Happy Holidays

I want to thank each and every one of you that have visited GolfSigma and have become a regular at GolfSigma.com. I especially want to thank you for telling your golfing friends about us, that is the best Christmas present that you can give us, and a special gift that will keep on giving for the golfers in your life. A month has almost past since my last update and I am here to tell you our silence will be your gain.

Features, features, and more features is what we have been working on and I cannot wait to tell you all about them.

· Long range tee times / the ability to book tee times longer than two weeks. This is one of the highest items on our list, is it ready, can I tell you more….soon. I can tell you one thing for sure; the first provider will open up one of the top five destination golf locations in the nation.
· Next would be the course d…
· Also the new addition to course c…
· How about I explain the new se…

Alright, I am sticking to our unwritten company policy and will not talk about new features till they are released. It is just so hard to do because I know the golfers will really like where we are going with our golfer friendly interface. I hope the next time I write on the blog I will be able to discuss some of the new features and enhancements that we are hard at work on.

Till then….more to come

Happy Holidays

Rich

No news is good news.

No News is good news, kind of. I would love to have some new features to tell you about, but not in this post. No news is good news, because we have been very busy with all sorts of new features that are all rolled into one new release. When might you ask, umm I have asked the same question, and as I am kept in suspense, and so will you.

Ah but we all agree at GolfSigma that we will not talk about what we are working on, which is really hard for me. But I will be tight lipped and just tell you that our customer is the golfer and all the things we are working on will make our customer’s experience better.

So with that said, please tell your follow golfers about GolfSigma, tell concierges, tell who ever can use our product about us, we appreciate all your support. There is one thing that we can always say and that is we look for new courses to search all the time, if you do not see your favorite course drop us a line and we will see if we can add them. If you’re a course, it’s free; we would love to add you. In the mean time have a happy holiday season and maybe the next post will not be about no news.

SOOOOOOO much more to come.......

Rich

How close are we?

Well it depends what aspect of GolfSigma you are asking about. Ad server - there, stability - there, adding courses - never ending, speed – there, proximity finder – there. What is that all about, proximity finder?

Well it is very obvious that most golfers know their home town and have no need to know how far away their favorite courses are. Ah, but what happens when you want to play golf out of town and use GolfSigma. Most of us probably would not know which courses are around the area that we will be staying, thus making the best tee time search engine, GolfSigma, a difficult tool to use.

So once again the CTO, in a stroke of brilliance, took GolfSigma to the next level and has used some state – of – the – art technology to solve this problem in a very cool and easy to use fashion. After we serve up your search results in a nanosecond, well maybe a millisecond, you can type in any address in the “Sort by distance from address:” search box. Quickly, we will sort your search results by distance from the address that you entered and also display how far the course is from your address. Problem solved!

Umm are we gearing up for long range tee times and the traveling golfer? You bet! How close are we?

More to come.

Rich

Busy working away!

It has been awhile since my last post and we have been strategizing and working our tails off on new features. First I want to say that I am very happy to report that the site has stabilized and is faster than ever. With the inventory of tee times that we search over 5 million, it is truly amazing at the speed that we can return the results for a specific area. We remain focused on adding golf courses and web sites to search and in the coming months we look to add many more golf courses and expect to at least triple our tee time inventory.

A major part of GolfSigma’s strategy that will increase our tee time inventory is that we are looking to add longer range tee times to help golfers plan their next golf trip. You may also see courses start to offer incentives to golfers who book further out, so we want to make sure that GolfSigma can provide golfers the best selection of long range and short term tee times. Yes we are very focused on long range tee times, we want the golfer to start their research for tee times for their golf vacation on GolfSigma, ah but one of the missing pieces of research is course information.

So what have we been working on, a comprehensive golf course directory. There are many directories out there on the web but we have decided to present a golf course directory that is golfer friendly and with the information that a golfer would want to know. A directory that has the information that would help you decide if you wanted to play the course. Why will this be different? We have been very busy obtaining the links to golf courses for several items that will help you learn about the course, URL’s, score cards, user reviews, etc.. Lots of work lies ahead of us, and we look forward to your continued support.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot to tell you that we have developed the pricing for forthcoming enhancements, same price that we charge you to use the search engine http://www.golfsigma.com/, FREE!

