DivotDog – Update

Hello,

Wow. Has it been one year already? On August 8, 2010 DivotDog was unleashed. While it was an exciting announcement, we knew going into it there were short comings.  We made a list of the immediate short comings that we could target. With that in mind, we focused on six specific enhancements: discount online tee reservations, a golf course finder, course profile pages, golf matches, social enhancements, and more detailed analysis.

Book Tee Times Online – Save up to 80%

This feature has us excited. In all honesty, it’s DivotDog’s first feature that provides real value. You can search for a specific course or browse discount tee times in your area. At this time, discount tee times are available at approximately 1,800 courses. We’re working hard to add more. If your favorite course doesn’t have a discount tee time, let us know, we’ll see if we can help you out. To find your favorite course, we recommend using the DivotDog golf course finder.

Golf Course Finder

This enhancement helps golfers decide where to play. You can find golf courses by a name or near a city. You can even look for courses with specific features. As an example, imagine you want to find a course with a driving range or some other practice options. For whatever reason, the course finder provides 20 optional search filters to help you decide. We believe this feature is particularly useful if you are vacationing or traveling for business.  Especially with the integration with the online tee times mentioned previously.

We know that one of the important items that you may want to search by is cost. At this time, the course finder does not have this capability. We are aware of its importance. We are also working to add this feature so that it works correctly. We didn’t just want to throw this feature on there and it be misleading. In addition, we are working to improve the speed of the searches. Either way, once you’ve found a course, you can view the details of a course with the course profile pages.

Course Profile Pages

Over the last year we have focused on improving our course data. Each course currently has over 30 interesting data nuggets. To elegantly display this information, we’ve organized it across four pages including: general information, details, reviews, and tee times.

At this time, we have successfully added yardages for over 850,000 hole and tee box combinations.  We will continue to build and improve upon our course data.  If you find a problem, please feel free to contact us.

Golf “Matches”

The first version of DivotDog provided insights for individual players.  With this version, we are providing a way for golfers to analyze how they played against other players during a specific round. We do this with matches. Imagine taking your scorecard from your round of golf and getting immediate analysis of how you fared against your competition. That’s real ammo for your smack talking arsenal.

Social Enhancements

One of the great things about golf is that it can be both an individual and social sport. With this in mind, we wanted to begin to roll out our social features. At first glance, DivotDog will appear to be yet another social network. We do not see DivotDog in this way. Instead, our goal is to do everything we can to be a golfer’s best friend. In pursuit of this lofty goal, it is hard to ignore the social aspects of the sport.  Because of this, we have developed a more passive social structure.

We have added two groups in relation to you, the golfer: partners and spectators. Partners are basically individuals whose golf game you have an interest in. Spectators are individuals that have an interest  in your golf game. We need to smooth this integration out a bit. In general though, you can add scores for your partners, for a round that you have played with them.

More Detailed Analysis

With this version we are beginning to collect more details around your golf game. You can now enter play details on a hole-by-hole basis. You now have the option to enter putts, penalties, fairway hit, and sand shot information.
Please note that at this time, this information is only being collected. We are working to analyze this data and provide this information in a way consistent with DivotDog.

What’s Next

We have a couple of low-hanging pieces of fruit hinted out in this note. We will be rolling out as much as we can over the next couple of weeks. After that, there is one large piece missing at this point: mobile. Our current mobile implementation falls short of our expectations. Delivering this, and delivering this well is our top priority. We have tinkered with various prototypes since late 2009. Personally, I can’t wait to get this valuable component in your hands. I believe that you will love it.

Last year we also hinted at a truly unique feature. It’s not ready yet. It will take a while to deliver. But we’re really excited about it. In the meantime though, you can real value from DivotDog by booking tee times online here.

Finally, we want to significantly improve our release cycles. One year between releases is too long. The reason it took so long this year is because of all of the enhancements we have made behind the scenes to ensure long-term viability. Regardless, as a golfer, we need to focus on delivering more value to you.  It’s there now. More is coming.

Thank you for using DivotDog!

Our Direction

It’s been a while since our last update. I thought I would drop a quick post and give you a peak in regards to our direction.

From a user’s perspective, there have been only a few changes since our launch. In reality though, we have been making a lot of changes in the background to help us meet our goals for next year. We are planning to release an arsenal of new features in March of 2010. In addition to these new features, we plan to release the first part or two of our business model.

A lot of the features will be fairly run-of-the-mill things that you would expect from a golf-related solution. One of these things is to dramatically improve our mobile story. Right now, it’s pretty subpar. But we have learned a lot. In addition to the typical things you would expect, we have at least one feature that we think is pretty innovative. As much as I would like to talk about it, it makes more sense for me to shut up and produce. With that in mind, I need to get back at it.

