In 2009 the British and Irish Lions rugby team toured South Africa, an event which takes place every 4 years and is a highlight of the rugby world. The Telegraph has the best rugby coverage of any UK newspaper, and the Telegraph digital team were keen to make their web coverage second to none.
Monterosa developed two applications for the tour – a team selector and a live reaction stream.
The team selector allowed fans to pick their favourite 15 players from the 35 man squad and position them on the pitch. They could then send their selection to a friend and also submit it to the Telegraph team. The Telegraph pundits also used the app to pick their preferred teams for each game, which they featured in their blogs.
The reaction stream used Monterosa’s ReacTV platform to pull the chatter around the tour into a live updating stream, which could be pre- or post-moderated by the Telegraph editorial team. This chatter came from Twitter, the Telegraph bloggers, and fans posting directly on the Telegraph website.
Technically, the team selector is a pure JavaScript application, and the reaction stream uses ReacTV, which is a combination of JavaScript, Ruby on Rails and the Monterosa Enmasse C++ back-end.
