Over the last several months I left a couple of semi cryptic posts Timu, the startup company that I left ActiveRain back in the fall to found.  Obviously from the logo I posted people were able to correctly guess what industry it was in, sports.  This inspired some guessing around ActiveRain about how exactly Timu was related to sports and what if anything Timu stood for. 

After several months of development work, we finally opened Timu up this week in a private beta test.  Unlike how so many web 2.0 companies slap a beta sticker on a product (cough, Google) and launch it like that this is an actual beta test with a small group of users to work out the kinks before a real launch in the not so distant future.

So what is Timu?

While Timu isn't yet open to the public, we are finally letting the cat out of the bag about what Timu is.  Timu is a communication and social networking platform for sports teams.  Whether it's little league, high school or adult rec. leagues Timu allows teams to take advantage of social networking concepts to help teams to schedule, coordinate, organize and share. 

I've played on and still play on several sports teams, and team communication away from the game has always been a problem.  How do you know when practices are, who's going to make it to games, is the game rained out?  These are some of the core problems that Timu will help to solve.

We're initially launching the platform for baseball and softball teams but will be adding in all the other major sports over the next year.

And what does it stand for?

I've seen plenty of guess about with Timu actually stands for, a couple of my favorites have been "Tetherball in my utopia", and "Teams in Motion United".  Sorry to ruin the guessing, but Timu isn't an acronym for anything, but it does have a relevant meaning.  Timu means "Team" in Swahili, plus it was a short, easy to remember and acquirable domain name :)

Looking for some beta testers

While Timu is not yet open to the public, we are still looking for a few additional beta test teams.  If you play on, organize or coach a baseball/softball team and would like to participate and help shape the direction of a really cool application, let us know.