ProLink Holdings Corp. has announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has awarded patent number 7,031,947, Method And Apparatus For Continuing Play With Cart-Based Navigation/Information System Display, effective April 18, 2006.
This patent protects ProLink’s innovative Pay-for-Play system, adding a key piece to ProLink’s intellectual property portfolio. This unique business process is a system of sharing revenue with the golf course. The Pay-for-Play system offers the service gratis to the customer for less than a full round, before automatically revoking use of the system if the customer does not authorize payment following the free period.
The Pay-for-Play program enables golf courses to lease the ProLink GPS system without significant up-front expenditures, instead charging golfers by the round to use the system.
The system is provided free to each group for the first three holes, and then is offered to the customer at a nominal fee for the remainder of the round. The acceptance rate for this service has been approximately 94 per cent, indicating strong demand from customers who are willing to pay a small fee to obtain yardage and course information for the balance of the round.
The Pay-for-Play patent brings the total number of patents protecting ProLink’s intellectual property to thirteen.
In February, the company announced a $10 million financing arrangement to fund leases from customers for ProLink Solutions and also to expand the target markets for ProLink Capital to include funding non-GPS capital expenditures.
“We believe Pay-for-Play will allow many golf courses who would otherwise be unable to afford our GPS system to provide their customers with this unique and exciting enhancement,” commented Lawrence Bain, president and CEO of ProLink Holdings Corp. “This patent ensures that ProLink will be the only company in the industry utilizing this unique financing arrangement, and we look forward to expanding our customer base significantly with this patented process.”
ProLink www.goprolink.com
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