Emerging markets voice and social media solutions firm Kirusa has partnered digital sports media company PERFORM, owner of Goal, to bring sports content to mobile subscribers in Africa.
PERFORM has granted rights that enables Kirusa to send daily voice and text updates relating to English, French and Spanish soccer clubs.
The partnership covers major countries of Africa, and provides exclusive rights to Kirusa to promote, distribute, and sell services based on content from Goal into many African countries. Kirusa said the partnership is already active in Ghana, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Republic of Congo, Senegal, Uganda and Rwanda.
“Goal produces updates and alerts and sends them to Kirusa’s Vobolo platform in the cloud, using APIs provided by Kirusa,” Kirusa said, adding the Vobolo platform then distributes the updates to Kirusa platforms deployed in carriers, and from there to the mobile subscribers.
“This soccer news update service has been named ‘Sports Connect’. Subscribers can listen to Sports Connect from their mobile phones, or from the web. Mobile users receive a notification on their mobile phone, and can listen to the news at their convenience. The passion for Sports Connect in Africa can be gauged by the fact that the service has already garnered over 1.5 million followers,” Kirusa said.
Inderpal Singh Mumick, chief executive officer (CEO) of Kirusa, said: “We have always been driven to offer engaging experiences to mobile subscribers. We are excited that PERFORM has partnered with us to produce exclusive sports content in a new medium, and to bring it to fans across Africa. A love of football has engrossed the entire world. Kirusa is proud to bring the joy of football to African fans via daily voice updates of scores, analysis, and team events.”
Daniel Price, head of distribution for Africa and Middle East at PERFORM, said: “We are very pleased to work with Kirusa to deliver our digital content to mobile football fans in Africa. Our synergy lies in complementing each other’s core competence, and presenting an engaging and holistic service to mobile users. Kirusa’s Vobolo platform made technical integration easy, while having immediate visibility and transparency on the usage has enabled growing our business operations.”
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