PHAT-METERS.

Longmont-based PhatRat's PhatAir threatens to revolutionize skiing

Sports fans gobble up statistics. Baseball has RBI and ERA. Football has passing yardage, rushing yardage and quarterback ratings. But freestyle skiing has always been more difficult to quantify. Enter Longmont's PhatRat

After watching a 1994 basketball game, PhatRat co-founder and CEO curtis Vock created -- over beers at a Boston pub -- the concept of measuring athletic performance through technology.

The technology itself is fairly simple, Vock said. The PhatAir, or Smart Sensor, which measures hang time, is a half-credit-card-size unit attached to the bottom of a snowboard, skateboard or ski. The unit monitors, quantifies and scores activity including speed, airtime, power, G-force and drop distance. It then sends it wirelessly to a central processing unit. The CPU reports data on time in the air, speed, Gs and more to a data receiving unit that looks like a fancy wristwatch -- and provides many of the same features.

The company installs the equipment at the sports venue and trains employees to use it. Another service entails using strategically placed antennae on the slopes, allowing the results to be monitored and televised.

In 1997, Vock, an intellectual property lawyer and "collector of degrees" (including an MBA and degrees in engineering and law) obtained a patent for PhatAir technology that measures a skier's or snowboarder's speed and hang time. Products that measure impact and height have patents pending.

PhatRat didn't incorporate until last year. "It just took time to get prices and technology to where they needed to be," Vock explained.

PhatRat came with some high-level talent: Vock founded Golf Age Technologies and other startups; marketing guy and MBA Tim Ryan grew and company to $5 million in revenue; engineer Adrian Larkin designed a development package for Ericsson's mobile phones and ran an engineering firm; and engineer Perry youngs has a computer science degree and specializes in real time design, programming and integration of high-level languages.

The company rents office and lab space at the Boulder Technology Incubator's Longmont facility. It unveiled its service at the Sprint Ultimate Airwave, a September 1999 freestyle skiing competition in Park City, Utah, that was televised on ESPN.

PhatRat is negotiating to supply measurement services to several winter 2000 events, including the Goodwill Games in Lake Placid, N.Y. Eventually, it will release its products on the retail market.

The U.S. Ski Team is among PhatRat's boosters. Chris Hazlick, team freestyle events manager, noted, "Anything we can use to give some perspective on air time is really very helpful."

"We just kind of guesstimated" air time in the past, said Matt Chojnacki, a Boulder-based team member. "I think they're a great company that's really on the right track."