More to come………..

Rich

What we have been up to....

What’s new is very simple stated, stability. Our new platform has provided us with the means to grow our tee time inventory, (currently around 5 million tee times) and increase our courses count, while maintaining the delivery of super fast search results. Now we will continue on our quest to try and search ever and any course that has an online presence.

We have added a quick link directory to show you some of the more popular golfing destinations. You can access that from the home page or just click here to take a look. Remember that these are just a few of the popular cities; you should be able to find any US city that has a golf course within a 50 mile radius.

We have also added a Forum that talks about everything golf. Have a swing tip, a golf joke (keep it clean), a predicted winner at the next PGA tour event (Tiger), head on over to the new Forum. We welcome your participation and look forward to meeting you in the Forum.

Hard to believe, but 25,000 Tweeps have decided to follow us on Twitter. If you are into Twitter and Facebook keep up to date with the latest. One thing I can guarantee is you will not see any posting about my golf game. (I do not want to be responsible for anybody injuring themselves by laughing to hard). Umm with all the Swing Instructions that are advertised on Twitter I wonder if any of them work?

We have also added a FAQ section which currently has very few questions, which is what we fully expect due to the ease of use of GolfSigma.

Ah one last item to mention, Sigma Ads. We have installed our own ad server in an attempt to accomplish two goals; deliver pertinent golf ads to your specific area, and hopes to help fund our endeavor. For our viewers we expect that they will see very exciting golf promotions from courses and other advertisers. Why will the advertisers be interested, because GolfSigma is one of the best sites to reach golfers, who else is on the site? Win, Win, Win……

As always, more to come…….

Rich

300 more courses added!!!

We said it before; that we want to display the tee times of every golf course that is able to book online, on GolfSigma. This past weekend we put on quite a few more courses, 335 more to be exact, this should make our Michigan, New Jersey, South Carolina, New York, and Wisconsin golfers very happy. Those are not the only states that we added courses to, but that is where 50% of the courses were added! So if you are in those areas take a look and see if you recognize any of our new additions. If you are not in those areas you should still take a quick look at your area and see what courses we have added.

Another cool part that is starting to emerge from GolfSigma is that we are becoming the place to start your tee time search when you are going to be traveling and playing golf. Some tee time sources are going out further than a few days making planning your vacation golf easier with the help of GolfSigma. Providing our golfers with long range tee times is a main focus of GolfSigma and we are continually working toward that goal. Hopefully in the very near future we can announce another relationship that will bring many new courses with extended range tee times.

Oh yeah, a nice detailed course directory that has golfer needed info……ummmm soon.

Rich

More to come……

The best 59 Minutes we have spent!

So much time and effort goes into the code that we look at everyday to make all these features on websites work. Most of the time we take all these features for granted, except when it is bad, they you say, “What were they thinking”. Just recently we made a change that involved how we search for courses, by city and zip code.

I was never a fan of how our city search took so long to find the city I was looking for. I got use to typing in the city that I was looking for and then going to make a cup of coffee, get a doughnut, and when I got back….. It wasn’t that bad, but it was a tad slow.

So one day I got an IM that said, “Wow 59 minutes to run this little program that I just wrote, now try typing a city into the box.” Wow, like never before Sigma search was fast and fun; ok well maybe getting carried away with the fun part, but now I need to figure out another time to make my coffee!

Try it and you will see how fast the search box finds the city you are looking for, but before you do; grab a cup of coffee and a few doughnuts, because you will have many tee times to chose from.

Kudos to the brilliant mind that makes GolfSigma tick!

Rich,

Much, much more to come….

In The Bag.

If you have been to GolfSigma before, hopefully you have had a chance to revisit and experience the speed and quality of the site today. We have worked long hours trying to tweak the engine to produce timely results without the “Opps” message popping up, and yes we have accomplished our goal.

