AccelGolf

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

From January 22nd to the 24th, mCaddie was in Kingston, Ontario to compete in Canada’s largest business plan competition. The Queen’s Entrepreneurs’ Competition provided us the opportunity to pitch to over 100 judges, including the CEO’s of PricewaterhouseCoopers, Visa Canada, and UBS Canada, over the three days of the event.

mCaddie successfully bested the top sixteen teams from as far as India, Portugal, Britain and the Philippines to win the $15,000 cash prize and an exclusive weekend at the Fox Harb’r resort. The experience was incredibly valuable for us as we prepare to solicit outside investment.

Financial support for mCaddie’s travel was generously provided by Pro Search, Inc., the Center for Entrepreneurship, and the Maine Center for Enterprise Development.