It came to Kurtis Petersons in a dream: He was on a golf course. He needed caddie help, advice, information. But all he had was his cell phone.
“And then I looked down at my phone and it told me how far I was away from the hole,” he said. “It had a slew of information.”
Wowed by his dream, Petersons, 25, hopped online the next morning to see if he could find such a gadget. He discovered a few cell-phone applications that kept a golfer’s stats, but he couldn’t find any that did what he’d dreamed.
So he invented one.
That was in December. Months later, Petersons’ GPS-guided mCaddie (for mobile caddie) has won him and his business partner, James Daniels, two sizable development grants. They’re now working to get mCaddie added to Apple’s menu of applications for the iPhone.
“It gives a satellite map of the hole, it tracks your scores and provides statistics based on those scores, your handicap, the accuracy of your hits. And at the same time it acts as a caddie in the sense it can provide a club suggestion and distance-to-hole or distance-to-hazard information,” Petersons said. “It’s an all-in-one tool, all in your cell phone.”
The mCaddie also offers a kind of virtual clubhouse where players can book tee times, chat with other golfers and see how their buddies’ play ranks, either by cell phone or on a home computer.
“It’s almost like an ongoing PGA tournament for hackers,” Petersons said.

Petersons, a 2001 graduate of Poland Regional High School, was working in hedge-fund accounting in southern Maine when he had his mCaddie dream. He thought the idea was a good one, but he knew he’d need someone with technical expertise to get it off the ground.
He found Daniels, 22, a University of Maine math major, on the social networking site Facebook.
Daniels, who had experience in user interface design and Web-based applications, was used to people approaching him for help with the next great Web idea. He usually turned them down flat.
Petersons he e-mailed back.
The two became partners and over the winter, they created a prototype. They entered mCaddie in a statewide business plan competition hosted by the Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Southern Maine’s School of Business. The judges, a trio of Maine businesspeople, seemed impressed.
“They were very excited by the technology,” Petersons said.
This spring, they won the competition’s grand prize: $10,000 in cash and $15,000 to pay for consulting services for their business.
Then, earlier this month, the Maine Technology Institute, a Gardner nonprofit that invests in promising technology, awarded Petersons and Daniels $12,500 in seed money.
Although the mCaddie is still in the testing phase, Petersons and Daniels plan an official launch this year. They said they already have a database of thousands of golf courses nationwide, including 120 in Maine. They believe their next-closest competitor has only four nationwide.
They’ve applied to get mCaddie on the list of official iPhone and iPod touch applications offered by Apple. And they’re working to get mCaddie developed for Android, Google’s mobile operating system, and plan to develop it for Windows mobile and Blackberry, so it can be used on older wireless devices.
“The best part? Just making this into a reality,” Petersons said.
ltice@sunjournal.com