If you play basketball, you know the feeling. You get to the local park or gym, ready to run, but nobody is there. You were all hyped to play, and now you’re shooting free throws by yourself like Steven Glansberg eating lunch. But, that has all changed thanks to an app called Infinite Hoops. The app uses your location to search its database and community network for other people in your area looking to play a game of pickup.
The app originally launched last year at the cost of $0.99, but this new-and-improved version is now available in the iTunes Store for free. With the improvements from its original launch, users can now set up “geo-fence” notifications that will notify the person when they have entered an area where a pickup game is happening. Users can also join pickup game groups to message other users and RSVP for future games.
It allows you to organize games, find people to play with or check in on games currently happening. The founder, Tosh Meston, told Mashable, “I like to think of InfiniteHoops as an intersection between your digital life and sports.”
Meston launched InfiniteHoops as a website in 2003 to organize games at Microsoft, where he worked at the time. He says the site has so far attracted 29,000 users who have formed 9,000 groups in every state and 100 countries. He says he knows of an active group in Malaysia and got feedback from one American user who used the app to find a pickup game in Madrid while traveling in Spain.
Currently a development manager for MySpace, Meston is bootstrapping InfiniteHoops himself and says in-app advertisements are a monetization possibility down the line but that for now he wants to simply focus on adding more users and guaranteeing a positive experience.