Over the past twelve months, Odopod has worked with a few Kinect prototypes using open source drivers in conjunction with Processing and Flash.

The most robust examples have leveraged the full body (aka skeleton) tracking provided by the OpenNI and Prime Sense NITE libraries. Unfortunately, this level of tracking requires people to pose like they're about to get a pat down from airport security. Even if you just want to track a single hand, it requires a socially awkward wave to the camera.

In February, Microsoft released the Windows version of the Kinect hardware as well as its Kinect for Windows SDK and license. The hardware itself is only nominally different, supporting experiences that are closer than possible with the XBOX hardware. The software, however enables full skeleton tracking without the need to strike any particular pose. In fact the recognition is instantaneous.

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If you're familiar with working on large template driven CMS websites, you might occasionally find yourself looking for some light weight alternatives. Perhaps you have a project that doesn't have budget for backend development but which would benefit from a powerful design template system. Or maybe you have the technical requirement for your site to use static HTML files instead of a dynamic server application. Or for whatever reason you decide you just don't need a web-based CMS admin tool.

Meet the static website generator. This is a set of tools that can compile and publish a fully static website from templates and content files. When you want to make an update, you change the content in a series of simple text files, run a publish script that generates a new version of the full site, and upload the new files to your server.

There's a whole slew of these available for various coding environments and languages. We've reviewed and worked with a few of the ruby-based ones (namely Jekyll & Bonsai). We used Jekyll for the Google for Veterans and Families project as a way to easily apply a few consistent design templates to 50 pages of content for a quick turn around. I also really enjoyed working with Bonsai on my personal site to create a very flexible page hierarchy and navigation that can be altered just by re-arranging or re-naming folders. Jekyll has a lot of community support and is intended to be more of a blogging platform than a free-form page-based website.

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By now, I expect you know that the number of people using smart-phones, tablets and other devices to access the web is increasing and is expected to one day surpass the number of people using laptop and desktop computers to get online.

To address this shift away from desktop dominance, a contemporary web strategy must:

1. provide universal access for each piece of content
2. optimize layouts for a variety of screen sizes
3. support touch gestures in addition to mouse and keyboard interactions
4. deliver optimized content for devices with limited resources
5. fully optimize key experiences for the specific contexts of use

Contemporary web development techniques make it possible to deliver on these points with a single front-end code base that adjusts to the capabilities of devices rather than building multiple sites different categories of devices (e.g. Mobile and Desktop). A single site is more cost effective to build and maintain and is also more flexible, able to accommodate new devices that don't fall cleanly into existing categories.

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Our site for Sony PIIQ features a slew of delightful, interactive elements to support this fun, young and innovative brand of headphones. Creating these features in reusable ways that could easily be applied using only flags in the HTML (and without having to edit any JavaScript or CSS) proved to be just the sort of exercise we love. In this post, we'll walk you through the process of building these interactive pieces and we'll share the thinking behind some of our decisions along the way.

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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.

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.

There is an incredible amount of potential stored within social networks and the Internet of Things.

On projects at Odopod, we've scored site contributors based on their social activities. We've provided tools for our clients to hold conversations in Twitter and bring those conversations into their sites. We've generated countless shares and likes. And we've only begun to scratch the surface.

With the continued growth of data available to us via APIs and increasingly sophisticated open source tools, we're looking forward to more and more opportunities to skim a little data and shape it into something both fun and useful.

I recently presented some related research during a brown bag lunch discussion. Here are some highlights.

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IWC.com is peppered with interactive modules designed to enhance the user's knowledge and appreciation of IWC's products and practices. At the heart of these interactions is a clean, smart and semantic markup, which provides a baseline experience for lowest-common-denominator browsers and feature sets, while acting as a content foundation for the richer experience supplied to modern browsers. There are a myriad of reasons for this progressive enhancement approach, and in this edition of our series on Building IWC.com, we'll explore the building of some of these interactive elements.

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On Wednesday, Microsoft released additional information about their upcoming SDK for the Kinect. However, if you don't want to wait for that release, there are some great alternatives available already.

To better understand the potential Kinect holds for retail and other installation work at Odopod, I've been exploring different ways to integrate Kinect into Adobe Air applications. We're using Air because it allows us to quickly build prototypes and explore this exciting new technology.

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