Dash of Lime

Launched to coincide with the highly anticipated upcoming Rugby Championship (formerly the Tri Nations), Primedia Online, the publisher of iafrica.com, has introduced live-scoring for rugby fans on the iafrica.com mobi site.

“With South Africa being such an enthusiastic sporting nation, it made sense to develop a live-scoring system that gives our community of readers the ability to follow the games they want, wherever they may be,” explained Tanja Lategan-De Korte, CEO of Primedia Online.

Simple and easy to access with any web-capable mobile phone, the live-scoring system can be found at mobi.iafrica.com/livescoring, allowing sports lovers to keep up to date with major games regardless of their proximity to a computer or TV. Not only does the live scoring system automatically update to display the latest scores, it also gives live commentary.

The fixtures page on the mobile site will list the upcoming games a few days before kick-off. The link to the individual games’ live-scoring will automatically become live just before the start of the match, with the commentators giving a brief introduction to the game.

For users who are bandwidth-sensitive, the mobi live-scoring system won’t be a heavy consumer of data bundles. Gideon Nieuwoudt, Head of Technical at Primedia Online says: “We created the live-scoring system in such a way that it reloads only the scores and commentary, not the entire page, thus using very little bandwidth to stay up-to-date.”

Bridget Pringle, managing editor of iafrica.com said the team was also preparing to roll out the live-scoring system for cricket in the next month. “We look forward to expanding this mobi live-scoring system to cover the full range of sports our users follow,” said Pringle.