Imagine an India-Pakistan cricket match in progress, and you get to see the number of fans watching the game inside the stadium and out, and get swept up in their emotions, in real time, on Google Maps.

That is what FanSpectrum LLC, a US-based technology start-up, aims to do. The company has been launched by two Indians, Dikshith Rai and Praveen Castelino, who hail from Mangalore, and Vibor Cilic, a Croat.

The trio came up with the idea for a sports social media site during the 2012 London Olympics.

At the time Rai and Castelino had been working with Cilic, a water polo player, to create a water polo app. Soon, they were talking about the need to have a platform that helped soccer fans around the world engage with each other.

Speaking to Business Line , Rai said: “If I want to say something to my fellow sports fans, there is no platform to engage with them. That is why we felt we should build something for this set of people. Fanspectrum.com connects them on the map when a match is in progress.”

Early days

The site is up and running, but it’s still early days, and the user base is low. The founders, who initially had only friends and acquaintances using the site, have now chosen to go live and expand the user base.

Fans can create ‘armies’ to support their teams/clubs and also ‘battle’ the fans of opposing teams. The goal is to become a full-fledged sports social media network by the time the football world cup begins in June, Rai said.

FanSpectrum has about 10 members on its team. Rai was tightlipped about the business strategy and investments, only revealing that the founders have bootstrapped the startup — run it with their own funds. “We are not looking at revenue right now,” he added.

FanBattle, FanArmy and FanLeague are three key features on the FanSpectrum site.

FanBattle happens only during the match. It helps track the views of fans in real time on Google Maps when a game is in progress, explains Rai. These are real users, whose city locations are shared, he said.

The FanLeague feature shows the results of the FanBattle, and not of the real match.

If a person does not want to share his location Rai said there is an option to mask it.

“On a platform like this, no one is posting anything private. They are posting something related to sports. For private posts, there are other social media platforms. We don’t want them to use it like Facebook or Twitter. This is for people who love sports,” he said. Immediately, the FanSpectrum team is aiming to ride on the popularity of cricket in India and other countries. The T20 cricket World Cup, said Rai, is a dry run for the platform.

The biggest challenge is to get more users, he said, adding: “In the next few months, if we get a few thousand active users we will be happy.”

FanSpectrum is also targeting the mobile space and has launched Android and iOS apps. Quoting a study, Rai said 70 per cent of users carry mobile phones or tablets when they watch a game in a stadium or on television. “We feel 85 per cent of our users may come through these devices,” he said.

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