This stunning photograph illustrates a new technique used in this study of the pouring of champagne.

A dynamic-tracking technique using IR thermography was used to visualize the cloud of gaseous CO₂ released when pouring champagne.

The findings of the research, illustrated by the graph above, were not that surprising – pouring gently along the wall like beer and chilling the champagne reduced the “loss” of CO₂.

The real question is what is left in the champagne and what level should that be?

I bought this interesting packet of potato chips (crisps to others) a few days ago as I was interested to see the face of a white housewife seemingly advertising chips on the supermarket shelf.

However it turns out to be something quite different which seems to me to be an interesting take on product design.

Simba have set up a competition allowing consumers to design their own flavours and submit these for consideration. The competition brought in 180 000 suggestions which were reduced to 20 and eventually the 4 winners now appearing online ready for your vote.

There was also competition on the supplier side with flavour houses being challenged to come up with flaours for the new products.

The winner will receive R 200 000 and 1% of all sales of the product for its life. The public voting for their preferred flavour can win weekly prizes of R 500 and two prizes from the final draw of R 50 000.

What do I think about it? – a brilliant marketing and product definition exercise but unfortunately although the Look up and Run Chicken had a new and interesting flavour, any taste of snoek or achaar were missing from Brendan Johnston’s chip!

By the way Walkie Talkie in this case refers to chicken heads and feet! which are also called Look Up and Runs. So a nice South African feel to the competition!

It will be interesting to see how it develops from here. Let me know what you think of this and watch this blog or subscribe to the RSS feed to hear how this develops.

Just days after the iPad went on sale in Australia Pizza Capers were talking about how they planned to use the iPad as part of their ordering and service system!

“The new iPads can be used as a Point-of-Sale terminal but staff can also bring them out from behind the counter to take orders from customers in the queue or in the dining area, making them super convenient,” Geizler said.

“We have always been early adopters of new technology – and these iPads are shaping up as a real bonus for us because of their portability, reliability, and because they are a real talking piece among our customers.”

Geiszler said the use of the iPad would save time when taking dine-in orders as they would go directly to the pizza chefs in the kitchen without needing to be re-entered into the order system.

The company is also developing an application for iPad and iPhone that will let them “jump the queue” by placing orders directly instead of lining up.

Posted via email from digivu’s posterous

So now we need to grow our vegetables under cover to stop “the critters” soiling them and effecting our health?

Reminds me of the reaction when you suggest sun drying to someone as an appropriate technology. The immediate reaction is “but what about the safety” not realising the majority of the worlds dried fruit is sun dried.

Which in turn illustrates the marketers “skill” to have come up with the natural sun dried concept to the upper income shoppers at Woolworths, five years ago.