Before I go though, what features would you like to see in DivotDog?

Friday’s Features and Fixes

Hello,

The launch of DivotDog this week was both exciting and educational for us. We have been encouraged and humbled in numerous ways.  With that in mind, I would like to share with you what we learned, what we have fixed, and what we have added. Finally, we have several individuals that we would like to thank as well.

Learned

• Golfers do not like our tee system. This is something we are going to improve upon in the off season. This is a tricky one for us. So we would appreciate any feedback.
• Golfers are confused when their favorite golf club has multiple courses.
• JavaScript for touch screen phones was leaking memory.

Fixed

• Prevented users from entering tee boxes with no course or other rating. This caused some errors to be thrown which prevented users statistics and trends to be generated. In the real world, the course and other rating are optional for a tee box. We intend to be compliant with this.
• JavaScript memory leaks (we think this is fixed at least)

Added

• GZipping of statistic and trend pages. As you can imagine, the bulk of imaging and data requires a fair amount of bandwidth for any of these pages. We implemented GZip on the public pages to help reduce the amount of time it takes a user to retrieve player information. You can learn more about speeding up web pages in High Performance Web Sites. I have also heard that “Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers” is good, however, I have not read it.
• Added the “Club” column to the course search page.

Is there anything that you believe needs fixed? If so, please let us know in the comments. Some of these issues were brought to our attention by other DivotDog members. Because of this, we would particularly like to thank:

• Microsoft’s BizSpark. They were very thoughtful in giving us some exposure earlier this week. We sincerely appreciate any and all mention of DivotDog.
• A particular individual at the Louisville, KY software development firm igNew. This individual has unselfishly spread the word about DivotDog.
• DivotDog Members. Considering DivotDog is still in beta form, there are some bugs. We are working hard to squish those and we sincerely appreciate our users’ feedback, patience, and understanding.

Thank you!

DivotDog has been Unleashed!

Ecofic LLC today unleashed the beta of its innovative golf scoring system, DivotDog. DivotDog is a one-of-a-kind service that provides real-time statistics and trending for golfers. At the same time, this revolutionary product broadcasts this information in real time. These features are delivered through an easy-to-use experience that adapts to a golfer the more they use it. To top things off, a growing list of trophies reward golfers for using the service. As the DivotDog motto boldly states, this service aims to be “a golfer’s best friend.”

“To be a golfer’s best friend, we need to treat regular Joes like pros”, said founder and creator Chad Campbell. Chad went on to say, “Traditional media has provided rich, in-depth analysis and broadcasting of professionals for years. DivotDog aims to bring a similar experience to any of the 50 million golfers worldwide that want it. This is possible thanks to advances in social media and the way that individuals have embraced it. DivotDog is able to enhance a person’s social experience by allowing their friends to participate in one particular area of a person’s life: golf.”

With in-depth analysis, statistical trending, and real-time broadcasting, DivotDog provides a new take on the traditional scorecard. Chad mentioned that “the scorecard has been a static, single use utility for golfers. DivotDog gives golfers more value without asking them to do anything radically different. If a golfer is hesitant to use the system, or prefers to use a scorecard over DivotDog, we would sincerely like to learn why. We would like to address any pain points early on. If we fail to do this, DivotDog will not grow into the service we think it can be. We believe that DivotDog has an exciting road ahead of it.”

When asked about future features for DivotDog, Chad continued. “From day 1, DivotDog aimed to become a golfer’s best friend. This lofty goal made us take into consideration a wide range of scenarios and situations. To address the wide variety of possibilities, we created a platform focused on flexibility, design, and performance. This was necessary to meet and exceed expectations down the road. At release, this platform is the world’s first real-time scoring system for everybody. While we will aim to provide a lot of the obvious features we believe a golfer would want from DivotDog, we also want to continue to innovate. While we are not ready to say anything publicly yet, we plan to have another world’s first in Spring 2010. In the meantime though, we sincerely hope the golf community will communicate the features that are important to them through our contact page. We also hope the golf community will be understanding of any glitches that may (probably will) happen with the launch of this new service. It’s been an incredible beginning to an incredible journey.”

Individuals may sign up for DivotDog by visiting here. DivotDog is a new, privately funded service provided by Ecofic LLC. This service, and Ecofic LLC, are based out of Louisville, KY and was founded by Chad Campbell. Chad is a two-time Microsoft MVP and author of Silverlight 2 in Action.