Along the way we have managed to simplify search and eliminate one complete page/step from the process of finding your next tee time. The number of courses has grown to over 2700 and the inventory of tee times continues to grow past two million and GolfSigma keeps returning search results with unbelievable speeds. All of these changes have been made with one person in mind, you our user!

It would have been fun to implement many of the cool ideas that we have, but we want our core business, search, to be working as good and correctly as possible. With over one full week (in the bag) of great performance behind us, we are now back to adding features, courses, more tee times, ads, (need to make some money) and some cool stuff.

Till the next time, more to come………..

Rich

The Bolg

Well there is one thing for sure; golfers read the email where I directed them to the Bolg! No good excuses, at least none that you want to hear or one that I want to print. My commitment, to do better.

Enough said, wow last two days have been crazy. The tech continues to perform wonderfully, providing top speed searches to over 1 million tee times in our database. We have been working hard to add a new provider which we should have wrapped up today, adding another 100 courses of which 40 are new to GolfSigma.

I want to thank all our new visitors and look forward to seeing you come back. Much more to come…. so sign up for our Bolg.

Are we there yet?

Simply stated, GolfSigma is a tee time search engine, period. To that point everything we do is done with the objective of how this will make the experience of our user, the golfer, better. We, and I use that term loosely because I would not even know how to code an excel spread sheet, have spent the last three months getting the quality of the inventory dialed in. As we started to grow we started to slow down and run into all sorts of oddities, I have talked at length in past post about these problems.

Enough said, "we have nailed it", as I knew we would, and it is time to move on. In the process of cleaning things up we have added another 250 courses making it a total of over 2600 golf courses. Tee times in GolfSigma over 500,000!

Coming up next, we will be adding new places to search which means more golf courses, more tee times, more tee time overlap, and tee times that are further out in time. We are at the tip of the iceberg and ready to charge forward.

Are we there yet? Let's just say the journey has just begun!

Finally more to come………..

Rich

We're BACK!

I am finally starting to feel good about the inventory system. We are back in action and tweaking MySQL to work on performance. I’m considering a personal blog to discuss technical aspects of GolfSigma but that is for another day. We are now serving up inventory for the following websites (aka Providers):

• ActiveGolf.com
• AZCentral.com
• Chicago Tribune
• Click4TeeTimes.com
• EZLinksSpecials.com
• Golf512.com
• GolfNow.com
• OpenTeeTime.com

We would like to double the list of websites we are searching in the next couple months. If you’ve done searching on GolfSigma.com before, you should notice we are serving up results much faster than in the past. We’ve also made a huge improvement in the way we perform these updates, resulting in much more accurate inventory. We’re trying as hard as we can to ensure that when you click on a link to book a reservation, the tee-time is still available. Please let us know if you have any problems by filling out our contact us form.

All the King's men are back at it!

This is a non technical post, from the non technical one at GolfSigma. I said "We thought we were close," in yesterday’s post but I think I showed some signs of premature hope.

We were so very close but we are still not happy with the quality of the inventory, so a fun weekend lies ahead for our CTO who is forsaking the nightlife and will be having a tryst with his PC till he kicks this issue.

We will nail it, and then continue on putting the rest of the searched inventory back on GolfSigma, i.e. Active Golf, Click4teetimes, and several others. Thanks for your patients; you will see this will be well worth the wait!

Rich, much more to come…..

All the King’s Horses, and All the King’s Men…..

We are putting “GolfSigma” back together again! If you have been to the site and experienced slow response or broken functions you will know what I am talking about. How we broke stuff is not as important as knowing that we are not only fixing everything but improving many of the parts that we touch along the way. Still struggling at times with some time out issues, but overall things are looking very positive.

