the Reebok Sports Club in New
York. Kulkarni, though, worked
out and bulked up until, in his
senior year, he walked on and
made the Penn junior varsity.
While on the Penn team—
often on the bench—Kulkarni got
a view of the scorekeeper who
used pen and paper to mark down
everything that happened in a
game. The notes would later get
tallied by hand into statistics.
By the time Kulkarni
graduated, he was convinced
that technology could make
better use of such stats. He built a
service that allows coaches and
players to locate specific shots in
game video with the click of a button. A friend invested $50,000,
and Kulkarni’s deceptively simple
idea became a startup.
Most high schools shoot video
of their basketball games. For
$1,000 to $3,500 a season, a coach
can sign up with Krossover and
upload that video to the site. A
team of four Krossover employees
use a video-game-like interface to
tag the whole game in about 45
minutes. The tags identify hun-
dreds of events in the game, such
as shots, steals, and fouls. “We
found we had to do the tagging by
hand,” Kulkarni says. “We tried
image recognition, but it was too
hard and images from all those
camcorders were not that great.”
The coach can then access the
tags and video on Krossover’s site.
The tags can be mixed, matched,
and sorted like a database. The
video and statistical sorting by
itself is delighting coaches.
“We can bring in kids and say,
‘ This is who you’re guarding and
here’s how she’s getting open,’
and show them the relevant plays
on a single video,” says Jim
Brown, assistant coach of the
women’s basketball team at Tran-
sylvania University in Kentucky.
“It’s not just a verbal scouting
The players get access to the
site, too, and they can use the
tagged video as a learning tool—
or for bragging. With a few clicks,
a player can assemble highlights
into a video and post it on social
networks. Which, of course, turns
into a viral marketing campaign
for Krossover. If one high-school
basketball team posts highlights,
rival players are likely to start
asking for Krossover too.
biz words illustrations by andrew rae
Self-professed
Internet guru Alex Blagg
from BajillionHits.biz
has apparently taken his
show on the road, as he
keeps sending us dis-patches on what he claims
are the “hottest new bizwords blowing up presentations and panels at
tech conferences, expos,
forums, and fests across
the world.”
VIP Inception
the practice of
putting a ViP
section in the ViP
section of your
ViP–only launch
party that caters
only to double-
elite ViP
influencers.
Swaggregation
the process of mindlessly
collecting as many t-shirts,
stickers, mouse pads,
little hipster buttons, and
other forms of branded
swag as you can at a trade
show or conference.
Networthless
any conversation
you have at a
conference that
doesn’t involve
net working, selling,
or closing. do not
make the mistake
of making normal
small talk.
Limp Bizness
the feeling of shame one experiences
when trying to hand a paper business
card to someone who now handles
all their contact-info sharing with a fancy
new app on their mobile device.
Hypnotweeting
when a conference speaker or
presenter’s ideas are so powerful
that the entire audience stares
intently into their computer screens,
dutifully live-t weeting
everything they’re not missing
completely.
