[edit] History
[edit] Conception
Cricinfo (originally CricInfo) was launched in 1993 by Dr. Simon King, a British researcher at the University of Minnesota and grew thanks to the help of students and researchers at universities around the world. It initially operated as a volunteer-based collective, and started life as a simple IRC bot. It was soon made available via Gopher as well, and with the advent of the Mosaic web browser in April 1993 became one of the earliest content web sites on the Internet.
While a company, CricInfo Ltd, was formed in 1996, CricInfo remained essentially a volunteer run operation until late 1999 and was not fully staffed until late 2000. The site was entirely reliant on contributions from avid fans around the world who spent many hours compiling electronic scorecards and contributing them to CricInfo's comprehensive archive, as well as keying in live scores from games around the world using CricInfo's scoring software, "dougie". CricInfo scored a number of significant firsts including the first streamed cricket matches ("VAT" audio over SUNSPARC systems in 1993[citation needed], video over the web in 1997 with a little help from Mick Jagger) and pioneered distributed internet based working (many of the volunteers never met or spoke to one another despite ten years of online cooperation), open online peer review and the use of chat networks at work.
[edit] Growth and Success
Cricinfo's extraordinary growth in the 1990s made it an attractive site for investors during the peak of the dotcom boom, and in 2000 it received $37 million worth of Satyam Computer Services Ltd. shares in exchange for a 25 per cent stake in the company (a valuation of around £100 million). It used around $22m worth of the paper to pay off initial investors, spent extravagantly but only raised about £6 million by selling the remaining stock. While the site continued to attract more and more users and operated on a very low cost base, its income was not enough to support a peak staff of 130 in nine countries, forcing redundancies.
By late 2002 the company was making a monthly operating profit and was one of very few independent sports sites to avoid collapse (such as Sports.com and Sportal). However, the business was still servicing a large loan. A merger with the better capitalised The John Wisden Group (then owned by Sir Paul Getty) was the logical next step and the company was renamed Wisden Cricinfo. Soon after, the existing wisden.com website was closed and gradually the Wisden brand was also removed from the site. In ten years Cricinfo had effectively established primacy (at least in the electronic sphere) over Wisden, one of the oldest brands in sports publishing.
In June 2007, ESPN Networks announced that they had acquired Cricinfo from Wisden Group, though the brand name and identity will still remain in use.[2]
[edit] Current
The Cricinfo front page (on the day Shane Warne reached 700 Test wickets)Cricinfo has continued to grow, aided by a sound financial base, and now has offices in London, Bangalore and Australia, as well as editorial presences in all major Test-playing countries. In 2006 they consolidated their India offices into one single premises, shifting from Mumbai and Chennai to Bangalore.
