Appsolutely Kicking

It is not easy to have a quiet word with Lucas von Cranach. At least not when one of his favourite football clubs is playing a match. Every few minutes his smartphone interrupts him with a loud cheer, the kind you hear in stadiums. This alerts him to the fact that someone in England, Spain, Germany or Italy has scored. He picks up the phone, quickly looks at the screen and puts the device down again—until the next goal.

The Berlin entrepreneur (and descendant of the German painter of the same name) does not have to pretend that he “eats his own dogfood”. He also does not have to resort to the old trick of boasting about some silly metric that makes his start-up appear more successful than it actually is. The Football App has been downloaded more than 6.5m times since its first version in 2009 (then called iLiga) and about 3,5m people use it regularly—which makes it one of the world’s most popular football apps. Another sign of success, a group of investors led by Earlybird Venture Capital, a German VC firm, announced on April 18th that the have invested €10m in the firm. View The Full Story At THE ECONOMIST

Video in German