UM student, grad win business plan competition

ORONO – Neither University of Maine junior James Daniels nor Kurtis Petersons, a 2005 UM graduate, are golfers, but that didn’t hinder the collaborative development of their reality-based golf program that recently took first prize in a statewide business plan competition.

The $10,000 cash prize and a $15,000 consulting services package they won in the annual business plan competition held by the Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Southern Maine’s School of Business in April has enabled “mCaddie” to move to the next development level.

They are launching a limited version of the program nationally and advancing their product marketing efforts.

mCaddie allows golfers to track and replicate an actual golf game with a simultaneous virtual game that generates game statistics, provides an online social clubhouse and allows players to see which of their friends are playing golf at a given time and how they are doing.

The system begins on the green with a cell phone with Global Positioning System functions. Players save their tee-off location with a “way point.” As the game progresses, mCaddie logs strokes and ball travel distances. The game is saved to the mCaddie Web site, where it can be reviewed and analyzed, or viewed by other mCaddie players.

“It’s fun stuff,” says Daniels, a UM math major and computer science minor who grew up in Eastport and Bangor. “Basically, it’s a caddie with tie-ins to golf courses. We already have a number of golf courses that are quite eager to sign on.”

Petersons came up with the idea for eCaddie and Daniels provided the technical expertise he had developed as a Web designer since high school. A former employee of UM’s Department of Information Technologies, Daniels has been developing Web sites through his part-time business, Marginleft, which he developed at the Foster Student Innovation Center at UMaine.

Since January the two entrepreneurs, with assistance from the Foster Center and the Maine Center for Enterprise Development in Portland, have been refining mCaddie.

In April, they entered their mCaddie business plan in the USM competition and won first place out of 33 original entries. Out of the six finalist presentations, theirs was the only business plan that was not already on the market, according to Daniels.

Daniels said the mCaddie targets an affluent demographic that he and Petersons think will embrace the combination of golf and technology. He said other programs will track golf games, but his research has shown “there is nothing this comprehensive.

“There are programs available to track golf by GPS and some track statistics, but there is nothing yet that ties it all together, and this has a social networking feature,” he said.

Daniels credits much of the mCaddie success so far to the assistance he and Petersons received at the Foster Center.

“They donate the office space free. They pay the electricity. They pay the Internet bills, and they provide a desk and a place to meet clients,” he said. “They are lowering the barriers of entry if you are a student who wants to start a business. They have a staff on hand to assess your ideas and help you test your ideas for free. There is very little risk.”

mCaddie works on the Apple iPhone and Petersons and Daniels plan to develop a version for Google’s Android mobile phone this summer.

Daniels and Petersons are the second business plan team from UMaine in three years to win first place at the USM competition. In 2006, economics major William Sulinski of Dedham and Matthew Rodrigue, a 2004 engineering graduate from Wilton, took first for their “Heat-Safe 1000,” a wireless device that lets heating oil companies know when customers’ oil tanks get low.