Oh, we added this blog to the home page so you can keep up to date with and see what we have been doing, or better yet see what we have planned. On a personal note, I even managed to attach the feed for this blog to Outlook without any technical support from our technical Guru, so I know you can do it. :)

So today we also located the bulletin that we have on the home page. The hope here is for this to flourish as a forum for anything to do with golf. Golf stories, equipment, courses, tee times, service, holes in one, etc… So give it a whirl and we will look forward to your Threads.

Oh yeah almost forgot to mention, all the filters, (price, alpha, time, number of golfers), should all be working now!!!!!

Rich

so much more to come………………………

ActiveGolf.com and Click4TeeTimes

Looks like we're having a few issues with Click4TeeTimes and ActiveGolf.com. We are looking into the issue and hope to have inventory fixed for the sites in a day or two. We'll let you know via this blog when the issue has been fixed!

Why GolfSigma?

Well the results are in, and over 90% of the golfers that responded to our survey have stated that they check more than one web site before booking their next tee time, with a high percentage of these golfers checking more than two sites before they select their next tee time. A very interesting pattern did ring through on the survey, that price was not always the driving factor to continue the search of various tee time sites. Not all tee time sites have the same price and they definitely do not all have the same tee time availability, so finding the best time at the right price is what golfers are trying to find. Enter GolfSigma…..

The goal of GolfSigma is to save golfers time by giving them one site to find their next tee time. Making the visit to GolfSigma fast, easy and present as many course’s tee times as possible in a grid presentation that makes it very easy for the golfer to make that tee time decision. As GolfSigma evolves, more courses, more web sites, more tee times, more areas will be added, and a longer range of tee time availability.

Another cool part about GolfSigma is the business model that benefits the user, Golfers. GolfSigma is a search engine and to that point the tee times presented to the golfer have no additional fees added to them and there is no cost to a golfer to use GolfSigma. GolfSigma takes this concept one step further and has elected to not even book the golfers round of golf, but instead transfer them to their selected tee time site so they may book directly and confidently on the web site of their choice.

Bookmark us and check back with us as we continue the evolution of GolfSigma…. More to come

Speed Kills

Really what I mean is speed kills the amount of time you will have to wait for the return of search results from GolfSigma for a tee time! We have focused our efforts for the past month on fine tuning how quickly we can return valid tee time inventory and feel we are the best we have ever been. Did I say perfect, no, but it is so very impressive to see 3000 or more tee times returned for a large golf area in just a few seconds. And just as important, the returned tee times are not “stale” and will take you to a current available tee time almost all the time.

Ahead of us this week; back to the site to clean up some items that we broke along the way, then off to some new and exciting features and the addition of over 1200 courses with extended range tee times. More to come…..

Rich

The latest at GolfSigma.

As you all know we are in fact a search engine for your next tee time. But a search engine without all the information or old data is not one that is going to be too popular for too long. We have taken a step back and decided that we were not happy with some of the results that were we obtaining, for various reasons. You will notice an immediate change in the data that is returned for a tee time search. Faster by a factor of 15 and many more tee times will populate the search results. We have made countless changes to our system both software wise and hardware to speed up the entire process because our tee time inventory is growing so rapidly. We have added processing power and load balancing to handle the additional server load both on the user side our and production side, providing our user with a faster and more comprehensive search than ever before.


So what is next?

Now that we have concentrated on getting current tee time’s inventory and as many tee times as possible for our current search partners, we are turning our focus to Search. What good is it if we have the most comprehensive and largest amount of inventory of tee times and the user cannot find what they are looking for? We are going to make it easier and faster to find the tee time search results that our users are looking for, as simple as that. Guaranteed, it will be unlike anything you have seen in the golf industry to date. Tearing down the borders of our current tee time search algorithms will have many benefits for our users and advertisers both. And who knows, with the removal of these borders, you may see the first glimpse of an international tee time search engine.

Beyond this?

Ummm. I could ramble on here, but very high on the list, is a way to connect people who want to reach our golfers. More to come.


Always happening.

It will be a never ending process to add inventory / golf courses. So don’t ever think that we are done adding courses to search for tee times. The goal – The Sum of all Golf!