This Pak entrepreneur lets cricket addicts look up World Cup scores ‘Cricly’

Millions of Indian cricket fans will closely follow their team’s toughest World Cup group match against South Africa this Sunday in Melbourne, Australia. They will plant themselves firmly in front of their TVs if possible, but for those on the move, there are a host of smartphone apps that can help them keep up with the latest score. The problem is to locate the app in the phone every time one gets the urge to look up the score – and for a hardcore cricket enthusiast, it’s an urge that comes every five minutes or so. Wouldn’t it be cool if the score were to come up on the lockscreen? That way, even in the middle of a conversation over lunch, a quick glance at the phone would satisfy the hunger to know how India is doing against the South Africans.

Now, there is exactly such a solution. Cricly, a new Android app from India’s neighboring cricket-hungry nation, Pakistan, lets you look up World Cup cricket scores quickly on the lockscreen.

Its creator, Jawwad Jafri, tells Tech in Asia he is hoping for an India-Pakistan final – which would obviously take Cricly into the stratosphere – but even otherwise, it’s a nifty app to have for cricket addicts who keep fiddling with phones in the middle of office meetings.

Local concepts for Pakistan market

Jafri is the founder of JVentures, focusing on mobile apps for the local market in Pakistan. Apart from Cricly, it has PriceBuddy to compare prices of mobile phones, and Mil Gaya (which translates to “Got It”), a discovery app for restaurants, salons, personal trainers, and so on.

Earlier, he co-founded Flashcall with MBA buddy Salman Jamali. Flashcall is the Pakistani equivalent of India’s Zipdial, which made a successful business out of missed calls and got acquired by Twitter last month. A missed call acts as a signal in frugal India and Pakistan, where a call not taken is money saved. For example, if you arrange to meet someone, you can give a missed call when you arrive at the meeting point, instead of speaking to somebody on the phone just to tell him you’ve reached.

Jamali was targeting the US market at the outset, but when Jafri came on board, he realised the real opportunity for a business like this was in Pakistan. He believes there’s a huge market for local concepts in Pakistan and India.

‘MBA could not kill my passion for tech’

A computer science grad with an MBA, Jafri cut his teeth on digital media.

After completing my MBA, most of my class ended up in the banking sector or fast-moving consumer goods. However, I realized very early on that MBA had not killed my passion for technology. I got my first break in local firm Sapphire Consulting, which was still a startup but was working on some really interesting projects for US-based clients. I remember working on a location-based application which was pretty unheard of back then in 2008.

He recounts to Tech in Asia how he became an entrepreneur.

When Sapphire started focusing more on corporate banking solutions, Jafri moved on to digital marketing jobs with ad agencies, and some of the most hectic work he did was during the last Cricket World Cup in 2011, played on the sub-continent. He enjoyed exposing leading brands to social media and online advertising, which were still at a nascent stage. But, what he liked the most was the independence he had to build digital marketing teams almost from scratch. That’s how the entrepreneurial bug bit him.