2011 was a huge year for Odopod. The biggest news of all was our merger with Nurun, the largest independent digital agency in the world. Together, Odopod and Nurun have an impressive combination of reach, depth, and talent that will enable us to do even more innovative work for our clients around the world. For more on the merger, read Tim Barber's article, Odopod and Nurun: Our Next Big Move.

Last year, we launched some of our most exciting work to date. Among the highlights, we redefined luxury online for IWC, establishing direct relationships with its fans. We helped EA revolutionize the way people buy, play and share games with Origin. With Tesla Motors, we created a series of interactive kiosks for their innovative new retail strategy. We also continued producing great work for Sony Electronics, Google, Plum Organics, and more.

Of course, we had some fun too. On Hack Days, we shut down our office and prototyped our own ideas. With the FWATV, we experimented with live video and Processing to give people a fun look inside our office. We shared some inside details about the culture of Odopod, we played a bit of dodgeball, and we won Advertising Age's Small Agency of the Year, West - what a year!

All in all, we couldn't be more proud of the people we've hired (and we're hiring more), the things we've done, and the projects we've launched (including the ones we can't share) during this amazing year.

Here's a round up of this year's work:

International Watch Company (IWC) :: Origin from EA :: EA.com :: Sony PIIQ
Ford Sync :: Plum Organics Quest for Yum! :: Tesla Retail Kiosks
Sony Tablet S :: Google for Veterans :: Plum Organics Contest :: Sony Personal 3D Viewer

Hack Days at Odopod is an incredible time of year. For 48 hours, we shut down the office, turn inward and focus on our own ideas. It’s a chance for us to build the kind of things that our clients don't ask for every day and just invent.

It starts off with an open call for ideas. Eight are picked and small teams are formed to produce the projects over two days. Everybody takes part - designers, developers, producers and strategists - all racing toward the same intense deadline, with a heightened sense of focus, creative energy and collaboration.

The culmination of Hack Days is a series of prototypes and proofs-of-concept.

Here are the results...

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It's that time of year again for another two days of closed-door hacking, tinkering and building prototypes for projects of our own devising.

Each year, we ask everyone in our studio to submit ideas that they've always wanted to make. There are no rules and no restrictions - the only ask is to describe the idea in 100 words or less.

From there, we make selections, split into eight teams and build the ones we love. We're just in the midst of the final selection process (as seen above) and are extremely excited about how the submissions are turning out so far.

This year, it all goes down November 9th and 10th.

We'll keep you posted on progress and process - in the meantime, check out the results of Hack Days 2010.

We're excited to share the second installment of our Babies for Yum! campaign for Plum Organics — the Quest for Yum! Odopod conceived and produced this whimsical video in which our baby hero explores the world of Yuck and Yum in search of the tastiest food.

As with our our caption contest on Facebook, the program is highly-targeted to modern moms and designed to thrive on the "authentic" and social web.

Our media strategy is focused on mom-centric blogs and causal online gaming sites where our target audience consumes, shares and engages with content.

Big thanks to our friends at Adobe for calling on Tim to chat about HTML, Flash and our work at Odopod. This video was featured during Adobe MAX October 1-5, 2011. Check it out.

Though we didn't exactly win Design Dodgeball 2011, we definitely had a solid showing, surpassing last year's performance tenfold. In fact, we killed it through the semi-finals and lost with our heads held high against a worthy adversary, frog design.

Here's the team looking especially deadly in our highly intimidating uniforms designed by the talented, Mr. Jason Hardy. We'll be back in the game next year and next year, we're out for blood.

Starting tomorrow through September 8th, Telly Koosis, Senior Developer at Odopod will join 350+ other Django developers at DjangoCon in Portland, Oregon. Django is Odopod's preferred back-end framework, which makes this conference simply too important to miss.

We've used Django on some of our most robust websites, including IWC.com, DonQ.com, and even our own site – odopod.com. With Django, we can create a rich variety of experiences, develop rapidly with the core features needed for content management systems, and access Django's vibrant community to easily extend its core capabilities.

For Telly, DjangoCon is not just about the sessions. We're sending him on a mission to find people who want to join our team. We’re looking for people of varying skill-levels who are passionate about Django (including the sysadmin bits) who also enjoy pixel-perfect front-end coding. Our developers all share an interest in design and user experience in addition to writing great code.

Of course, we're also interested in meeting freelancers, development agencies, and related technology vendors. So, If you're at DjangoCon this week and want to learn more about Odopod, say hello and we'll connect you with Telly.

The Small Agency of the Year Awards was held in Denver last night to honor and celebrate the work of small and mid-sized agencies around the world. Presented by AdAge and Creativity, the annual event is designed for agencies to gather and discuss the unique challenges faced by today’s market.

Founder and Creative Director Tim Barber was present at the conference to accept the honor of Small Agency of the Year, West Region in which Odopod was co-named with Zambezi, an agency in Venice, California.

AdAge quotes, "[Odopod's] 55-person shop's clients include Sony, Electronic Arts, Tesla Motors, Google and IWC. While Odopod does traditional advertising and branding, what caught the judges' eyes were the retail experiences it created for Tesla, the Trends Dashboard and website it created for Google, and the EA Download Manager, which did for EA Sports' PC games what iTunes did for Apple."

We're extremely thrilled to be recognized for our work in both communications, UI innovation and product work. This combination allows us to step out of the box and innovate for our clients at a fundamental business level.

Odopod was also recently recognized as one of the “Top 25 West Coast Agencies to Watch” by iMedia - a group that closely monitors and recognizes the agencies that move, shape and lead digital. Odopod was named as a key agency that has advanced interactive marketing through big ideas, brilliant creative, cutting-edge technology and pursuit of excellence in the digital space.

Thank you to everyone who continues to celebrate our work. With so many big things happening here, we couldn't be more proud and thankful to be recognized for all that we're doing.

We learned a lesson pretty early on as we tried to figure out what to do with our live stream on FWATV: if you want to make something cool, give it to the nerds.

Since we've given our development team the camera and the freedom to do with it whatever they wished, we've gotten nothing but exceptionally cool experiments in live video by hooking up Processing and Kinect applications to our feed.

We've applied various "filters" that react to movement in our studio space. To name a few, we've had a filter that makes the scene look like a giant, moving painting, a filter that applies tiny bursts of pink bubbles that appear when anyone moves, and a Kinect application enabling odopodders to draw via hand tracking.

Check out the gallery of filters we've used so far and tune in each Thursday from 2-3pm PST on FWATV as we continue to experiment with live video using Processing, Kinect, and whatever else we can dream up.

We're extremely pleased to announce our ongoing digital agency of record relationship with Plum Organics, maker of delicious, premium and organic foods for babies and toddlers. Odopod has been working with Plum to design and launch a digital strategy that brings its personality to life in fresh and engaging ways to capture the hearts of the Modern Mom. With an appetite for innovation, we've been working with their team on the 2011 campaign which recently kicked off with the Babies for Yum! caption contest on Facebook.

For the contest, Odopod conceived and designed a custom application that allows participants to create, vote and share out entries to their social graph, encouraging deep engagement and viral spread. In just the first three weeks of an eight-week program, Plum has already garnered tremendous results including a huge increase in their fan base with over 37,000 fans to date.

We can't wait to see how the campaign grows as we continue to craft new initiatives through 2011. Visit Plum Organics on Facebook »