Kiwi cricket scores with local developers

Very few of us get to combine our passion with work but for cricket nuts Gus Pickering, Technical Director at NV Interactive and Nigel Parker, Web Development Advisor at Microsoft, creating a real time cricket scoring web app was literally a labour of love. We caught up with Gus and Nigel to find out what drove them to bring live cricket scoring to PCs, phones and Macs.

What inspired you guys to get into cricinfo and ultimately blackcaps.co.nz?

Gus: We're hard out cricket fans and players, who all share a love of technology and when you have the opportunity to work with something you're passionate about, you get great results.

So how did it all come to be?

Gus:: We started working with CricInfo.com to rebuild their live scoring backend in 2005. We worked closely with Microsoft on this project which supported our early adoption of some of the newer .NET technologies available at the time. Based on the success of CricInfo.com, the opportunity came about to work with New Zealand Cricket to replace their aging live scoring system in 2006.

And that eventually led to blackcaps.co.nz?

Nigel: Now that we have been working together for over four years, we've been lucky enough to be involved in several website projects including building blackcaps.co.nz, producing an interactive video highlights system, streamlining internal logistics systems, bringing live scoring to the big screen at the cricket grounds and recently innovating how we present live scores online with Silverlight and Web Slices for Internet Explorer 8.

So for the uninitiated, what exactly does blackcaps.co.nz do?

Gus: We've recaptured the attention of the New Zealand Cricket public through the redevelopment and presentation of blackcaps.co.nz content and live scoring data, we can now turn to more dynamic ways of presenting this information. More visual and detailed presentation of data can immerse users for longer and that offers New Zealand Cricket huge benefits in the drive to commercialise the content they deliver on their website.

You also chose to migrate New Zealand Cricket to a web slices application - why?

Gus: Since taking on blackcaps.co.nz in Oct 2008 we've focused on the data delivery aspect, making sure we're capturing the game data and displaying it with the correct cricket terminology and precision. Now we're looking at ways of more creatively presenting that data and looking at technologies that align with the way people consume the data. So being able to provide a more passive but instantly obtainable solution fits with the way people follow cricket online.

So how does the web slice version work? Will it only function with IE8 or can you use it with other browsers?

Gus: Web Slices were introduced by Microsoft in Internet Explorer 8. With Web Slices, you can keep up to date with frequently updated web content that you care about. If you visit the Black Caps website using IE8 you can add the Web Slice to your favourites bar. Once added, you can keep track of live scores for all current international & domestic New Zealand cricket matches without needing to load the full webpage.

We worked closely with Nigel Parker who is a web development advisor at Microsoft New Zealand. Nigel himself is a huge cricket fan and we were discussing the nirvana of having live cricket scores available instantly at work, at home and while we were out and about on mobile devices.

Nigel: Web Slices give you a way to pull fans back to your web content. In a time of short attention spans and instant feedback, people expect to be notified instantly. At the same time they tune out of information that adds no value or gets in their way. This is why Web Slices are powerful for reaching passionate users. Web Slices include a mechanism to notify you when something happens, like a wicket is taken, prompting you to click back to a full web page to find out more.

Sounds pretty nifty if you're cricket fan say at work, but what if like most workplaces, you don't have or can't run IE8?

Gus: We built the Web Slice using Microsoft's Silverlight technology and it also enables you to run the Match Centre directly from your desktop on both Windows and Mac. I personally run it on my work computer on a second monitor so I can stay up to date with the matches that I follow throughout the summer. Microsoft also created an open specification for Web Slices so other browsers can implement it. I think that there is an extension for Firefox that adds support for Web Slices.

So what are the advantages of Blackcaps.co.nz over cricinfo?

Gus: We're not trying to compete with Crininfo. The New Zealand Cricket Match Centre and Cricinfo.com are two entirely different properties.

The design of the Black Caps web slice applet is pretty intuitive - What design factors figured in its eventual layout?

Gus: One of our senior designers came up with a simple visual interface that is easy to use, scales to support different screen resolutions with clear readable type and is in keeping with the visual online brand that we have created for New Zealand Cricket.

We designed the Web Slice with future versions in mind. We are already planning the next release which will bring together more detailed cricket data, cricket news and events and look to incorporate new ways to visualise the vast amounts of scoring data we already capture.

Is NV Interactive looking at international opportunities for the web slice cricket application?

Gus: Cricket is international by nature, and having the channels available through cricinfo.com and New Zealand Cricket relationships we see huge potential in further developing this product as it has a synergy with the way users consume live cricket scoring on the internet and other media. This is an area that we are actively pursuing as it offers us the ability to be at the forefront of technology through a sport we understand intimately. Getting the right mix of technology and cricket thinking is key to the success of these products, which is why we work closely with New Zealand Cricket and award winning International cricket statisticians.

The cricket application works pretty well on a PC, how hard would it be to migrate it to other platforms?

Gus: Since the Match Centre has been built using Microsoft Silverlight, it already runs in all of the world's most popular web browsers. It can also be installed to run as a desktop application on Windows and Mac machines. Currently our web based live scoring pages can be loaded inside the browser on a number of popular mobile phones. I see an opportunity to take this even further with the release of Silverlight 4 and Windows Phone 7.

I recently returned from Las Vegas where I attended the Microsoft MIX web conference. At the conference I was excited to learn about this new mobile phone platform from Microsoft that will support Silverlight for building phone applications. Working with Nigel Parker up in Las Vegas we were able to get our existing Silverlight based Match Centre running on the new Windows Phone with almost no code changes in less than 20 minutes. Both Silverlight 4 and Windows Phone 7 Series offer new scenarios that can engage and reward cricket fans.

During the keynote at MIX in Las Vegas we were shown a demo where a user was notified on their phone when a goal was scored in a football match and then when they clicked a link an application launched that showed them a video replay of that goal. This is the sort of thing we can look at doing both, in the browser, on the desktop and via a mobile application when these new technologies launch this year.

What would your top three tips be for budding application developers?

Gus: One, make sure that the websites and application that you build get their data from web services so that you can reuse the data for other display opportunities, like desktop, mobile devices and in the future potentially TV's.

Two, seriously look at Silverlight as a display technology. It is already installed on about 60 per cent of internet connected machines worldwide and it gives you a rich interactive user interface on a range of screens.

Three, partner. We have been a Microsoft Gold Partner for the last five years and we capitalise on the strategic direction that Microsoft takes with their software platform. Doing this opens doors for us to be technology leaders for our clients.

What does the future for both the cricket app and NV Interactive hold?

Gus: During the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in LA last year, Microsoft's chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, described Microsoft's "three screens and a cloud" vision, where software experiences are seamlessly delivered across PCs, phones and TVs, all connected by cloud-based services.

Ozzie was talking about how customers want choice and flexibility in how they develop and deploy applications. He also talked about how we're moving into an era of solutions that are experienced by users across PCs, phones and the web, and that are delivered from data centres we refer to as private clouds and public clouds.

This really summarises where we see the future of the new interconnected world we find ourselves in now. We are thrilled to be at the forefront of this & are really excited about the possibilities it offers for us to dramatically extend our clients brands into new & exciting areas.