2005

The scent of chocolate is now being incorporated into a new packaging method with hopes that it will induce impulse purchasing in would-be consumers. ‘Chocolatine,’ as the product is being called, doesn’t have any specific product ties yet. At this stage, it’s basically a new style of glass capsule designed to emit fragrances and distribute them over long periods of time. The project combines technologies from Eastman Chemical Company, Eurofragance, Rotuba and EJ Pack.

Rotuba is responsible for the development of the jar lid that captures the fragrance of Chocolatine, which also has notes of vanilla and orange. In time, project developers say that the smelly packaging could be used to market products such as DVDs. Also, here’s a Chocolatine press release from EMG.

[via Slashfood]

New additions to the brand directory

• Mont Blanc, the luxurious pen-maker
• NIVEA, the cream company
• OpenOffice, the open source office software
• Toyota, the car producer

The Austrian mobile phone provider A1 has got an interesting showroom located on a main shopping street in Vienna. Built on 700m² it features a very modern interior design and futuristic computer interfaces to provide the guest with multimedia information. After all those flashy, trendy and shiny presentations visitors can go upstairs to relax at the bar.

The building is split into entry hall with terminals, (good) cocktails on the 1st floor and a shop in the cellar. What makes the shop stand out is that you get a virtual shopping cart (zombie-handy) on which you save your buyings, then move on to the cashier to checkout. So you don’t actually have to carry around real boxes.

After one year of existence the company now re-evaluated the concept and will change the location of the areas. The shop moves to the first floor, the bar will be located in the cellar with a new club concept.

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Cool nails branded with Sprite, Oreo, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, …

[via la parte contratante, in Spanish]

For christmas, I would like to get this watch, designed by Philippe Starck.

It is based on L.E.D. technology and time or date are presented when the appropriate button is pressed.

Nothing special you say but look how pretty L.E.D. can be and apart from the extra-ordinary design, it is not that expensive ($125). For a Starck.

L.E.D. digital

[via Indeterminacion]

Mentos, the German Freshmaker has just put online a funny and pretty enjoyable advergame called Sheep Volley.

The more or less innovative part of the game is that users can take pictures of their sheep while playing, then send them off to their friends. You can earn even more points if you manage to collect Mentos candies during the game.

[found at Adverblog]

I have developed a new feature for the Brand Directory.
It is a small but powerful spider-engine who finds pages on corporate websites. So for example, if you want to find the About page on Apple’s website directly this should be handy.

Here’s a screenshot of the Apple page in the Brand Directory

More Brands with “Pages found”:

• Asics
• Nokia
• Pepsi
• Pizza Hut
• Starbucks

Thanks to Alexander Kirk for his technical help.

Renault is online with a new game “Clio Xtrem Racer: Race to resurrection”. The gamer at the wheel of “ghost” car races against the time for reincarnation into New Clio. This futuristic racing game developed by Publicis Net France challenges gamers to experience cool jumps, loops and a blazing speed simulation.

Inspired from the video game launches, they have run a viral campaign in order to create word-of mouth before releasing the game. By creating a fake game studio identity – PNet Entertainment – and a fake website –CliXr: Race to resurrection- Publicis sent the teaser and the trailer of our game to webmasters of blogs and websites specialized in video games.

For those who want to play every time everywhere the downloadable version of game is also available on the website.

Play it here

Tasty cheese logo from the brand “Gouda Jung”.
Spotted at a supermarket in Berlin, Germany

My friend Alex had a great idea: to get rid of all those bookmarklets one has in his/her toolbar: “add to delicious, add to newsgator, add to bloglines, blog this with wordpress, …”
You get the point.

blummy is a tool for quick access to your favorite web services via your bookmark toolbar.

It consists of small widgets, called blummlets, which make use of Javascript to provide rich functionality (such as bookmarklets). It works on almost every page on the web. Just click on it at your toolbar.

I designed the logo for him, did a little bit of CSS tweaking and added some bookmarklets.

Check it out at blummy.com

When Visa’s founders sat around a table in Northern California in 1969, they could hardly have imagined its metamorphosis from a lending instrument tied to a plastic card, to a global entity processing more than US$3 trillion a year.

Today, Visa is much more than a credit card company and while incremental changes have been made to the logo, the Visa brand has hardly changed in the intervening 30 years.

The new, evolved brand architecture was presented to member banks earlier this year and it is obvious that the task of moving to the new brand framework is massive. More than one billion cards and 20 million merchants will adopt the new design as part of the normal business process.

What has changed?

• The “V” in Visa has been enhanced with an original gold accent
• The banners used as borders will disappear and the word-mark will be more prominent
• Flexibility – the evolved Visa brand now works equally well on cards, computer screens, PDAs and shop windows
• the Visa dove hologram now resides on the back of the card and is integrated with the magnetic stripe, which makes the card less vulnerable to fraud and secondly increases the space for partnering companies on the front side by 65%.

The new Visa brand and identity will go live later this year when Visa member banks start to issue cards with the new format and look. Given that there are more than one billion cards in circulation, the company expects a transition period of three to five years.

More about VISA in the Brand Directory

Full interview with John Elkins

and because I’m a millionaire I bought a whole 6 blocks, enormous chunks of pixels on the Million Quarter Webpage. Hey, I got 2 blocks for free!

This is how it looks like:

Maybe you think this is a waste of money but I want to give it a try and find out:

• how much visitors the picture attracts on the millionquarterwebpage
• how the link influences google, alexa rank and other search engine rankings
• how helpful the Alt/Title Tag is
• in what time these positive changes occur and when they will tail off

The Alexa Traffic Rank curve looks pretty good. If only my stocks would fly that high. But I never really knew what to think of this whole ranking thing anyway. So I guess this is also a test for Alexa.

I’ll keep you updated with some thoughts and stats.

Update 22 OCT 2005

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DM9 DDB, Sao Paulo for Antarctica Beer (Brazil)