Congratulations to our clients and friends at Better Place who are featured on the cover of the September issue of Wired.  We’re excited to be working with some great people making an important impact on our environment.

Odopod was hired by Better Place to build a digital movement to help people live free from oil.  Today, Odopod launched the company’s 10 Words campaign. Better Place is asking everyone to create their own minifesto answering the question in 10 words or less: “Why do you think we must end our addiction to oil?” By creating a minifesto, people from around the world are given a public platform to express their personal reasons for ending our dependence on oil.  Tell Us Your “Minifesto” >>

If you’re in line for the new 3G iPhone, you’re one of many who will soon be trying out a great video app from RhythmNewMedia (RNM) called vSNAX. This native app is a free download as of July 10th and Odopod is proud to have designed it.

vSNAX was among one of the first twenty featured titles in the App Store, and it’s currently ranked #33 in downloads—From the store ranking and the user comments, it seems to be a standout application!

vSNAX delivers premium mobile video clips to iPhone and iPod touch users from multiple media partners like MTV Networks and Spike TV.

We were excited about working on this mobile app with RNM, who was a perfect partner. Work began a nimble design process (7.5 weeks) in April and produced an interface that allows RNM’s dynamic content to shine. Highlights of the application include a sophisticated video viewing and browsing experience, interactions that take advantage of the iPhone carousel behavior and accelerometer, and an elegant ad delivery system.

Check it out yourself on the iPhone App Store >>

Looking for something sweet, salty or super small? Check out the delicious new Clifbar Mini and Mojo Dipped products we just launched on CLIFBar.com!

Nike Skateboarding scooped an American Design Award, winning first place in the 2008 Winter Semi Annual Design Contest in the Web Design/ Flash category. So far this year, the website (our third for Nike Skateborading) has been a finalist for a Cannes Lion (clothing, footwear & accessories) and a Webby Award (best sports website).

We built the new site in Flash for fluid interactivity, yet it’s designed and built for speed—to be responsive and fast-rendering like HTML. The focus is mostly on great content, but we also wanted the site to be useful –for skaters and Nike Skateboarding. For example, we made a Yahoo! map mash up that shows every skate store that carries NikeSB. Then we hooked everything up to a CMS that makes it simple for either Odopod or Nike Skatebarding to add to the site: new photos, videos, products, stories… whatever. This is what really keeps it fresh.

See for yourself >>

1. The site was built entirely in AS3. We’ve found it fairly easy to transition from AS2.

2. We used the CASA AS3 framework, which standardizes the code across a project. This increases efficiency and becomes a great plus when you have several developers collaborating on a project.

3. Eclipse + SVN. Eclipse is our development environment of choice. It makes our development easier and more efficient. Using SVN is an indispensable requirement on a project of this magnitude.

4. Video played a big role on the site. We used Sorenson Squeeze as a compression suite, especially for video shots requiring alpha channel.

5. Bitmap data and math was used to create the kaleidoscope. Performance is far better than running different videos at the same time.

6. Built-in Perlin Noise algorithm in Bitmap data (combined with a Blur Filter) was used to create fog found drifting across the site. This coded fog ended up being more dynamic and lightweight than creating fame-by-frame animations or videos.

7. The particle system in The Infinite Solo was code-generated. Again, more efficient and dynamic than a heavy animation or video.

8. A Displacement Map Filter was used to create the rippling effect in the Chamber of the One-Gallon Axe ceiling.

9. Adobe JPEG Encoder was used in the Vanity’s Lens to compress the bitmaps into JPEG data before sending the image to the server. What this means is that the image compression is done on the client side reducing server processing and bandwidth needed.

10. Amps in Balloon Scene in the Interactive video where built using BOX2D, an open-source 2D physics engine for games.

The universe of White Gold is about a million times more fantastic than our world. To make the story of Is It Me, Or Do You Love My Hair? real we did a huge amount of compositing in post.

Here’s a peek into the epic production that was shooting White Gold’s first interactive rock video: Is It Me, Or Do You Love My Hair? It went down on a sound stage at The Culver Studios.

Honda Color Explorer from Odopod on Vimeo.

Odopod created a set of three touchscreen kiosks - a color explorer, car configurator and environmentology timeline.  In this video, Odopod ACD Geoff Dowd gets his hands on a floor model at the LA auto show.

We actually can’t say much more than that. For now, the best we can do is point you here for a taste.