JOHN T. GO URV ILLE JERRY N. C ONOV ER

GolfLogix: Measuring the Game of Golf

It was a sunny May afternoon in 2002 as the employees of GolfLogix—all six of them—assembled around the company’s conference table in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was 106!F outside, but it was comfortable inside—partly due to the air conditioning, and partly due to the company’s finally gaining traction in the market. After three years and nearly $2 million in investments, things were looking up. GolfLogix was founded in May 1999 on a simple concept—using the satellite-based global positioning system (GPS) to aid golfers in playing the sport they loved. In its simplest form, the GolfLogix product consisted of a customized, handheld GPS receiver, called an “xCaddie,” that indicated the distance to the green to which a golfer was hitting (see Exhibit 1). Rather than having to “guesstimate” how far he was, the golfer could simply look at his xCaddie, see that he was, say, 157 yards from the green, and pick the club appropriate for that distance. GolfLogix was offering 60 of these “Distance Only” units to golf courses for approximately $1,500 per month on a three-year lease. In turn, courses could provide the units to golfers free of charge, rent them for a nominal fee (say $1 per round), or bundle their cost with the greens fee.

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But GolfLogix’s system could do much more. Rather than simply indicate distance, the system also could be used to record a golfer’s progress around the course. Using an enhanced version of the xCaddie, a golfer could record the exact location of his ball at the beginning and end of every shot as well as the club used to make that shot. At the end of the round, he could download this data to a kiosk in the course’s pro shop. In return, he would receive a three-page color printout mapping his progress around the course, along with statistics on how often