GPS Golf Guru President's Blog

Introduction and Purpose

Hello, my name is Darryl Cornish, and I am the President and one of the founders of Assistant Pro Inc. the maker of the GPS Golf Guru. I am also one of the co-inventors of GPS for golf and I have been working in the GPS for Golf market since 1995. A few Golf Guru Members and Affiliates have asked that I comment on some of the issues involved in their GPS Golf purchase. This blog is my attempt to respond to these questions effectively. In addition, I would like anyone interested to understand our company's plans, principles and philosophy. I believe that these may be important to many people considering a GPS golf purchase.

To summarize, the purpose of this Blog is to provide you with useful information regarding:

GPS golf devices in general,
our GPS Golf Products,
Assistant Pro Inc. as a company and it's plans for the future,
our Team principals and philosophy,
other related products that we run across, and
anything else that I think you might find interesting and informative.

I thank you for visiting the GPS Golf Guru site and I sincerely hope that you find this blog useful and informative.

Darryl Cornish
President, Assistant Pro Inc.
Maker of the GPS Golf Guru

GPS Golf Guru Course Maps

Purpose of this Article

Our sales and support personnel are often asked questions like "Do you charge a subscription fee for access to your maps?" or "How do you map your courses?" The following is a brief discussion about:

how we map courses,
how we are able to provide them to our users free of charge,
how we maintain them,
our long term vision of how golf course mapping will evolve with the GPS industry in general
and how our approach compares to that of our competition.

The Evolution of Mapping in the GPS Industry

Whether for golf or for other GPS applications, the most difficult and expensive thing for GPS companies to do over the long term is to keep their maps current. Leading edge GPS companies like TomTom and other have recently announced plans to use data collected by GPS units and cell phones on the road to gather data to help update maps in real time. Check out the this link for a discussion of the TomTom MapShare program. Golf Guru is years ahead of this curve, because we started out with this approach to maintaining the currency of our maps. From the outset, we started out with the objective of designing a GPS unit that was sensitive enough and accurate enough to allow users, affiliates and golf courses to immediately update our maps when the course changes. This accuracy and sensitivity has the benefit of providing the golfer with extremely accurate and consistent distances on the golf course.

The Best GPS Golf Device

As Phil75070 on GolfWRX.com rightly points out, there is "no best gps golf device for every customer at this time." In my humble opinion, there will NEVER be a best gps golf device for every user because often the requirements of different users are conflicting. Phil75070 also points out that it took GPS Golf Guru a while to get the mapping software right, but we got there within about 4 months of releasing the first version to our beta testers. The update to this new software was released FREE OF CHARGE to all of existing GPS Golf Guru users.

The GPS Golf Guru software is designed to make it extremely easy for users to upgrade their software: just plug in your GPS Golf Guru, open the Guru Utility and it will ask you if you would like the update. We are committed to continuing to improve our software, our hardware and our web experience, and we make these improvements available as transparently and cost effectively as possible to our existing customers.

GPS Golf Guru in Montreal, Canada

JayManMtl, a user at GolfWRX.com, recently asked a question about our plans for mapping courses in Montreal. The following is an edited excerpt from my post on GolfWRX.com responding to his question