were excited about the mentorship, but hesitant about how heavy-handed the advice would be given. Again, this is almost laughable now. Another TechStars tagline: "It’s your company". No one in TechStars tells you how to run your company. In fact, if Shawn / David didn’t have faith in your ability to build a business by making the right choices, they wouldn’t have chosen your company.

"Ask three mentors the same question, and you’ll receive four different answers." In soliciting feedback from so many smart people, it is requisite to weigh the data points of the mentors and make decisions. The key is to have drive and clarity of vision, so that you can weigh different points of advice and not get discouraged.

"We work hard"

I was worried that the meetings, sessions, and work habits of other teams would break our flow. Our team works hard. When we got to Cambridge, we learned another TechStars motto, "Do more faster". I can’t count the times we walked into the office and woke Stephen (HaveMyShift) up sleeping on the futon, or caught Ajay (Sensobi) in on a Sunday evening. Its your duty to make the most of the three months.

"I’ve read VentureHacks et al"

I read…a lot. There are some great blogs/books on startups, but nothing compares to having someone who has been there on the other line when you need it. An example: early-stage fundraising is literally an art, and I cannot express how much I’ve learned from Shawn, Brad, and the other mentors, and even our peers, including Laura (oneforty), who raised at the beginning of the program.

"Why not ycombinator?"

Someone early said: "If you want to build cool technologies, go to YC; if you want to build big businesses, go to TechStars."  I don’t know if the former is true, but the latter absolutely is. TechStars provides mentorship, integration into an incredible network, and a certain level of credibility that mitigates a tremendous amount of the difficulty in building an early-stage startup. TechStars doesn’t just build cool technologies, they build world-class leaders who will build big companies over and over.

Thank you TechStars.

We've been getting some pretty good press the past few weeks. Here's what people are saying about us:

• TechCrunch: TechStars Debuts Nine Startups In Boston
• Venture Beat: A new class of startups.
• Killer Startups: A company for golfers that want to push forward.
• Mass High Tech: Techstars Boston startups shift models.
• Boston Globe: The InnoEco Awards from Tonight's TechStars Demo Night
• Xconomy: TechStars’ First Class of Boston Startups Launched at Microsoft-Hosted Gala

Thanks for the support everyone. We are looking forward to what the next year holds. If you see any more articles out there, be sure to let us know. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter.

Problem:

Creating an http connection across all carriers / networks / services (BIS, BES, TCP).

BlackBerrys require connection information to be appended to each request. For example, instead of requesting http://www.google.com BlackBerrys need the request to be http://www.google.com;deviceside=true;ConnectionTimeout=20000; The appended string describes how the network will execute the request. The issue is that for BIS services the carrier information must be specified. There are two ways to do this.

1. determine apn settings by cross-referencing an application-defined xml file and the carrier.
2. intensely search google and find a single magic string --> mds-public

The solution is the following:

private static String getConnectionString()
{

	//The Device is a simultaor --> TCP
	if (DeviceInfo.isSimulator())
		return ";deviceside=true;ConnectionTimeout=20000";

	String st = "";
	
	//A carrier is providing us with the data service
	if ((CoverageInfo.getCoverageStatus() & CoverageInfo.COVERAGE_CARRIER) == CoverageInfo.COVERAGE_CARRIER)
	{
	
		// blackberry internet service
		ServiceRecord rec = getBIBSRecord();
		if (rec == null)//couldn't find the right record
			st = ";deviceside=true";// let the phone try to do the work
		else//found the record, get the id
			st = ";deviceside=false;connectionUID=" + rec.getUid()
					+ ";ConnectionType=mds-public";
	}
	else if ((CoverageInfo.getCoverageStatus() & CoverageInfo.COVERAGE_MDS) == CoverageInfo.COVERAGE_MDS)
		st = ";deviceside=false";// use the clients blackberry enterprise server
	else
		st = ";deviceside=true";// let the phone do the work if it can

	return st + ";ConnectionTimeout=45000";
}

//gets the record referring to the BIS configuration
private static ServiceRecord getBIBSRecord()
{
	ServiceRecord[] ippps = ServiceBook.getSB().getRecords();
	for (int i = 0; i < ippps.length; i++)
	{
		if (ippps[i].getCid().equals("IPPP"))
		{
			if (ippps[i].getName().indexOf("BIBS") >= 0)
				return ippps[i];
		}
	}
	return null;
}

The only thing to note is the connectionUID portion. Basically if you are accessing the mds-public domain you need to specify which one --> connectionUID. Fortunately this ID is identical to the service records UID. So appending all that information gives you access to all the network coverage you need. The only thing not included in this is access to WIFI. Let us know if you tackle this.

This solution was created by Mike Nelson, AccelGolf's lead mobile developer.

Welcome to AccelGolf, the new face of mCaddie. Changing a company name is a big decision, and one that we didn't take lightly.

Endless thanks to the hundreds of users that have helped us beta test the the iPhone and BlackBerry applications. Expect to see them soon in the iPhone App Store and the BlackBerry App World.

Best,
The AccelGolf Team

mCaddie attended Web Innovators in Boston tuesday night. We had a great time, met some fantastic people, and were interviewed briefly by the Bostonist. They just posted a video featuring some of the companies demonstrating at the event, and our own Will Sulinski got a chance to tell a little bit more about what we do and where we are going.

Bostonist Attends Web Innovators Group 03/10/2009 from Tom Lewis on Vimeo.

Check out the original article here: http://tinyurl.com/d4zunq

As shocking as it may be, there are some members on the mCaddie team who do not golf. We know, it's a crime, and they have promised to take up lessons this summer. Hitting the green for the first time can be a scary thing, but it looks like there is at least one golfer out there who isn't intimidated.

Unni Haskell, a 62-year-old native of Norway who moved to St. Petersburg last year from Stamford, Conn., took two months of golf lessons and decided she was ready to hit the course. She stuck her tee in the ground, teed up a Top Flite range ball and took aim on the 100-yard first hole at Cypress Links, a nine-hole, par-3 course in St. Petersburg. Haskell swung as hard as she could with her purple Wilson ProStaff 12 degree driver. The shot went about 75 yards, avoided the bunker on the left, bounced onto the green and rolled in the hole. First hole of her life. First swing on a course. Hole-in-one. "I didn't know it was that big of a deal,'' she said. "I thought all golfers do this.'' Ugh.

To read more of this facinating and frustrating story, read the origional article at the St. Petersburg Times

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.

Read More at www.masshightech.com/stories/2009/02/09/weekly9-New-mCaddie-app-tracks-golf-range-on-Blackberry.html