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.

When Tim, Dave and I started Odopod in 2000, I had a personal goal. I wanted to create a healthy work environment – one that encourages diverse interests outside of work; one in which we would respect and like our clients (and in turn, they us); and most importantly, one where people (including me) would enjoy spending at least forty hours per week.

Odopod now has 60 uber-talented people, and we're growing as carefully as ever. With the Nurun acquisition, we join a network of 1,000+ experts all over the globe (Montreal, Paris, Shanghai, Barcelona, etc). It's a time of tremendous opportunity as well as of considerable vulnerability. I know from past experience that an acquisition can threaten the very culture and systems that made us successful.

Odopod and Nurun are committed to protecting and perpetuating the unique culture and energy of Odopod. In this spirit, I have taken on a new role, overseeing the integration of Odopod and Nurun. It's my responsibility to ensure that the quality of our work, the happiness of our employees, and the intimate attention we give our clients remain uncompromised.

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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.

To all the interaction design applicants, there may be ambiguity on how we define the role of interaction designers. We hope this post may shed some light on what we are looking for.

Digital design is evolving

There's not much interest in designing a tree of static web pages anymore. We're being called upon to design sophisticated digital experiences across multiple devices and contexts. Interaction design is no longer primarily about information science: it's visual design + information design + motion design + pattern recognition + systems thinking.

This kind of work requires a rare individual.

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Ten years ago we created a new agency. The idea was pretty simple. We wanted to marry the culture and practices of Silicon Valley startups with those of creative agencies.

Our first assignments and clients were incredibly diverse — from designing software for startups to creating digital campaigns for big brands.

Back then, this made Odopod an anomaly.

It took about nine years longer than we expected but the landscape has changed around us. Now clients seek us out for our unique combination of expertise with software design and brand thinking. Increasingly, they see it as essential for everything from product innovation to marketing.

As a result, we're enjoying the best years in the company's history and producing our best work ever.

Now it's time for us to make our next big move.

For the next ten years, we want to charge ourselves with a new ambition. We want to raise the bar even higher — for the work we do and for the clients we engage.

And we're not doing it alone.

Today, we're officially announcing that Odopod is merging with Nurun, the largest independent digital agency in the world.

This merger gives us the platform we've been looking for — one that enables us to do even more innovative work and to deliver that work anywhere in the world.

Nurun's outstanding technology pedigree will help us innovate across even more platforms. Their international presence and leadership will help us expand into new markets alongside our clients.

Together, Odopod and Nurun have an impressive combination of reach, depth and talent.

We're genuinely excited about the next ten years and are looking forward to starting this new chapter with the Odopod team as well as all of our clients, partners and friends.

This summer, I was given the amazing opportunity to pioneer the first design internship at Odopod after meeting with founder Tim Barber at RIT’s Industry Day. From my first day, I felt like a part of the Odopod family.

Right away, I became heavily involved with major projects for both IWC and DonQ, working on interface design, user experience, and motion studies that kept me busy throughout the summer. I was also delegated to conquer some design and development for internal projects as well.

As the team became more confident in my skills, I was given more work and more responsibility. By the end of the summer I had done everything from animating an After Effects motion study to coding HTML/CSS and designing web pages. I even had the opportunity to render stylized 3D assets, making my summer experience extremely well rounded.

Working at Odopod has really boosted my knowledge of the industry and has greatly enhanced my skills as a designer. I had the privilege of working alongside a team of incredible designers who were always ready to answer my questions, show me helpful shortcuts, and share special design techniques to improve my work and help me become more efficient.

Perhaps the most important part of the experience was learning how to work with a full team that included strategists, designers, developers, creative directors, and producers. From client meetings to lunch breaks, everything I did was always a part of a team effort. I was honored to be included on a team of people with such similar interests and personalities to my own.

I am thrilled to have had such a wonderful experience working here at Odopod. The "odopeeps" are a fun and energetic group of people that made me excited to get up and go to work each day and tackle challenges for huge clients. I am now looking forward to taking my newly acquired knowledge and skills back into the classroom so I can make my senior year the best one yet.

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.

This Wednesday, The FWA is launching its newest project, FWAwebTV.

Basically, a huge group of renowned agencies around the world will be streaming live video from their office spaces, each for one hour at a time. The lineup includes some of our great agency friends and promises to be a pretty neat look at the agencies you love, nearly 24 hours a day.

Of course, Odopod will be there too, streaming live every Thursday at 2pm PST. There might be some excitement. There may even be danger. But mostly, you'll get a chance to take a look inside our sweet office space and catch the studio hard at work.