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Happy full Olympics week!

I have to say, even among all the controversy with NBC and tape delays and Twitter accounts being suspended, I’ve really enjoyed the Games this year.

This morning, I started to cry when they told the story of Oscar Pistorius running the 400 meter race for South Africa…on prosthetic legs. It’s pretty freaking amazing what human beings can do when they put their minds to it. And, not only may he take home a medal, he’s teaching kids with prosthetic legs how to run and not let others treat them like they’re different.

I love that.

It’s been a very inspiring week from the Phelps/Lochte rivalry, Gabby Douglas taking home gold to Missy Franklin hugging her parents after her win and President Obama tweeting his congratulations.

Go Team USA!

And, speaking of Team USA, we have a couple of videos that pay tribute to the swimming and gymnastics teams.

5. Call Me Maybe – 2012 USA Olympic Swimming Team. I saw this video too late last week, as I’d already written Gin and Topics. So I saved it for today, which also risks you’ve already seen it. This is the swimming team singing, dancing, and swimming to Call Me Maybe. I’ve seriously watched it at least five times, even though the song is waaaaaay overdone.

4. Nationals Bullpen Reads Fifty Shades of Grey. Daria  Steigman sent this to me and I was crying from laughing so hard. It’s not very long and don’t forget to wait until the very, very end…even after the MLB logo.

3. Actors Read Yelp Reviews.  Actress Therese Plummer reads Yelp reviews…the good and bad including Indian food that made one reviewer “pee out my butt.” Holy cow. Thanks to Nicole Vernet for making sure I saw this!

2. The Smartest Dog in the World. I don’t know if I should be really impressed by this or pained by it. The smartest dog in the world is so well trained, he knows “touch” vs. “get” and, when he’s told to get the toy on the count of three, he doesn’t go near it, literally, until the guy says three. Thanks to Blair Minton for sending it along!

1. What Makes You Beautiful: A 2012 USA Gymnastics Team Parody. This is a riot! It’s to the tune of One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful,” but some guys in a gym paying tribute to the women’s gymnastics team.

Happy weekend, everyone!

In the days following the tragic Aurora, Colorado killings, approximately 30 Facebook pages that pay tribute to the killer have appeared. One of the pages, which has more than 800 followers, is written in Holme’s authorial voice. The following is a recent unedited post from that page: “Whatever you have to say to me, I [...]

Kickstarter’s crowdfunding has become the way to bring back all of the games that we’re nostalgic for. After Christopher Williamson saw the success that game developers have had raising funding through crowdsourced donations, he decided to raise money for his own pet project: an updated version of the classic Atari game M.U.L.E.

Over 31 days, Williamson is trying to raise $500,000 for his DreamQuest Games in Lafayette, Colo. DreamQuest is making an updated version of the game dubbed Alpha Colony: a Space Tribute to M.U.L.E. Williamson has the rights from the family of the original developer, and he plans to publish the new game on the PC, Mac, iPhone and iPad. On top of that project, the Kickstarter money will be used to do a “faithful remake of the game with M.U.L.E. Returns.

While M.U.L.E. Returns will be a remake with updated graphics, Alpha Colony will be a “modern tribute” with game play that is similar to SimCity or Civilization.

The original game was created by Ozark Softscape and published by Electronic Arts in 1983 for the Atari 400/800 game console and then later adapted for the Commodore 64, the Nintendo Entertainment System, and the IBM PC Jr. It was an amazingly addictive strategy game that simulated an economic environment on the fictional planet Irata (Atari spelled backwards).

The game was built by a team of four people including Jim Rushing, Dan Bunten, Bill Bunten and Alan Watson. Unlike many games, the title has never had an official sequel, and it became a cult favorite over the years.

It has inspired a number of clone games, such as 2009′s Planet M.U.L.E., which was a free downloadable online game. Bunten (later renamed Danielle Bunten Berry, after a sex change operation) was working on an internet version of the game until her death in 1998. Will Wright dedicated his game The Sims to the memory of Bunten, and the M.U.L.E. theme song was included in Wright’s later game, Spore, as an Easter egg. In 2007, the game industry’s Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences inducted Bunten into the video game Hall of Fame.

