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.

We're excited to share the second installment of our Babies for Yum! campaign for Plum Organics — the Quest for Yum! Odopod conceived and produced this whimsical video in which our baby hero explores the world of Yuck and Yum in search of the tastiest food.

As with our our caption contest on Facebook, the program is highly-targeted to modern moms and designed to thrive on the "authentic" and social web.

Our media strategy is focused on mom-centric blogs and causal online gaming sites where our target audience consumes, shares and engages with content.

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.

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.

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.