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.

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.

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.

We're extremely pleased to announce our ongoing digital agency of record relationship with Plum Organics, maker of delicious, premium and organic foods for babies and toddlers. Odopod has been working with Plum to design and launch a digital strategy that brings its personality to life in fresh and engaging ways to capture the hearts of the Modern Mom. With an appetite for innovation, we've been working with their team on the 2011 campaign which recently kicked off with the Babies for Yum! caption contest on Facebook.

For the contest, Odopod conceived and designed a custom application that allows participants to create, vote and share out entries to their social graph, encouraging deep engagement and viral spread. In just the first three weeks of an eight-week program, Plum has already garnered tremendous results including a huge increase in their fan base with over 37,000 fans to date.

We can't wait to see how the campaign grows as we continue to craft new initiatives through 2011. Visit Plum Organics on Facebook »

We're extremely proud to announce the launch of the newly redesigned ea.com. The new site is minimal, clean and focused, allowing EA's huge library of game content to truly shine.

Each game has a customizable and scalable page template within the unified EA platform. These templates accommodate a wide variety of content needs specific to each title, allowing game pages to feel unique to the game's core attributes. All the must know info on game titles have a home on these pages and includes as many stories, videos, pics, trailers and news items as each game has to offer.

We are thrilled to have worked with the talented people at EA on the new site and look forward to continuing our work together on all things EA.

Check it out and let us know what you think »

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.

Our partnership with Sony continues with a new launch for PIIQ - Sony's slick, new brand of headphones. The site features a multitude of finely tuned interactive details including rollover animations, subtle movements and navigational elements.

The full product lineup gives visitors huge, sexy product images, sharing tools, sweet product pairings, and the ability to add comments with Facebook integration. The PIIQ Team pages offer up inside details of new members, their gear and stats and the news section keeps fans up-to-date on all things PIIQ.

There's quite a bit of cool stuff to check out so take a look at the new Sony PIIQ and let us know what you think.

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.

Continue Reading »

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.