"Faster, Higher, Stronger - Together"
Sports and Platform Businesses
I had introduced a new section called Opportunities Through MountainSpeak (OTM) towards the end of the newsletter. See if you would like to explore some of these interesting opportunities. Please look at previous issues and contact me if you find something useful.
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DTW
During the Week, the sports world was shocked to hear withdrawal of Simone Biles from Olympic Gymnastics Competitions at last moment. Though many questioned her mental toughness but overwhelming majority found her to be deserving of all the support and love.
Multiple platforms have helped the athletes in two important dimensions related to playing sports and earning livelihood.
Sports related platforms have helped in Training , Performance and Recovery. Like I mentioned earlier, mental training has become an integral part of the sports world and an Indian company Dhyana has built a meditation tracker that measures heart rate variability (HRV) and has built-in algorithms to understand how meditation affects your Autonomous Nervous System - the part of the body that feels stress & relaxation.
Training has received lot of attention from experts as well as retired players and coaches. CRICURU which is founded by Virender Sehwag along with Sanjay Bangar is a pioneer in AI-based cricket coaching and aims at offering a personalized learning experience for its users. They have created a platform to give emerging players an opportunity to learn everything about cricket from the world’s best batters, bowlers, fielders, all rounders, and wicketkeepers and more!
Then on the engagement side in terms of Fan Experience and Monetisation, players have benefited immensely from rise of social media platforms. Players are wearing their emotions on their sleeves or may be nails and the fans are simply lapping it up.
Covid19 has made spectators participation almost impossible so fans are being helped by multiple OTT platforms to follow their favourites. Amongst many others, an Indian platform start-up edisn.ai has an AI powered fan engagement & monetization platform with patent pending player recognition technologies to help networks deliver state-of-the-art player recognition, contextual content delivery and social engagement to millions of fans.
To conclude, sports and brands have a great symbiotic relationship. Brands love Fans and Fans reciprocate. Platforms can help brands- both sports and non-sports- to come closer to their fans. They deliver tremendous value to sportspeople by helping in sports performance and fan engagement.
OTW
Over the Weekend, we celebrated the success of P V Sindhu who brought another Olympic medal for India. Way back in 2015 , she was sporting enough to pose for a picture for Aru after one of our Sunday Long Rock Run near Khajaguda Hills in Hyderabad organised by Hyderabad Runners and Society to Save Rocks.
Of course, I watched parts of Chak De to reflect back on the issues of mental toughness and resilience in sports. My daughter Aru wrote about the challenges faced by women in sports in her newsletter titled “Breaking the Glass Ceiling by Winning 2020“.
Lets all together hit the six, punch an upper cut, smash hard or claim a perfect ten to break the glass ceiling so that we all can fly high together.
Aru Bisht, a Part of My Life
It is important to know that all of us including the players are fighting internal demons as well as societal baggages.
We have definitely travelled a far way and celebrate all success and laurels brought by Indian athletes-men and women but still have need to cover distance in ensuring an enabling sports ecosystem. I wrote about the challenges in Indian sports and had suggested a Bleed BLUE campaign for reviving Indian Sports while writing for Business Line in Campus.
Bleed BLUE focussed on learnings from some of the finest enterprises about goal-setting and achievements- Understand the demand-supply pattern, leverage the existing ecosystem by crafting future-oriented enablers and create a broader coalition of stakeholders, with particular efforts at roping in the fence-sitters. You could read the detailed analysis in this link. Translating all this to Olympic glory for India as part of a Bleed BLUE framework means:
Build a coalition of important groups to renew their buy-ins ; Leverage existing infrastructure ; Understand what we are historically good at, and Enable mechanisms to get the best out of current assets.
Stay Safe and Get Vaccinated ASAP
I Love You
Shailendra
PS- If you are in Kolkata during the week (4-7 August 2021), let us catch up.
OTM
Opportunities through MountainSpeak are available at TRICE for marketing and communications roles. Trice has seen some significant growth over the last couple of months in S-Commerce and team is excited on the potential of this idea and it’s growth. They are looking to expand to about 700 Communities in the next 6 months. And to do this, Co-founders are looking to work with like minded individuals who believe in the idea and are interested to learn and grow along with them. They are a passionate team and extremely motivated to build Trice as India’s largest platform for Neighbourhood Commerce. Should this be of interest to you and if you have any questions, please reach out to Naveen.