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Entertainment portal, cricket and technology

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CIOL Bureau
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Cricketer-turned-technopreneur Krish Srikanth, spoke to R Jai Krishna of CyberMedia News on his new venture of launching a cricket entertainment portal, krishcricket.com to create CRM software and promoting an accounting BPO

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What made you enter into the IT space and what are the sectors in which you are specialising?

Information Technology is a growing sector and we wanted to leverage on its growth by combining my knowledge of cricket with technology. We promoted own company, as there is a brand value and cricketing for Krish Srikanth attached to it, and this along with good marketing and networking gives a better value-proposition. We are constantly on the lookout for new ideas to grow further.

We want to specialise in three areas such as, online space, mobile applications and IT services by developing software on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and a BPO for Accounts, where we see a good business both within India and abroad. In all the three areas there is a lot of room for more improvement.

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This is an exciting market, which requires innovative content. Our strength is creating such content backed with technology. Moreover, access to the right kind of people is very important in this business, and we have that, and hence, we are confident of making it big.

Krish Srikanth,  former cricketerCould you tell us about launching of krishcricket.com?

Krishcricket.com is a portal, launched about four-months back taking into account the increasing Internet usage. We intend to brand cricket entertainment aimed at cricket lovers across the world.

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We also want to leverage on the gaming front as it is a now an evolving market, and there is a tremendous growth potential. Thus we adopted a flash-based model, as the market is still open and others have not explored the potential.

We also intend to be on the mobile space by providing cricket updates on the latest matches happening around the world. For this purpose, we are already in talks with some of the leading mobile service providers in India.

Apart from these, a visitor to the website can purchase CD packs such as Bat Like a Master, which will have lessons on different batting techniques.

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What kind of revenue model are you working on?

Since the online traffic is increasing, we are now banking on the advertisements, and we are confident in good revenue from this methodology. As in September alone we had a total of nine million page views. Apart from this we are also conducting contests to increase the traffic and selling cricket-based goodies such as CDs and other entertainment stuff online. We have procured the exclusive rights for World Cup 1983 videos featuring the semi-finals and the final matches, and interviews with five players who played in the epic final match. All these are available for paid-downloads.

Similarly, as for the mobile space, 30 video clips, called Magic Moments, from the World Cup 1983 final match, are available as video clips for downloading on mobile phones.

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We are also in talks with some mobile operators for these downloads to be offered to their subscribers for a premium charge, apart from which we would be providing live cricket updates on mobile on match days.

Wallpapers and eCards featuring 1983 World Cup, distinct ring tones, tips on keeping fit are some of the other interesting content, which we now offer free but may be charged sometime later.

Apart from all of these, we are in talks with some Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) to distribute our CDs and some videos as a value-added package to their customers. Already, HP is now distributing our gaming content, for which we charge a royalty.

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Could you brief us about your Accounting BPO and CRM software development?

We found that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software could be applied to any business across all verticals, and it would only enhance the level of performance of a company. Thus my son, Aditya, got into developing it with a core team, who have the right blend of both domain and technical knowledge.

As for our Accounting BPO is concerned, it is Impetus Consulting. We got into this business, as one of our partners is our Chartered Accountant, and a good family friend. Accounting is also another area where we realised there is a huge unexplored local market, apart from the outsourced contracts from abroad. Added to this, we are planning to establish our own base in North America and UK, as there is tremendous scope for outsourcing of accounting services.

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What could we expect next from Krish Srikanth on the IT front?

We would be launching another two or three interesting and interactive games, which will have a multiplayer version. Similarly, there would also be mobile-compatible games and videos.

In another one month, we also intend to launch video-by-mail, by which a cricket enthusiast could video-graph their batting on video and send it across to us, and after in-depth analysis I would suggest the corrective measures, which they can implement in their practice. In future, we might also introduce an online report card for this service, so that the performance could be tracked over a period of time.

© CyberMedia News

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