As they say, “Howzzat”? With the Champions League T20 series in full swing, there hasn’t been a better time for a startup like Cricingif to come under our radar. The aim is simple: for everyone who’s too busy to watch the match and too lazy to read the ball-by-ball commentary most websites now offer, Cricingif brings an entirely new dimension of enjoying the sport – GIF (Graphic Interchange Format). With small-sized files that load easily on mobile phones and laptops alike, you can now enjoy every pitch of every over and every strike of the bat whenever and wherever the need or urge arises. The Cricingif say they recognise cricket is, by far, the most watched sport in the sub-continent and their intention was to cater the need in a unique manner. This unique manner for them was a time-saving, descriptive, ball-by-ball preview of each inning.
The team behind the startup consists of Shahid Rasool (Founder and CEO) and Muneeb Wyne (COO), a duo of FAST NU graduates in engineering. Each of the members of the team brings their own unique skill-set to the table and it is their combined power that has led Cricingif to the success it presently enjoys – as is evident from the live “Follower” tickers on their homepage. In an exclusive conversation with TechJuice, Shahid had the following to say about the difficulties they’d been facing:
“Software is still an immature field, as of yet, in this country. Conventional investors do not properly understand the way this industry works and therefore undermine the efforts of a developer. It is hard for them to understand and trust something that is not tangible and they cannot estimate its true potential.
Also, as entrepreneurship in the IT sector is a relatively new concept, support from the people in your surrounding is persistently lacking. Your peers encourage you to have a “back-up plan”, your friends are changing jobs for “better packages” and so your parents reckon you should follow suite rather than investing, scratch that, “wasting” time in an idea you think is great.”
When further asked about the future of Cricingif, Shahid spoke about how the industry in difficult to storm into but he did make us a commitment which spoke about the team’s ideology and persistence:
“All I can promise is that if God wills, soon this will be one of the biggest IT products to have come out of Pakistan.”
As far as the offering is concerned, www.cricingif.com offers live updates for all the ongoing matches under coverage as well as an archive of coverage details from previous matches. Their homepage proudly shows a live stream of tweets from cricket (and related) personalities to keep you in touch with the daily happenings of your favourite personalities filtered out by a team of experts dedicated towards information dissemination.
Overall, the interface is smooth and simple, as the case should be with sports websites and navigation is fairly easy to manoeuvre. We found the team to be very responsive in terms of feedback in case you have any constructive criticism of simple praise to offer. The sport that has united Pakistan for more than six decades has now taken on a new frontier and rest assured Cricingif is flying the green flag high.
