Pictured above:

I went looking for the future in Las Vegas. From the moment I walked into the first hall of the Consumer Electronics Show I was adrift in a sea of 3D TVs, bedazzled iPhone cases, iPad wannabes and a myriad of lifestyle headphones. “Beats” by Dre have been popular for some time, but have you heard about “Street” by 50? Or, “Soul” by Ludacris? Perhaps you’ve heard of “Chambers” by Rza? Then there was the candy colored assortment from iWave, iLuv and Nixon. One thing is clear — lifestyle headphones are more than a fleeting fad.

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By sheer quantity, you’d probably surmise that the future is all about TV. Ultra-thin and ultra-big — one was 84 inches! 3D in every flavor — including the new kind with no glasses required. (Speaking of glasses, I saw a TV that up to four people could all simultaneously watch different programs by wearing special glasses with built-in earbuds. I didn’t try it, but I can tell you that without the glasses it could possibly cause seizures).

The 4K and 8K TVs that offer four to eight times the pixel resolution were certainly impressive. Sadly, it may only be an alternate future in which the broadcast industry supports these formats.

For me, TVs that boasted facial recognition and took voice commands showed the most promise. I’m ready to ditch my many remotes and own a TV that knows what volume I like it set at and can pull up my favorite show, based on a verbal description.

“Hey TV, play that episode of 30 Rock when Jack talks to his TV.”

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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.

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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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 Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Atomic Age, the Jet Age, the Space Age and the Information Age - every technological era has brought about profound effects on socioeconomic and cultural conditions. They've reshaped human behavior and reset reality.

But, before the full effects of each of these technological developments have taken hold and fully permeated the collective understanding, people and businesses undoubtedly found themselves navigating a strange "in-between" time - a time where future visions are uncomfortably mingled with legacy artifacts and pre-existing expectations.

Today, in the Connected Age, technological innovations are bringing about seismic shifts in our reality every day. The dust is far from settled, and perhaps, it never will be. For businesses and brands this uncertain and unpredictable landscape is wrought with danger. Red herrings, pitfalls and fruitless dead-ends surround us, while opportunity is elusive.

But fear not, Larry Johnson (Odopod's Associate Director of Strategy) and I (Director of Brand and Strategy) have been hard at work cataloging the common mistakes, collecting helpful techniques and distilling best practices to survive and thrive in today's in-between times. We've compiled them neatly, into a presentation of course, and would love the opportunity to share them with you, our industry friends and peers at SXSW 2012.

But we need your help. Please vote for our SXSW session: Danger is Everywhere: Illuminating common pitfalls of marketing's in-between times and take a peek at some example slides here.

This preview is just a taste of what's to come. We promise to keep it short, sweet and useful so send us a vote and we'll see you there.

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.