With cricket fever raging on currently, it may be topical to read about Cricinfo, which started with the basic idea, ‘Live cricket score information system through the Net,’ as chronicled in one of the real-life stories written by Rajeshwari in ‘My Life My Choice: Mid-life career choices’ (www.macmillanpublishersindia.com). The chapter on Badri Seshadri, ‘The serial entrepreneur,’ traces how in 1992, when the World Cup was held in Australia and New Zealand, information was disseminated through a mailing list and that gave the critical mass for a group of people on the Internet.
“Both the mailing list and the newsgroup were not in real time, whereas IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was real time. This is similar to group chat rooms that are in vogue today. In late 1992, a few people experimented with trying to give ‘ball-by-ball’ scores on IRC, and followed that with a ball-by-ball commentary later.”
Informs Rajeshwari that a British academician named Simon King, who was at that time doing post-doctoral research at the University of Minnesota, created an automatic program on IRC that would provide cricket scores to anybody who walked into the chat room, and named it ‘CricInfo.’ Badri, who was one of the few graduate students in Cornell, with a computer and an Internet connection at home, joined the initial team of this new cricket excitement, part-time, as his first entrepreneurial adventure, the author recounts.
To know what happened subsequently, sample this snatch of Badri-speak, quoted in the book: “One fine day, I took the decision of jumping into Cricinfo full time – everybody was shocked. Cricinfo’s founder Simon King started interacting with the International Cricket Council in the UK. In 1996, the cricket World Cup was happening and I was managing the live scorecards for all the matches during that time. It was an operation of a phenomenal scale and we had huge hits on our website. A little after that, Simon called me and said we should actually make Cricinfo into a company…”
Lively narrative.
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