The Economic Times reports:

The next IPL Twenty20 extravaganza may unfold at Lord's as well. The tournament, which had a smashing debut earlier this year, is expected to be split with five weeks of action in India and three weeks in UK where it is expected to draw in sub-continental diaspora as well as English fans. The IPL proposal has been discussed with the English board which has evinced keen interest in the possibility of staging a part of the competition that was won last time by Jaipur Royals.

The competition is scheduled for April-May and the player auction for the second season will be held in February next year.

The IPL governing body is expected to consider the proposal for two venues when it meets on January 3 and even though the schedule and revenue model need to be finalised, the scheme is expected to go through.

It's likely that the tournament will kick off in India and then move to the UK for three weeks before it returns to India for the final matches.

"IPL will become more of an international event and other cricket boards are also likely to be supportive. Indian interests will be safeguarded in the revenue model and the game will benefit overall," said well-placed sources.

What organisers have to look at is whether the scheduling clashes with major fixtures in England or India.

The eight-week IPL window is any way inked into India's cricket calender and any hitches are expected to be resolved with technical teams already carrying out a survey of facilities in England.

Given that IPL drew in top talent from across the cricketing world, adding an England leg will make the event even more high profile.

English cricketers missed out in the first edition of the game as their board held them to domestic commitments. With IPL's impressive revenues being shared and the event being played at home, the English board could reconsider its objections.

From the Guardian's '21st Century Sport': A year on:

Twenty20: Auctions, helicopters and India's big win

In September 2007, India's victory over Pakistan in the final of the first World Twenty20, played in Johannesburg, drew a worldwide TV audience of more than 400 million. India had caught the Twenty20 bug and this was the catalyst for the Indian Premier League, launched last spring. The IPL has changed world cricket for ever.

'Cricket is a religion in our country,' said Lalit Modi, who dreamed up the IPL with a senior executive from IMG, the sports marketing group. Modi sold the TV rights, for a league in which not a ball had been bowled, for $1.026bn. He lured India's richest men and Bollywood's A-list to the IPL player auction, one of the strangest events of the year. Franchise owners spent $35m in eight hours of bidding. The first tournament ended in June, but its aftershocks are still being felt as cricket governing bodies around the world race to create new properties to take to market. The second World Twenty20 is in England next June and the unloved ICC Champions Trophy will become another 20-over competition in the West Indies in 2010.

ESPN Star, the Asian pay-TV broadcaster, paid nearly $1bn for rights to the Twenty20 Champions League, a new competition for first-class sides rather than countries, though that has been postponed because of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Most of the money goes to India, Australia and South Africa, with England picking up scraps. The deal puts further pressure on English cricket. The Indians have the economic power – and they are using it – to change the cricket calendar.

England will almost certainly have to move or give up their May Test matches, releasing their best players to the IPL, and have pinned all their Twenty20 hopes on a new domestic competition (due in 2010) and their deal with the Texan billionaire, Sir Allen Stanford, to play T20 in Antigua. There was outrage when Stanford promoted that five-year deal by landing a helicopter at Lord's and showing off $20m in $50 bills in a Perspex box – an event that matched the IPL auction for novelty value. Money talks. The biggest winners are India and all the players who get IPL contracts. To many cricket followers the biggest loser is the game itself, with Test cricket under threat.

Plus • Half of England's players say they would retire from international cricket if it was the only way of clearing the way to play in the IPL. • The ECB talk of hosting 'foreign' Test matches at Lord's. Pakistan and Australia have both discussed the idea.• Pakistan move all home one-day games to Dubai for three years from 2009.

It was the late Estée Lauder who, in the midst of rough economic times, said: “When things are bad, if a woman has a little perfume and a new lipstick, she feels like a queen.” And it was by knowing a thing or two about how women felt that Estée Lauder became very rich. Grim though things are, it's encouraging to know that somewhere is buzzing and, you've guessed it, it's the perfume counters that are reporting booming business....

The world wide web has encouraged a new breed of what American Elle called “perfume fanatics, supersniffers who... seek out esoteric notes, celebrate superior dry downs, host sniffing parties and swap samples of their latest discoveries”.

Read the whole Times Online article HERE.

UPI reports:

Market researchers said online shopping perked up dramatically on Cyber Monday, the digital deal-making day that is the Internet's answer to Black Friday.

Web monitor Akamai Technologies said a record 6.7 million visitors per minute clicked on approximately 280 Internet retail sites by 3 p.m. Monday, up from last year's 4.6 million visitors per minute tally, the newspaper said.

"Things are better than expected," said David Fry, whose company operates online retail sites for major retail chains. Traffic was up 30 percent to 60 percent and revenue up 10 percent to 20 percent compared with a year ago, he said.

