"Mobiles phones do have a ‘silent' feature," smiles Morris, managing director of DMC, the company that has been developing CaddyAid for the last five years. In expanding the CaddyAid product from a smart but pricey hand-held product costing £299, to a piece of software you can install on your phone for free, Morris is counting on golfers to use their mobiles on the course.
CaddyAid first appeared in 2003. Its most obvious point of difference from its GPS-driven rivals was its use of an actual course photograph, rather than graphics, to depict the hole. The system's touch-screen set-up - tap any two parts of the picture and CaddyAid works out the yardage between them - also means you can use the unit when the GPS signal is lost, in a so-called manual mode. Manual mode means you can do your yardages sitting on the train or in a hotel room, a feature popular with the European Tour caddies who use the device, including Lee Westwood's bag man Alistair McLean and Darren Clarke's former caddie Billy Foster. Foster even suggested another CaddyAid innovation - a lay-up feature that lets you program your favourite pitching distance and then calculates the yardage to that point from wherever you are on the course.
Until recently the golfer either needed to shell out £299 for the device or, if he or she owned at GPS-savvy touch-screen smartphone, download the software for £99. With the new CaddyAid Mobile product though, DMC is letting golfers download the software that will support the course information system for gratis.
"The plan is to make our revenue from the course credits only," Morris explains. "One course will cost £9.99, five will cost £29.99 or you can get unlimited courses for £9.99 a month, with a minimum 12-month contract."
CaddyAid Mobile is not as sophisticated as the main product because of mobile phone limitations when compared to the power of a PDA. It offers graphics, not a photo, and currently has no touch-screen capacity. But it
still works via GPS; users whose phones do not already have a GPS receiver will need to buy the matchbox-sized bluetooth receiver, specifically designed for CaddyAid Mobile, which DMC sells for £39.99.
Morris believes that shunting the product sideways from a bespoke £299 unit to a phone download is a "huge boost" to the club professional.
"Before, stocking CaddyAid could have been an expensive business," he says. "You're looking at, for the top of the range system, £399 a unit. But now, we will basically let the club pro sell the CaddyAid software to the customer - and make the cash from it.
"We will provide to the pro, completely free, the CaddyAid software and data for his course on a computer. He can then sell both to the consumer for either £5 or £10 - it's up to him. All he has to do is plug the customer's phone - which must have internet connectivity - into the computer. It's like selling an electronic course guide."
CaddyAid Mobile also has an advertising feature, which flags up an advert between holes, almost like a local business sponsoring a hole. It's up to the club to negotiate the deal, but Morris points out the pro can use it to promote his own stock too.
"The customer ends up with one of golf's most sophisticated course guides," adds Morris, "plus the software to download more, for a tenner, and the pro has made £10 for no outlay, although we charge the retailer £1 for every course sold. We simply invoice them and that's the deal. Then, the next day the customer gets
an email from us, asking them if they enjoyed using our system and if they might buy another course. They have the software already on their phone. It opens up new customers and a database for us."
Despite the less-sophisticated feel of CaddyAid mobile, Morris insists there is no loss of quality in the product. The sophistication of the system is summed up by the camera used to take the course images - used both as pictures in the original CaddyAid unit or as the basis for the CaddyAid Mobile graphics.
"The camera costs £1 million," Morris reveals. "It is mounted to the wing of a plane, which flies over the course in a series of parallel sweeps.
"The standard image for a camera exists in what we might call one layer, but this camera's images exist in multi-layers. One shows GPS coordinates; a second shows height data, represented in a series of colours; a third shows topography via contour lines. A fourth layer shows landshift, allowing comparison with older pictures to see how the land has moved, while a fifth can even reveal water table information. The pictures are almost as useful to the course superintendent as the golfer."
The camera captures around 20 images of the course, which are collated into one great big picture. Individual holes are then cut out and rotated so the tee is always at the bottom of the screen and the green is at the top. Around a billion GPS coordinates on each hole means the system guarantees accuracy to within a metre.
But in making CaddyAid available for mobile phones, is Morris not in danger of cutting demand for the original £299 product?
"The main unit might become less desirable," he concedes, "but the phone companies are telling me that by the end of next year all mobiles will become touch screen anyway. That's exciting for us because we can then install the same software as the main unit into the phones, with all its functionality and club pro software built in. At the end of the day, the mobile phone will be the mass market."
While CaddyAid's technology may be top-notch, Morris accepts there is still cynicism about GPS technology. He feels the recent explosion of available inferior devices hasn't helped.
"We sent out a unit to a club pro recently; he told us the distances it was giving were different to one of our rivals' products. I know for a fact that some of them use Google Earth as a basis for their figures. I know how inaccurate that is, and the inconsistencies thrown up create apathy in the industry.
"I went to the Munich show as a bit of a secret shopper, and was disheartened to find how many of our rivals use inferior systems. I can talk until I'm blue in the face about our product, but if you have a bad taste in your mouth to begin with it won't count for much.
"There's a GPS bandwagon at the moment, with cheap units on your wrist watch and so on.
I believe the market will become flooded, the companies that make inferior products will go bust and the better ones will stay standing. The two things you can't afford not to have in this line are accuracy and simplicity - it must tell you what you need to know in a blink of an eye. CaddyAid and CaddyAid Mobile deliver on both counts."
The one other thing a GPS device needs, though, is the ability not to make a ringing tone on your backswing. And if CaddyAid Mobile is to thrive, the nation's golfers had better remember to hit that mute button before they hit the first tee.
http://www.caddyaidmobile.com/
