Harri Hohteri was sitting frustrated in a video meeting when he got an insight – now a brilliant invention is conquering America

Deep In the courtyard of the Helsinki Olympic Stadium, you can admire where the vast majority of the iconic stadium’s renovation budget of more than 300 million euros went into.

When you’ve had time to explore the sports facilities built underground, you end up at the elevator door through the parking garage.

The elevator leads directly to the office spaces, the theme of which is immediately clear. New and old, rubber and leather basketballs can be seen everywhere. It works on the premises Harri Hohterin founded by a company called SportIQ. The company, which announced a huge and historic collaboration agreement on Wednesday.

SportIQ, SIQ for short, has been the world’s leading manufacturer of smart basketballs for years. The company started with a partnership with Wilson and continued after that to manufacture and sell balls under its own brand.

The smart sensor placed in the ball’s valve can calculate the ball’s trajectory and spin speed. It knows if the ball went into the basket and how fast the throw goes after the ball is caught.

It can tell if there is the necessary repetition in the throwing movement and offer instructional videos if, for example, the curve of the throw needs to be increased.

SIQ’s balls have been used by their throwing coaches, for example James Hardenin, Chris Paulin and Victor Webanyaman world stars like

In the future, sensors utilizing SIQ’s artificial intelligence will be embedded in the balls of Spalding, the first basketball manufacturer in world history.

SIQ has more than 25 patents around the world. No other company has a similar smart sensor embedded in the ball in production.

Now SIQ has as a partner one of the world’s largest and most famous – if not the largest and most famous – basketball manufacturing brand.

Hohter’s in the study, the man’s backgrounds and different passions are prominently displayed. The former professional basketball player played in the Finnish premier league for 11 seasons.

The first thing in the room that catches your eye is the large basketball hoop rack. On the other hand, one of the walls is filled with early Apple computers and their replicas. Under the table stands the sympathetic droid R2-D2 from Star Wars.

The worlds of basketball and information technology already met during Hohter’s playing career. Towards the end of it, the idea of ​​a technological development step that would revolutionize the sport also began to emerge.

The idea arose in the 2007–08 season, when Hohteri had already completed his computer science studies at the University of Helsinki. He played in Helsinki’s Torpan Poj, when the length of the video meetings started to get frustrating.

“Instead of the coach choosing certain points in advance, we watched the video together and it took a lot of time to rewind the video tape. The players just waited and wondered what was going on here. The VHS tape didn’t offer a quick way to find the right clip, so I started thinking about how to automate all of this,” Hohteri recalls.

The idea popped up again when Hohter was working as a technology director in a startup company that did consumer tracking in a shopping center. That’s when Nokia was contacted and offered the opportunity to track shopping carts.

The idea had its problems in the shopping center environment, but Hohteri came up with another way to utilize the tracking device.

“I asked if you have thought about using this in sports. They showed some of the sports they had used it in and I told them I was interested in baskets. I announced that I could organize a testing event, and one was held at Kisis. We put sensors in the shoes of the players, we checked that everything works and we are able to follow their movements.”

The business really started when Hohteri reached an agreement with Wilson, owned by Finnish Amer Sports. Hohteri traveled to Chicago and agreed on a new test event at Kisahalli. This time the sensor would be in Wilson’s ball.

“Things moved forward and Wilson said we can do this as long as you make us a scaled consumer version of the ball. That’s how the first smart basketball was born with Wilson in 2015. The ball had to be bounced to the ground after every shot in order for it to register the shot, but it still worked.”

Hohter was interested in computers as a child. Even the first contact with the eight-bit Commodore 64 made an impression.

However, he ended up in the industry a bit by chance, because in middle school he began to position himself more strongly in the direction of fine art, following in the footsteps of his photographer older sister.

Hohteri applied to visual arts high school and Mäkelänrinte sports high school, passed and ended up in Märsky. After high school, he applied to TaiKi and, as a backup option, studied computer science. He narrowly passed TaiK, passed and ended up working in data processing.

Hohteri got to know the artificial intelligence side when Apple released an e-mail program that sorted spam instead of subject words using an algorithm. There was no program available for Hohter’s Apple Newton, so he decided to code it himself.

“That’s when I understood” how the computer can be taught things.

The idea of ​​using artificial intelligence to monitor basketball developed through cooperation. A person who was involved from the beginning and still works at SIQ entered the picture The body of Poropudas.

“Jirka and I are the same age and I knew that he is a doctor of technology and a basketball fanatic. I called Jirka and he came to Kisis to watch one of the test games we organized,” says Hohteri.

“I asked him if it makes sense to make a basketball game that uses basic machine learning algorithms to tell whether the throw went in or missed. Jirka stated that yes, but it can also be done with neural networks, on which artificial intelligence is based. Now we are talking about 2012, when artificial intelligence was not yet mainstream.”

Poropudas developed an algorithm that was about 75 percent correct. Hit accuracy was still not very good, so Poroputaa was hired to help.

“We hired a PhD in physics from Tampere. By combining their forces, we were able to create a network that was 99% correct. Today, the reading is closer to one hundred.”

The physics doctor never got to see the day the groundbreaking contract with Spalding was announced.

“Unfortunately, he passed away this year from an illness he didn’t know he had. The saddest part about this Spalding pattern is that he isn’t there to see it. I would have wished that for him and his family,” says Hohteri, moved.

“He and Jirka played a huge role in getting that artificial intelligence created before there were tools like today to create artificial intelligence. Today, almost anyone can feed data into a machine and say it came up with some kind of model for me. Things were different then.”

Agreement Spalding is of course financially significant for SIQ. It’s easy to conclude, even though the cooperation agreement forbids the direct figures to be made public.

Spalding is fighting head-to-head with Wilson for market dominance in US basketball sales. It sells tens of millions of balls a year.

SIQ’s sensors are placed in “premium indoor/outdoor balls”, i.e. those that can be played both indoors and outdoors. The balls cost around 50 dollars without the sensor, the price is significantly higher in the smart version.

SIQ prices its balls in such a way that the total price consists of a one-time purchase price and an annual fee to use the services of the mobile application.

For SIQ’s own-brand balls, these prices were $99 and $99, respectively, but the ball was sold for a bundle price of $179, which included a one-year annual fee. Spalding’s ball is priced at $125 + $125. So the basic price for buying a ball and the annual fee for a year is 250 dollars, but it is also sold for a bundle price of 199 dollars.

With its own brand, SIQ sold every ball it produced at every Christmas market, and with a huge well-known brand, sales can be expected to increase significantly.

“Factories make balls for all brands, and it’s different to be a big manufacturer that buys 40 percent of the factory’s balls than a smaller one. It’s easier to get tens of thousands of balls to the Christmas market when you already have a big customer.”

Hohteri reminds that there is an advantage of scale in costs and marketing.

“The relationship between how much marketing euros are used and how much benefit is gained from them is on a completely different level when there is a well-known brand in the background. It always takes time for us to try to explain what SIQ is. Spalding doesn’t need to tell you what Spalding is.”