SportsChimp brings clean betting to the game; Banana bucks are at stake

The ongoing IPL 5 might be hitting the headlines for all the wrong reasons. But the recently launched sports-picking app/game SportsChimp can provide enough virtual thrills off-field. Just bet on your favourite team and you can win banana bucks from your Facebook friends if your team wins in real life.

The idea came from Hot or Not (a rating site that allows users to rate the attractiveness of the photos submitted by others). "Most of the sports-picking apps are too complicated and they are not social. We wanted to change that with SportsChimp and came out with this mindless concept," said co-founder Nav Chatterji.

So how does SportsChimp work? Log in with your Facebook account and you will come across two teams who will be locking horns in future matches. Choose the team who you think will win and when the actual match is over, the app will calculate how many banana bucks you have won or lost from your Facebook friends, who have also placed bets in the match. Banana bucks happen to be the virtual currency used across SportsChimp.

The app calculates and decides a leader, and also measures the Win Streak, which means the number of matches one has predicted correctly in a row. You can also 'poke fun' at your friends via the button called 'in your face'. SportsChimp works on any desktop or mobile browser.

Set up by a team of four – Nav Chatterji, Tarun Arora, Aditya Sahay and Rahul Bhardwaj "the app is still evolving and the team is not yet ready to share its revenue model. "We have a few ideas about making money but right now, we only want to make it popular," said Chatterji, an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania who is also very active in the Silicon Valley startup community.

Bhardwaj had worked with Leitch Technologies, RIM and Infusion Development in the early years of his career and also founded companies like Vayyoo Inc, TwitBiz, EPIC Technology DataSmartLabs and the recently funded TwoMangoes. The two-year-old online dating services start-up TwoMangoes raised an undisclosed angel funding from Andy Jasuja, the co-founder, chairman & CEO of Sigma Systems, an IP solutions services company.

Sahay, an alumnus of IIT-Roorkee and National University of Singapore, had worked for Oracle India and also founded ClipWeave (it provides technology and outsourcing solutions for video meta-data extraction and annotation of video content) and Radbox (adds any video one discovers on the Web and then one may watch it later).

Although the app has been launched a couple of weeks ago to cover the ongoing edition of IPL, the team is working towards making similar apps for the English Premier League and the upcoming soccer and tennis tournaments. We really don't know how successful it will be but the founders claim that as many as 6,000 challenges have been won and lost since its launch. Now, it's time for our readers to check out how many banana bucks you can win.