Here is a list of 10 interesting facts about the God of Cricket
1. Dec 11, 1988 – Makes his first class debut. At 15, scores an unbeaten century against Gujarat at the Wankhede Stadium to become the youngest Indian to make a hundred on first-class debut. He is the only player to score centuries on debut in the Ranji Trophy, Duleep Trophy and Irani Trophy.
2. Nov 15, 1989 – He was only 16 when he made his International Test debut against Pakistan at Karachi.
3. November 14,1992 – Tendulkar was the first player to be given out by the third umpire in an international game.
4. Oct 1995 – Signs a five-year contract worth Rs 31.5 crore with WorldTel, which makes him the richest cricketer in the world.
5. Mar 31, 2001 – Completed 10,000 runs in ODIs in his 266th match. Became the first batsman in ODI history to score 10,000 runs. Brought up his 30th one-day century at Johannesburg against South Africa. Completed his 100 wickets in ODIs. Also completed a unique double of 10,000 runs and 100 wickets.
6. Oct 17, 2008 – Tendulkar became the highest run-scorer in Test cricket at Mohali against Australia, surpassingBrian Lara‘s tally of 11953 runs.
7. Feb 24, 2010 – At 36 years and 306 days, he reached greater peaks by scoring the first double-century in one-day cricket vs South Africa at Gwalior.
8. Tendulkar has 13 coins from his coach Ramakant Achrekar. He would win a coin if he could get through an entire session of nets without being dismissed.
9. Sept 2010 – Tendulkar was the first individual without an aviation background to be awarded the honorary rank of Group Captain by the Indian Air Force.
10. Mar 16, 2012 – More than a year after scoring his 99th international hundred, Tendulkar reaches the landmark that might never be equalled, scored his 100th international ton against Bangladesh in Dhaka.
Former Pakistan World Cup winning captain, Imran Khan, tagged Sachin Tendulkar as “lucky” because Tendulkar didn’t have to face up to the ferocious West Indies pace attack of ’70 and ’80s.
Imran Khan
Imran Khan, delivering a lecture on leadership at the All India Management Association function in New Delhi, said that batting against the likes of Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Joel Garner, Malcolm Marshall and Colin Croft was a big challenge and it needed special skills to handle them.
Imran Khan also pointed out the even someone as talented as Sylvester Clark couldn’t get a look into the Windies XI because the top four strike bowlers were irreplaceable.
“There was Sylvester Clark, who used to be on the bench mostly but on a rebel tour of South Africa, he demolished the opposition single-handedly.”
The former Pakistan great also sympathized with the former Indian opener, Sunil Gavaskar and said that Gavaskar did something that none other Indian batsmen, including Tendulkar, had to face.
“My friend, the poor guy, Sunny Gavaskar bore the brunt of the West Indian fast-bowling attack. Sachin is very lucky that he didn’t face them.”
Very recently across India, there was great chatter and huge buzz on the social web, about a very famous and legendary cricketer’s retirement. For those who don’t know, I’m talking about Sachin Tendulkar, a legend in cricket, he has a great number of admirers across the country and over the globe retired in October and there was talk about his retirement in all sections of the society and businesses across India.
How is that relevant to this story? Sachin Tendulkar was a very powerful brand in himself across segments of businesses and minds of consumers across the country. That is what this startupZauber, a software company born in Argentina understood and capitalized on to showcase its offering to potential clients and this is what they created: Flowics: Sachin Tendulkar Demo.
They essentially paid tribute to the cricketer, a sports icon and business brand, with a social hub for #ThankYouSachin–a Twitter initiative that the BCCI (Board of Cricket Control in India) launched in association with Twitter India. But there’s more to what they did and this product has greater business impact than just the bit they created to get maximum eyeballs across the country.
In today’s day and age where technology across the social web is expanding its reach globally, it is quite important that brands have relevant tools to capture what audience across different segments of entertainment, business, sports, and etc are talking about their brand. That is exactly what their product Flowics helps with.
Flowics is a full media social engagement platform which curates, moderates and displays real-time social content that is relevant for brands and media companies available for the Web TV and any other digital screen. Flowics launched in 2012, after the company Zauber was involved in several projects building visualizations out of Twitter data since 2009.
Flowics allows publishers of any kind to easily create engaging social experiences that can be deployed directly on their digital properties, capturing the buzz generated by TV shows, sports and entertainment events, and important news stories, enabling them to better engage with their audiences. One of the key features their product has is their automatic curation engine and their broad catalogue of creative interactive visualisations. The curation technology helps their clients to filter the Twitter buzz and find the most relevant Tweets for a specific show or event, automatically removing all Tweets which do not satisfy specific pre-defined rules. Their visualisation engine provides a very broad range of solutions to display Twitter content on any digital media: On-air TV, jumbotrons or any giant screen and of course Web properties.
What’s interesting is their focus on the Indian market, where businesses are adopting social media with a great volume of users across various social networks. Of course, with the growth in digital rising, this is certainly the market to target. What helps is that they are one of the very few Twitter-certified products for tweets curation and visualization. Although there are similar products and competitors in some markets, they seem to be the only company in India providing these services.
“One of our key features is our ability to process and understand Tweets in any language, as well as to provide internationalisation capabilities for all our widgets, including support for non-Western languages,” said Gabriel Banos, CEO and founder of Zauber, in an e-mail interaction.
Currently their clients and market verticals include: TV networks and producers, online portals and media, events organizers, news media outlets, brands and agencies. Which is certainly a huge market considering a high penetration of television viewers in the country and also the ones who use social media quite a lot these days.
“We have high hopes on the Indian market, which we believe will grow very rapidly in terms of social media penetration, specially Twitter adoption. TV is a very strong and huge market in India, so the positioning of Twitter as the “second-screen” for TV, will enable new business opportunities for broadcasters, brands and producers, making Flowics a must-have product to better engage social audiences. Our product has already been used by Star TV for the #AllForUttarakhand campaign,” added Banos.
Of course there are no doubts that the Indian market has a high volume of social media users, big FMCG brands adopting social media, digital and getting into new media services. Certainly what sparked the interest was this hope they had in this market. But the true test remains in seeing how fast and how well can they tap into this market, which is tough to crack on the sales front, be it for services such as theirs.
Thank You, Sachin 