If you are not sure what 'Cyber Monday' is, click HERE.

Live Current CEO and Chairman, Geoffrey Hampson, the Company’s President and COO, Jonathan Ehrlich and Chief Corporate Development Officer, Mark Melville all invested in the round. 

Please see the news release HERE.

The Economic Times reports:

Anshu Jain, head of global markets at Deutsche Bank, has bought a minority stake in Mumbai Indians, the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket team owned by Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani, ET has learnt.

London-based Mr Jain, a keen cricket enthusiast who is often seen at the Lord’s cricket ground enjoying matches, is said to have picked up the stake in his personal capacity. Reliance did not respond to an emailed query asking it to confirm the information, while Deutsche Bank does not comment on personal investments of its executives.

According to a person familiar with the matter, Mr Jain's investment in the Sachin Tendulkar-led Mumbai Indians was made "some time ago" and was for sheer love of the game. One estimate is that his stake could amount up to 15%.

The franchise for Mumbai Indians, which includes cricketing stars such as Harbhajan Singh, South Africa’s Shaun Pollock and Sri Lankan Sanath Jayasuriya, was won by Mr Ambani for $119.11 million as part of a high-stakes auction in which he outbid liquor baron Vijay Mallya. Mr Mallya later successfully bid for the Bangalore team called Royal Challengers.

Mr Jain, it is now hoped, may take a more active role as a minority investor, and use his contacts to rope in some English players for the Mumbai Indians, the person familiar with the matter said.

Several IPL teams are targeting marquee players such as Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff, but so far the English Cricket Board has been reluctant to allow England players to take part in IPL.

Mr Jain’s investment is an expression of his personal love for the game and not because the Mumbai Indians is in need of money, the person familiar with the matter said.

Check out the great selection of holiday gift deals by clicking the image below:

Plus act now for an extra gift. Enter code GIFTGUIDE and save an extra $5 on any order over $40; save an extra $10 on any order over $90, plus free shipping or save an extra $15 on any order over $150, plus free shipping. Also, sign up to the Perfume.com newsletter to receive all sorts of specials, fragrance tips and information.

The Perfume.com Gift Guide includes expert picks from fragrance guru Grant Osborne, founder and editor of Basenotes.net, a fragrance site that's full of great info about perfume and cologne.

The peak holiday shopping season for online retailers kicks off just after US Thanksgiving, on 'Black Friday' and especially 'Cyber Monday'.

BTW, If you have not checked out The Daily Spritz, the blog of Perfume.com lately, it is definitely worth a look.

Live Current will issue a press release about its third quarter 2008 results early Monday morning.

You can access the Q HERE.

----

In the third quarter there were several key developments -- e.g. BCCI.tv launch, Karate.com development partnership.

Televisionpoint.com reports:

The Champions of the first Indian Premier League (IPL), Rajasthan Royals, runners-up Chennai Super Kings and multi starrer Deccan Chargers are seeking to raise money by diluting their stake in these entities as they gear up to make big bucks in the new season.

While some of these teams have already roped in investment bankers or financial and business advisory firms such as KPMG to work out valuations, financial experts and valuers differ widely in their estimates.

On their part, these teams are expecting valuations of $ 250 million, but experts like Sanjiv Agarwal of Ernst and Young say they won't be surprised if some of the multi-starrer teams command valuations two or three times that figure.

Agarwal was part of the E&Y team that had done the valuation for Team India some three years ago. Today, he puts Team India's valuation at $ 5 billion.

The first IPL season was a huge success and some franchises such as Chennai Super Kings, Kolkata Knight Riders and Rajasthan Royals even managed to break even or spin profits....

When contacted, KPMG executive director Rajesh Jain refused to put a valuation for any IPL team. But he said value estimates for a team would be done solely on the basis of cash flow. He said quite a number of investors, both domestic and foreign, were looking at acquiring stakes in IPL franchisees for strategic purposes.

The market buzz is that media firms, ADAG, Sahara Group, Future Group and financial entities such as ICICI Venture, Sequoia Capital and India Value Fund are exploring opportunities to join the IPL bandwagon. Names of some international players like Providence, Macquire Bank, DE Shaw, Deutsche Bank, Alcazar, Engelfield are also doing the rounds as possible investors in IPL franchisees.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

In the era of the 52-inch plasma television set, marketers at Sprint Nextel Corp. are banking on football fans to seek out a decidedly smaller viewing experience.

For the first time Thursday, a National Football League game -- the Cleveland Browns vs. the Denver Broncos -- will be broadcast on Sprint mobile phones as part of the wireless company's exclusive partnership with the league. That partnership deal is valued at about $500 million over five years.

