Hike partners with CricBuzz to bring in-app World Cup updates to your fingertips

Friday February 13, 2015 , 3 min Read

With the ICC Cricket World Cup 2015 starting tomorrow and India versus Pakistan match scheduled for Sunday, cricket fans will be looking forward to following live action on their televisions and mobile devices. While many of us have our favourite cricket app already installed, for some of us this involves deleting other apps due to lack of space and installing cricket specific apps to follow the action. With their partnership, Hike and CricBuzz are aiming to kill two birds with one stone.

After acquiring Zip Phone and introducing free ‘Hike Calls’ to its Android user base, Hike messenger, India’s homegrown chat application, today launched ‘World Cup 2015’ in partnership with CricBuzz, a Times Internet Limited Property. This new feature on Hike will allow users to avail score updates, news and analysis curated by CricBuzz. For every android user on Hike, a new chat window, called ‘World Cup 2015’, will appear in the users’ chat list, which will be active during the entire World Cup.

Commenting on the launch, Kavin Mittal, Founder and CEO, Hike messenger, said,

It is a known fact that our country is crazy about cricket. We’re excited to partner with CricBuzz to launch ‘World Cup 2015’ on Hike, like messaging, we’ve kept the experience quite simple and bite-sized so that it feels effortless to consume cricket content, inside Hike itself.

Hike’s android users will receive a card with real-time score updates and match results starting February 13, 2015. This chat will be active until March 31st and will contain content relevant to the latest match; post which the chat will disappear from all the users’ chat roster. In addition, Hike users will also have access to view detailed scorecards and news from the World Cup, points tables and additional content, within the app. Users will also be able to share match scorecards with friends in one-to-one and group chats.

Launched in December 2012, Hike has over 35M users and has raised $86M from Tiger Global and BSB till date. The app also boasts of a fairly young user base with over 90% of its users being under the age of 25 and residing in India. The chat app has localized features, which are developed keeping in mind the infrastructural and cultural requirements such as Hike Offline that lets you message your friends even when they’re offline and 'Hidden Mode' – allows users to hide their private chats with a password, 'Regional Stickers' - helps users express more in their own language etc.

Pankaj Chhaparwal, CEO, CricBuzz, said,

Being a brand that is natively digital, we understand the importance of reaching out to the customers, on a medium they’re used to, in a format that is engaging. We’ve been doing a lot of things around building traction on CricBuzz and our content partnership with Hike takes it to the next level. Through hike, we’ll be touching over 35 million users. We’re excited to see how this takes off.