HONG KONG VIA APPS

Shoot for the Stars

David Lee on app development, basketball and fitness for all.

There are basketball fans who dream of training with their favourite NBA stars, and then there’s David Lee.

Motivated by a love of the sport, the Hong Kong–born entrepreneur and his company NEX Team created HomeCourt, a basketball training app powered by AI and AR. Backed by celebrity players like Steve Nash (who presented alongside Lee to launch the app at the Apple Keynote event in 2018) and Jeremy Lin, it was even used by the NBA to recruit new talent in 2020.

Lee talks to us about NEX Team’s app development journey, the story behind their cooperation with the NBA and how they extended their vision to include personal fitness.

HomeCourt’s dribble workout games are a fun way to improve your basketball skills.

Street Hoops to NBA

HomeCourt uses the camera on your iPhone or iPad to identify your movements, whether it’s a dribble, a layup, or a free throw, and calculates metrics such as shooting accuracy, dribble speed, vertical jump, release time, and ball control. After every session, you’ll get instant feedback in the form of graphs and recorded videos to help you improve your game.

Besides challenging yourself with its training programmes, you can also share your progress with fellow basketball lovers around the world. Its NBA–inspired drills, such as Jeremy Lin’s crossover challenge and Sue Bird’s dribbling challenge, are particularly popular among users.

In 2020, HomeCourt became an official partner of the first-ever virtual NBA Draft Combine, revolutionizing talent recruitment in the basketball industry.

A Player’s Hidden Agenda

Lee has a lengthy CV: before he graduated from the University of Hong Kong with a BBA in information systems and a BEng in software engineering, he’d already built an online spreadsheet service—EditGrid—that was later acquired by Apple and developed into today’s iWork productivity suite.

That solid foundation for entrepreneurial success led Lee to co-found NEX Team with a few friends and they started working on HomeCourt.

Having a team that shared an organic interest, passion, and understanding in a particular ‘thing’—in this case basketball—really helped motivate us to bring [i]HomeCourt[/i] to life.

—David Lee, co-founder and CEO of NEX Team Inc

“It may be surprising because I’m 5ft 5in, but I love playing basketball,” jokes Lee. His passion for the sport started in 2006, while he was leading the team behind EditGrid. When he had free time, he and a few colleagues would go to the outdoor basketball court near their office and play a game or two to unwind.

But whenever his family watches him play, Lee says he gets too stressed to score a single shot. “Perhaps a bit embarrassingly, the idea [for HomeCourt] emanated from my desire to show off my shooting skills to my wife and daughters,” he explains.

During the development process for the app, he and the team considered other possibilities, but ultimately zoomed in on basketball because they all loved the sport.

From Basketball to Fitness for All

HomeCourt saw a surge in downloads in the spring of 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. But the team noticed something interesting: 80 per cent of user-app interactions had nothing to do with basketball drills. Instead, many parents—and PE teachers—were getting their kids to try the app’s general exercises and agility workouts in an effort to keep them active while staying indoors.

Inspired by this response to the app—and given that non-basketball activities only accounted for 10 per cent of HomeCourt’s training materials—the team came together to develop a new AI-powered fitness app to help people stay active with just an iPhone or iPad.

“So many people enjoying the non-basketball related activities in HomeCourt demonstrated a real need for activity-based play that used the player’s body,” Lee explains.

Stay active while having fun with Active Arcade’s gamified exercises.

Active Arcade turns routine workouts into a fun gaming experience: from casual Whack-a-Mole to the more intense Box Attack, there are a range of AR exercises to choose from—the app tracks your motion via the camera on your iPhone or iPad, keeping score while you play and work up a sweat.

By turning workouts into a game, Active Arcade quickly garnered lots of positive publicity on social media. Just three months after its launch in May 2020, the app had 1.5 million downloads.

This success affirmed NEX Team’s mission of applying cutting-edge technologies to developing fun, interactive fitness experiences. Lee and his team plan to continue to gamify workouts using AI, making fitness enjoyable and accessible for even more people.