gierach

I'm building a video game (2d/mobile) and am finding out how labor-intensive art asset creation can be. I know I'm not efficient yet and am making rookie mistakes, but even so, I'm looking for alternatives. Does anyone have recommendations for companies, studios or individuals that will make game art on a contract or per-sprite basis? Also, I'm using a mixture of Adobe Flash and Photoshop to build my spritesheets right now. If there's a better tool set for this work, I'm all ears.

I'm pulling together a fairly large dataset that I am using for some side projects and I believe it could be valuable to other businesses. Any advice out there on the following?

1. best way to test whether a market for the data exists,

2. best way to sell the data to customers (are there good, established marketplaces for datasets?)

3. tips or lessons learned on designing APIs and running a business focused on selling data.

I have an idea for a site that I suspect would be useful to members of a niche online community. I would like to float my idea around to gauge interest. The problem is that the idea is somewhat easy to implement and the community is made up of technically-skilled people with free time. Is it a good idea to announce the idea and create a sign-up site to collect emails and/or opinions? Does anyone know of a better way to gauge interest?

What software do you use to monitor your servers and the services running on them? I'm looking for Nagios competitors that are better and easier to set up. Right now, I've got a few Perl scripts that send emails if the disk gets full or if my site isn't returning the expected content, but it's not ideal.

I was pondering over the Amazon/California Sales Tax story and wondered why more eCommerce sites don't collect sales tax. If you don't collect sales tax from your customers, why not?

I'm looking for something to do illustration and animation on for web design, 2d games, etc. I want to draw on the screen, but it can't be tied to another computer, so the Wacom Cintiq is out. I've heard of people using their iPad for illustration, but I am unsure of how well it works with a stylus and how smooth/responsive the drawing experience would be. Can anyone give me a recommendation?

I'm a long-time Gmail user and love the slick web interface. I love the searchability, threading of emails, intuitive reply mechanism, built-in chat, etc. However, I don't have full control over it. I would like to run my own mail server, with my own domain, and host a comparable web interface to it for my own purposes. Built-in chat would be great (maybe compatible with XMPP so I could still chat with my Gmail contacts).

Does anyone know of a package out there that fits the bill? I'm not looking for "Google Apps for your Domain". Does anyone else think this would be useful?