The game was unique because it allowed multiplayer interaction through a single game console, encouraging family play. Williamson got advice for his Kickstarter project from Paul Trowe, the founder of Replay Games who recently raised more than $600,000 for a remake of the classic game Leisure Suit Larry.

The game may not seem like much today. But it had solid game play and was a pioneer in the economic simulation genre that includes SimCity. It’s about colonists who land on a planet and they have these robotic mules (multiple use labor element) that they outfit for food and energy. In the original economic simulation, you buy a plot of land. Then you get a mule and outfit it to be a miner, farmer, or some other useful function. You set it to work on your plot of land and then you reap the resources. If you have time, you can hunt an elusive wumpus. At the end of the turn, random events such as meteors disrupt your colony. Players can buy and sell resources to maximize profit on the remote colony.

The new game, Alpha Colony: Return to Irata, will update the graphics to three dimensions. You can view the map from a top-down, angled view, similar to games like SimCity. The game will be populated with many different alien species, all with different benefits. Each mule is a Swiss Army Knife, but it is also a character with emotions and a unique capability. The mule is a character that has a face that the player can feel an attachment to.

The fan base for M.U.L.E is still huge, with eight dedicated and active fan sites. Williamson played thousands of M.U.L.E. games over the years and in the past decade, he has been building his own M.U.L.E. prototypes over the last decade.

“I feel there is no one more qualified to bring this game to a modern audience,” Williamson said.

He used his 401K savings to get this far. Now he’s asking for donations. The more you donate, the more you can participate in the creation of the game. Williamson got the rights for the game from Bunten’s family in Little Rock, Ark., and he also got access to design notes that Bunten created to do an update on the game. Williamson’s daughter, Gwendolyn, is helping with the project. Five full-time employees and a bunch of interns are helping with the project.

If the team raises enough money, it plans to do a complete remake of the original M.U.L.E. Here’s a screen shot from the new game design below.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your tickets here.

Filed under: games, VentureBeat

Well, we can certainly tell it’s Friday afternoon, can’t we?

The childhood staple Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood has gotten this loving and charming tribute from YouTube power user and autotune demigod melodysheep — all with the permission and cooperation of the fine folks (and copyright holders) at PBS, too.

“When we discovered video mash-up artist John D. Boswell, aka melodysheep, on YouTube, we immediately wanted to work together,” a PBS rep wrote on the video’s YouTube page. “Turns out that he is a huge Mister Rogers Neighborhood fan, and was thrilled at the chance to pay tribute to one of our heroes. Both PBS and the Fred Rogers Company hope you like John’s celebration of Fred Rogers’ message.”

The rep went on to reveal that Mister Rogers is merely the first in a series of PBS icons who will get the remix treatment.

Boswell is particularly known for his “symphonies of science,” which feature interview clips and quips from famous scientists. Stay tuned to the PBS Digital YouTube channel for more. And go throw some money at PBS while you’re at it.

Filed under: media, offBeat

Late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was memorialized by a number of notable people, including President Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton and U2′s Bono, on Monday in a tribute video at the 16th Annual Webby Awards.

We can't all be Gandhi or Picasso or Bob Dylan—or Steve Jobs, for that matter. That's the message delivered in this cheeky print ad (full image after the jump) from DDB Stockholm that riffs on the famous copy from Apple's "Crazy Ones" commercial—turning it on its head. "Here's to the one who's normal," the ad begins. It goes on to celebrate those of us who are "always struggling," "never complaining," "never quoted" and "never celebrated." It concludes: "When you're ordinary, you need something out of the ordinary." That something turns out to be Papercut, a DVD, book and magazine shop in Stockholm. The ad—created by copywriter Magnus Jakobsson and art director Fredrik Simonsson, with typography by Rasmus Kellerman—will be published a few weeks from now in Sweden. Jakobsson has been writing quirky ads for this client for a while. In one, he told his own life story. In another, he meditated on a penis scrawled at the top of the ad.

A great multi-disciplinary creative, Hillman Curtis, has passed away at the age of 51 on April 18. A true Renaissance man, he combined the skills of a musician, graphic and web designer with being a filmmaker. I first learnt about him through his powerful and innovative interactive work in the 1990s. Some even called him the ‘Michael Jordan of web design’. Check out this lovely tribute to Hillman.