Over the next seven weeks, Sprint will phone-cast the eight games that are televised solely on the NFL Network, the league's cable channel. For the past three seasons, the NFL has struggled to persuade major cable operators to include its channel in their basic programming packages.

With the NFL Network is available in only about 40% of American households, Sprint executives hope the NFL games can do for their company what the league's Sunday Ticket package has done for satellite-television provider DirecTV Group. Sunday Ticket, which is exclusive to DirecTV, allows dedicated fans to see every NFL game on Sunday afternoons, and has been crucial to DirectTV's growth.

"Live compelling content is a game changer in the mobile industry," said Steve Gaffney, Sprint's director of sports sponsorships.

For the NFL, the Sprint phone-casts are part of a series of experiments with digital media aimed at discerning how fans will consume football in the future. NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric Co., conducted similar experiments this summer, showing highlights and a handful of events from the Beijing Olympics on mobile phones.

"We know a lot of fans find themselves displaced, and they are using devices like mobile phones for more tasks," said Brian Rolapp, the NFL's senior vice president of digital media and media strategy. "With 60% of our revenues coming from media, we'd be foolish not to do something like this."

The planned phone-casts are part of Sprint's NFL Mobile Live package, which is available on most Sprint handsets. The package can be purchased for $15 a month, and is also included as part of Sprint's Everything plans that start at $69.99 per month.

The Globe and Mail today has a feature article about Live Current, "Perfect pitch scores a deal for B.C. firm":

Geoffrey Hampson didn't know what to expect when he arrived in the conference room of the Jumeirah Carlton Tower Hotel in London last February. He and a colleague had flown in to meet India's cricket czar, Lalit Modi, the 45-year-old scion of a billionaire family who'd recently spearheaded the founding of a professional league — a kind of NHL or NBA of cricket.

Mr. Hampson, chief executive officer of Live Current Media, a Vancouver-based website developer, had an hour to persuade Mr. Modi that he should sell the Web rights to the Indian Premier League (IPL) to Mr. Hampson's 30-person firm rather than to one of the global media giants that Mr. Modi had short-listed for bids.

Read the full article HERE.

----

UPDATE: Live Current CEO Geoff Hampson will be online at the Globeandmail.com on Friday at 1 p.m. Eastern to take your questions. To submit your question, click HERE.

Moneycontrol.com, India's No. 1 financial portal, has a transcript of a CNBC-TV18 interview with arguably the most powerful person in the cricket world, Lalit Modi, Vice President, Board of Control for Cricket in India and Commissioner of the Indian Premier League. Mr. Modi talks about the exciting growth of the business of cricket spurred by the IPL (and also the Champions League Twenty20). 

You can read the transcript HERE, or watch the TV interview HERE.

The business of cricket is grabbing headlines again. Just when you think that cricket valuations have shot through the sky, the BCCI comes along and shows there's still more headroom to go. If the domestic IPL media rights were snapped up for close to USD 1 billion, the champions T20 League that will be inaugurated in December has been sold for another USD 900 million to be precise. CNBC-TV18’s Ramya Ramamurthy reports on what will be the most expensive cricket tournament ever

Read the complete article at Moneycontrol.com, a leading Indian financial portal.

From a Times article today:

All the grounds are reporting high demand for tickets....The credit crunch has also had little effect on corporate sales. “There is overwhelming demand for boxes and other types of hospitality, a waiting list for long-term boxes, and perimeter advertising is already sold out for the whole of 2009,” an MCC spokeswoman said.

And what of India, the most booming growth market for cricket? The eight Indian Premier League (IPL) franchises met in Bangkok last weekend and agreed to increase the cap for purchasing players from $5 million to $7 million. This will apply for the next auction of players in February, but the owners also agreed a one-month trading window from December 15 in which, as one source said, “trading can be done for players with absolutely no budgetary limits”.

The franchise owners have been buoyed by recovering, from television, sponsorship and ticket sales, almost 80 per cent of the money they paid to the Indian board for their teams. The franchises were bought for between $67 and $112 million, but are said to be worth between $250 and $300 million. They will also benefit from sharing the $1 billion of media rights that were recently sold for the Champions League.

There is speculation in India that the Deccan Chronicle Group wants to sell its 80 per cent stake in Deccan Chargers, who came last in this year's IPL, and cash in on the increase in value. Tim Wright, the chief executive of the Chargers, refused to comment but said the IPL had been more successful than anyone had expected. “The franchises did all their financial modelling before anyone knew how big IPL would be,” he said. “It has vastly exceeded expectations.”

Live Current/GVC attended the IPL franchisee meetings in Bangkok which are mentioned in this article.