So how did I come to deciding that the first mobile application I would build would be for fantasy sports leagues? I came to this idea first by looking at what a mobile device essentially are, and I thought to myself that one thing that makes mobile devices unique is that its a device that you carry around with you, and it allows you to connect with your friends and family. So the social networking aspect is available to applications on mobile devices. Then the question was what online community can I make available on mobile devices, and sports came to mind. Sports fans are a passionate group, and being able to stay connected and participate in a sporting community from the convenience of your phone seemed like it would be appealing. Sports + social networking then lead to sports fantasy leagues, a community of sports fans communicating and competing with each other. SportsFlash was born.
The name "SportsFlash" came about accidentally. Desperate for a name to call this thing, I started to first think what I wanted to create, a mission statement so to speak. I wanted this thing to eventually be all encompassing with regards to sports, using the features mobile devices had to offer. Initially it would be for managing and/or monitoring your sports fantasy leagues, but eventually it could be used to connect and talk smack with other sports fans in your contact list, use location based services and GPS to find the closest sports bar, sports venue, and use the community aspect to allow sports fans to share sports trivia, suggestions on the best place to park at your teams sports areana... skies the limit. I wanted this application to be everything sports, at least as much as can be on a mobile device. But I still needed a name, then I thought of flash memory (don't ask me how that came to mind, I think I was watching something on the history channel at the time), and I thought of sports living on flash memory on your mobile device, hence ... SportsFlash. Then I thought about the relevancy to NewFlash, and the idea that people would receive alerts/SMS messages about their league, players, scores ... etc, and SportsFlash just seemed like a good fit.
As far as licensing, I choose GPL, because being that this is starting from an academic project, I believe my biggest interest in this project is learning from it, and using the open source community to learn and continue to learn from this project. So I want the ability to continue to learn, and not have anyone’s ingenuity in the future not be part of this project for everyone to learn and benefit from.
So here we are, building a sports application for mobile devices, using Google's Android platform. Should be an interesting ride!
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