Find yourself in the rough too often? Hunkered in bunkers?
If so, a visit to the Max Out Golf Performance Lab in Sherman Oaks may be just the thing for you.
There, former U.S. Amateur Champion Mitch Voges will lay it out for you personally in his links laboratory, providing a high-tech club-fitting to show players looking to improve that golf is a game to tame.
When you arrive, you’ll fill out a Player Profile Assessment, which details your game, types of courses you play and ball striking goals. It also measures your existing clubs.
Next, a wireless transmitter is Velcro-ed to your wrist with a cord to the shaft of a special club that measures your “shaft load profile.” It technically measures how much load a golfer puts on the shaft, including when and where it bends and releases, to determine the ideal flex, bend profile, tip area and weight of their swing. Voges utilizes the Integrated Golf Measurement System (IGMS), a gauntlet of launch monitors, wireless shaft analysis tools, high-speed cameras, sensors and accelerometers.
Voges maintains that if you adopt his technological tips, you’ll see 20 to 50 more yards on your drives. He steers clear of recommending any particular club.
“Don’t expect a hard sell on the latest clubs in stock,” says Voges, who was U.S. Amateur Champ in 1991.
Voges started Max Out Golf in 1997 with a $100,000 of his own money along with partners Steve Chase and Al D’Amato. There was virtually no advertising. But Vogel was able to convince several golf magazines to run pieces on the company, which yielded some $250,000 in revenues that first year. That figure grew incrementally each year and in 2005, positive articles in Golf Magazine and Sports Illustrated led to another doubling of revenue.
Now, the company, which has four locations in the United States, should have five more in Europe by the end of September. Hall of Famer Billy Casper and PGA pros Steve Pate and Duffy Waldorf among graduates of the analysis program.
Blog ’til You Drop
Los Angeles-based ThisNext has launched its online shopping recommendation service.
ThisNext said that it is offering a “shopcasting and product discovery network” which allows bloggers and others to recommend products online. Users can create product “playlists” on the site, which they can then run on any blog. The bloggers can profit from the playlists by commissioning sales through an Amazon.com affiliate ID.
ThisNext said that the service will use social filtering, discovery algorithms, and the “wisdom of crowds” to help consumers find products. The firm is backed by Anthem Ventures and Clearstone Venture Partners, and is headed by former Weblogsinc blogger Gordon Gould.
Sea Launch Success
Long Beach-based Sea Launch, which is developing a mobile, sea-platform for the launch of rockets, has successfully delivered a communications satellite to geosynchronous orbit.
Sea Launch, which is a joint venture of Boeing and a number of other companies, said that it delivered the Koreasat 5 communications satellite to geosynchronous transfer orbit last week from a spot in the Pacific.
Sea Launch has been launching payloads from its platforms, which are assembled in Long Beach, since 1999.
Boingo Series C
Santa Monica-based Boingo Wireless Inc. just raised $65 million more in Series C financing, which the company will put toward its acquisition of Chicago-based Concourse Communications. That buy will enable Boingo to increase its retail sales channels over WiFi networks in airports in cities nationwide, including Chicago’s O’Hare, New York’s JFK and others. LAX travelers won’t be able to use Boingo. They will access the Internet through T-Mobile, which outbid Boingo for the airport contract and will roll out its services in the next few months.
Staff reporter Dan Cox can be reached at
[email protected]
or at (323) 549-5225, ext. 230.
