[Metalab] Project Ideas

[Chris Hager]

Hey guys,

 From my previous Android games, more than 10,000 users submitted their 
email addresses (optionally). Now I'm planning to start a weekly 
Android-Games email newsletter with a particular focus on multiplayer 
games. One of the points I'm thinking about is how I can reliably send 
that many emails without landing on spam indexes or encountering other 
problems. Any advice / ideas? (I have my own root servers, SSL certs, etc).

I'm also thinking about extending the concept a bit further: The 
newsletter will be all about Android games, therefore we need game 
reviews. The current game review websites suck (like just a wordpress 
with single posts). I have a couple of ideas how to build a great 
community-based Android game-review site, and having reversed the 
Android market protocol I also can directly access the user comments and 
ratings of any particular app.

If would love if someone wants to participate in this - and there is 
money to be made too. Help is appreciated in brainstorming, planning, 
designing, starting, coding, any of the 1000 random things to do in a 
startup... :) If you want to chat about things, hit me up! (Either in 
person at metalab, metachris at jabber.metalab.at or 0676-5863730).

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I'm also building a multiplayer engine and gameserver infrastructure 
(currently available in beta for Android developers): 
http://www.flockengine.com -- also there all of the above mentioned help 
is be appreciated :) So far two games have been deployed which are using 
my framework; on an average hour the infrastructure serves about 1000 
players / 500 games.

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Another project idea that I would _love_ to see (but don't really have 
the time/energy to build) is a simple Android/iPhone app with all the 
data of Vienna public transports. Then you could see which are the 
closest stops to you and the departure times. For that we would need: 1) 
title, gps coordinate and address of all stops (could be easily done by 
building a quick website with google maps that reacts on a long click, 
then we have gps+address and need to set the title), and 2) the 
timetables (for that we could use the times of the first stops and take 
the minutes it takes between each stop to interpolate). Could be fun and 
done in a couple of days if we would be two or three people!

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Cheers,
Chris