If you want to learn more about his work yet, visit his site here.

The city of Jundiaí in Brazil has changed the name of one of its streets to “Avenida Steve Jobs,” offering a tribute to the late Apple co-founder not far from a Foxconn plant believed to be producing iPhones and iPads.

Just when iOS developers had thought they had heard of every UDID replacement mechanism out there, Opera Software had to go and launch its own, too. Today, the company, best known as the maker of the Opera web browser, is introducing something it’s calling “App-Tribute” – and yes, it’s yet another system providing an alternative to the now deprecated UDID.

The UDID, an identification number that’s unique to every mobile Apple device, had been previously used by mobile developers for advertising and user tracking purposes. Following what can perhaps be seen as overuse, and in the worst cases, abuse, Apple announced it was ending support for UDIDs six months ago, in an effort to address ongoing privacy concerns as well as to head off future complaints. UDIDs, unlike web browser cookies, for example, can’t be deleted by users themselves, and users have no options to opt-out from tracking save for simply not using mobile apps.

Recently, Apple began rejecting apps utilizing UDIDs from the iTunes App Store. Meanwhile, a number of workarounds and alternatives have presented themselves for use.

And now, you can add Opera’s latest to that growing list.

The company is launching “App-Tribute” via its advertising subsidiaries AdMarvel, Mobile Theory, and 4th Screen Advertising. However it was Mobile Theory, a recent Opera acquisition, that came up with the solution. With App-Tribute, like many of the other alternatives, the goal is to protect consumer privacy while still allowing developers the ability to collect user analytics.

The product can track and attribute downloads without those having any form of ID mechanism to identify the user. Nor does App-Tribute depend on any ID or the transmission of that information between apps, networks and advertisers, like some of the other alternative solutions.

The system contains two parts: the App-Tribute Advertiser SDK and the App-Tribute Publisher SDK. With the former, developers can track successful downloads and subsequent installs of an application, but again, without using any personally identifiable information to do so. Its only server-side communication involves tracking and validating the app installs.

The Publisher SDK, meanwhile, can then track the promotion of apps as well as anonymous user interest in designated apps. It also provides the proper attribution to the publishers that promoted and facilitated the downloads of the promoted apps without handing off personally identifiable information in the process.

“Since the launch of iOS in 2007 and Android in 2009, we’ve watched both sides of the industry – both developers who want to advertise their apps and those that want to monetize their app traffic — struggle with the thorny issue of promoting and tracking app downloads. We’ve seen schemes that attempted to solve the problem through device and user tracking, many of which raise troubling questions around accuracy and consumer privacy,” explains Mahi de Silva, EVP of Consumer Mobile at Opera Software as to challenges that led up to the development of this system.

He also says that the new solution was developed alongside Opera’s publisher customers, and is now being used by some of its and AdMarvel’s customers. Opera can’t specifically name them, but describes the apps as “a personal radio service” and “some leading mobile game publishers.”

The Publisher SDK is also being bundled with AdMarvel’s own SDK, for its customers’ use. AdMarvel’s cloud-based ad platform currently reaches over 150 million smartphone users across over 8,000 mobile sites and apps.

Opera says more details will become available on its Advertising site at www.opera.com/advertising, but that information has yet to be posted at the time of publishing.

UPDATE: Opera says it has posted information about the solution to the website at: admarvel.com/app-tribute. We also asked the company if it could describe the App-Link system in more detail.

Opera says the system fits more closely into the “pasteboard” method (more on that here), but there are some differences. When someone clicks an app download ad, the phone stores the app information, which creative to attribute the download to, and the first time it occurred. Opera doesn’t know anything else about the device or user, though. When the download happens, the information from the pasteboard is sent to Opera’s server. If no attribution on an app download happens, then nothing is sent to the server. In addition, all the attribution takes place on the device, not the server.

I’m always amazed to see how creative people can be in paying tribute to their favorite movies. Mashups and re-edits give new life and new perspective to all-time masterpieces like, for example, Hitchcock’s Rear Window dissected and stitched back together by Jeff Desom.

An awesome job whose output was actually mainly an interactive installation as you can see on Jeff’s website.

And if you are a fan of such kind of work check out also this post: Tarantino from below. Wes Anderson from above.