Pictured above, some of the passionate creators at SAY Media’s Create conference this year:

Recently, I participated in SAY Media’s Create conference with an inspiring group of passionate people who are all creating amazing content and building culture around the things they love.

The event got me thinking about the future of media — and how brands can best position themselves alongside “passionate” content to foster more meaningful connections with their customers.

Media creation and consumption continues to fracture and expand into every conceivable space. What once were a few trusted sources has become an ever-expanding universe of niche players. Never before has there been more content available in more places. However, consumers and creators are often overwhelmed, finding it difficult to know what’s relevant, and to connect with others who care about the same things they do.

For brand marketers, this landscape has become frightfully convoluted, proving to be a difficult ground to find reliable tactics for consistent success — particularly when it comes to connecting meaningfully with their target audiences.

So, how are people discovering media today? What draws them in? What inspires them to engage and what compels them to come back for more?

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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.

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending the Eyeo Festival, a gathering of the world's best data visualizers, creative coders, and other like-minded folks. Over three packed days, sessions tackled thought-provoking topics such as the role of data visualization in social justice and how the seemingly absurd can contribute towards the greater good. Speakers presented groundbreaking work, some for the first time. Interspersed were workshops ranging from an introductory course to physical computing with the SparkFun ProtoSnap Arduino board, to a hands-on "conditional drawing" lab. In all, it was an incredibly inspiring experience.

Energized by the conference, I took a quick stab at making a few of my own visualization experiments, focusing on the subjects closest at hand: fellow employees at Odopod. Here’s an example of one question I attempted to answer: Assuming work begins at 10AM, what does everyone's morning commute look like? Using self-reported data from Odopod's own, I was able to plot a simplified visualization of the daily morning migration.

Click here to see the visualization in action »

What you’re seeing is a simplified map of the Bay Area, with the starting points of various Odopod employees, flashing as they leave the house in the morning. Hover on the dots to reveal who they represent, click & drag the bar graph to scrub through the timeline. In a future version, we might plug this in to Google Map's API and try to implement intelligent path-finding, or explore differentiation between transportation methods (such as drivers vs. walkers). For now though, I think it's a fun little diversion that lets us make some observations that we normally wouldn't be able to.

I look forward to utilizing the skills I’ve learned in future projects here at Odopod.

Odopod started at the end of 2000. It was the dawn of the “Digital Decade.” Over the past ten years, we’ve grown from a small digital studio to a fifty-plus strategically-minded digital agency. Meanwhile, the Internet has evolved from being something people use – to how people live.  

People are boldly adopting new ways of using digital. We are empowered by our personal devices and social networks to try things that might have previously seemed too difficult, time-consuming or expensive. Cultural shifts are taking place at a massive scale to how we shop, communicate, read, consume media, play games, bank and work.

How and when did this happen?

Rewind to 2001.

The dot-com bubble had just burst. Still, there were high expectations and optimism for the Internet. The decadence and “get rich quick” schemes of the dot-com era gave way to innovation and “stuff that works.” With a glut of used furniture, office space and brilliant minds, it was a great time to start a new kind of company.

Continued after the jump »

Odopod designer Dan Becker has done something many of us have wanted to do: publish a book. Go Dan! And not only that, he's published a book about design... and beer! What could be better?

Beer: A Genuine Collection of Cans is an incredible photographic journey of vintage beer cans. He covers some brief histories, shares interesting details on unique designs and brands and brings us some crazy flavors like "Pink Champale" (which is some malted champagne beer hybrid, FYI).

You may ask where one unearths such a collection of vintage goodness. And thanks to Dan's step-father Josh Russo, we have an answer. Dan explains, "I had been aware of my step-dad’s collection for years, but had only known it to be stored in cardboard boxes around the house. It wasn’t until he put the cans on display in the basement that I got a true sense of how extensive the collection really was."

His family basement! Amazing.

The book has also been really well received across foodie, design and culture blogs as seen on Cool Hunting, epicurious and NotCot. We're proud to see the personal work of one our designers get the attention it deserves.

Pick up your copy at Chronicle Books or Amazon and as always, the book can be followed on Facebook and Twitter.

Congrats to Dan! Now go buy his book.

Every Halloween, odosketch artists create some amazing, spooked-out sketches. This year, we've gathered up some of our favorite creatures and characters that make these fall festivities so much fun, created by the talented people of odosketch.

Happy Halloween!

Tim Barber is a founder and the executive creative director at Odopod in San Francisco. For the past 15 years, he has practiced his craft—creating entertaining and meaningful experiences for people using new technology platforms. He draws on a unique combination of technical insight, entrepreneurial spirit and a knack for storytelling. Tim leads work for the UFC, Sony, PlayStation, Nike, MTV and Google.

You can follow him on Twitter but first, read our Egotist Briefs interview with him where he talks about creative trends, creative culture and what he looks for in the people he hires.

Creatively, how’s San Francisco doing these days?
Something weird is happening in San Francisco.

For quite a long time, it’s been home to a lot of inventive, world-changing companies — phenomenal ad agencies, graphic design studios, industrial design companies, and technology companies. And now the fences between all these creative people are being dismantled — agencies are creating apps, start-ups are inventing media properties, and big brands are learning to behave like tech startups.

When the rules change like this, it creates a huge amount of tumultuous, inventive energy.

I really enjoy it. The tumult plays to our strengths. Since we started, Odopod has had one foot in the advertising world and the other in the software world. We work comfortably on big campaigns and big applications – doing our best when they come together.

After 10 years, we’re no longer an anomaly.

Now, we’re refining the model. We want to create the equivalent of IDEO for the digital age — a company that can reveal unique insights and then martial design and technology to act on them. We want to improve the way brands and businesses operate, especially how they connect with people who use their products.

Read the full article »

Associate Technical Director, Boris Pique shares his experiences attending and speaking at this year's FITC San Francisco.

FITC had its first FlashintheCan conference in Toronto in 2002 and has since grown to become one of the most important events of its kind. What initially started as a Flash-only conference has expanded over the years to include sessions about other relevant technologies such as Processing and openFrameworks just to name a few. Even if the event is a Flash conference at its core, the broader breadth of topics is, in my opinion, a welcome approach since it’s undeniable that technologies other than Flash are better suited for certain types of work.

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Odopod Designer, Linzi Bergmann shares her experiences from this year's FITC San Francisco.

I am super excited that FITC came to San Francisco this year. The conference was smaller and more intimate than FITC Toronto, so you were able talk with and learn from the speakers on a more personal level. There were some key themes that continued to stand out throughout all of the presentations and an overwhelming amount of awesome content, topics and speakers. Here are some of my highlights from this year.

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Prototypes can serve a wide range of purposes. If you haven’t done so yet I encourage you to read previous posts in which we’ve looked at prototypes that help define the user experience and others that evaluate technical feasibility.

In this post we’ll look at another kind of prototypes, those that are used as a sales tool.

Prototypes as a sales tool
Sometimes clients come to us with very ambitious and exciting application ideas. At this point, their internal teams have spent some time giving birth to these ideas and are working towards getting them green lit to become actual products. In order for these projects to ever see the light of day, our clients usually need to get approval from stakeholders higher up in their organizations. These stakeholders are not designers or developers; they are business people. So for them to be able to fully grasp the value of these potential products it’s essential to present them with a visual depiction of how these applications might look and behave. It’s our goal to help these clients make a strong case for the investment that these projects will require when fully produced.

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