Unhandled Exceptions: Cheer Your Team!

Unhandled Exceptions – Cheerurteam

Unhandled Exceptions is a web video series where each episode a company, an individual or several individuals who are trying to do something different or interesting in Sri Lanka are interviewed. The types of people interviewed here range from startups to nonprofit organizations and even people in various disciplines such as sports or drama. This is done to give some much needed exposure to those who are interviewed and to promote innovation in post war Sri Lanka. If you are, or if you know of a business or individual(s) who can really benefit from this, please contact Adnan Issadeen via adnan.issadeen@live.comor via mobile (0773833241) or leave a message on the Facebook page www.facebook.com/techrumble. You can find out more about Adnan at @area51research or http://identyme.com/adnanissadeen

One of the first companies we interviewed (although due to some technical difficulties the video couldn’t come out until now), Cheerurteam.com is a web startup that acts as a portal to support your school’s activities online. In this interview with its founder and CEO I take a look into how Cheerurteam started up, what its business model is and I fail to get Fathhi Mohamed to let me in on the secret as to what their revenue model is.

The business model

The core functionality of Cheerurteam is threefold. The first is to keep a live text and picture update of all events that it covers. When queried on how he feels about the competition The Papare might provide via its live streaming of the event Fathhi believes that the two sites complement each other more because while live streaming is definitely more real time, Cheerurteam provides better access to information for people on mobile devices and also gives better access to highlights once the events are complete.

The second is to keep track of the teams that are being cheered for. By providing a method for individuals to support their schools via the cheer buttons Fatthi believes that he satisfies a need that is very prominent in Sri Lankan society which is a way to show one’s support to one’s alma mater online.

The final part of their business model is one which goes on behind the scene which is the engine they have built to take in and analyze all the data that comes into their site. In fact Fathhi mentioned that it is through this engine that a likely revenue model will come about. The interesting thing about the engine is that it allows all sports to be ‘normalized’ where no matter what sport, based on a set of rules which the engineers specify they can all be handled equally. And this means that if a particular individual plays basketball and cricket his profile of proficiency will be measured as a whole since the engine has the capability of converting the rules of basketball and cricket into a point scoring system which puts both sports on equal grounds. This is actually a pretty tough concept to imagine since Basketball could be defined based on defense quality or baskets shot while Cricket would be dependent on the role played in the field.

To find out what else Fathhi had to share with us that day, take a look at the video. It’s got a lot of insight and hopefully I should be able to get a follow up article through very soon on what exactly Fathhi has been up to since the time of this interview.