The Age Cricket Scoreboard

Fairfax is one of the world's most innovative media empires, Fairfax have always lead the way in online news delivery in Australia. Their online "supersites" now stretch across a broad range of topics with some of Australia's most popular sites.

Areeba was contacted by Fairfax in 1999 to deliver an interactive cricket scoreboard for The Age website. The brief was to provide an interface that looked like the Adelaide scoreboard. Budget and available technology were limited.

Areeba developed a system whereby editors with no technical knowledge could update and maintain the scoreboard and provide text commentary in real-time. Areeba designed an innovative interface that included a moderated bulletin board (using email) whereby fans could have their say on the game and included icons that enabled editors to highlight wickets, boundaries and ducks.

The system generated huge support from the users, being loudly touted as the best live scoreboard on the web. Success was largely due to the interactive component that Areeba conceived that enabled good-humoured sledging and commentary from cricket fans across the world.

Developed pre-2000, the cricket scoreboard was still being used for the 2006/07 cricket season. The scoreboard is proof that when it comes to taking advantage of the web, good ideas need not be expensive or complicated if executed well.

However, Areeba does apologise to all employers for our part in the thousands of workers over the years who have followed the cricket on the Internet instead of working.