If you were following the recent Fifa World Cup through online media giant Yahoo’s curated website, chances are that you would be watching the work put together by a small team based out of Bangalore. The Bangalore-based sports development team, which works on global products, served as the “global war room” for two months for an experience that touched millions of viewers.
“Yahoo had an entire experience built around the World Cup. It was a very interesting thing that was extremely successful. Not very many people realise that a big chunk of this experience globally was run out of our Bangalore office. We ran a global war room here [in Bangalore],” Yahoo India R&D head Hari Vasudev told this correspondent on Thursday.
The curated site was packed with interactive timelines and heat maps, contextual insight cards and exclusive content from football celebrities such as Jose Mourinho.
The sports team in Bangalore, which had cut its teeth by building the desktop and mobile web experience for Yahoo Sports, was responsible for co-ordinating with teams in the U.S and Europe to give an experience that included player and team-level statistics and detailed commentary. Since most of the games ran late into the night, members of the team were required to stay back to ensure that the site didn’t crash or that it was able to scale up without latencies going too high.
One of the bigger issues was that because the World Cup’s matches ran late into the night in a number of countries, the company’s experience was accessed by a high number of desktop PC users. The team in Bangalore, according to Yahoo, manages this aspect for over 20 countries.
“We have always been fairly globally integrated in that sense. We measure ourselves by the impact we have on global products. We made it a lot of fun, and it also allowed us to engage in a way with our employees. The whole thing came together really well. It was a very good experience for the team,” he said. While Yahoo is yet to receive the viewership statistics for this year’s World Cup — it clocked more than 4 billion page views for the last edition — the company believes it has made a substantial impact.
