Hamster Shredder

Tom Ballhatchet's hamster-powered paper shredder. Via Core77 design blog.

Design for the other 90%

"Design for the Other 90%" is a new exhibition running through Sept. 23 at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City focusing on sustainable innovation. A few of its highlights will be familiar: The Katrina Furniture Project, the One Laptop Per Child initiative and Lifestraw (pictured), for instance, have both received generous media attention.

In featuring more than 30 innovative tools—each of which addresses issues such as safe drinking water, shelter, health and sanitation, education, and transportation—curator Cynthia Smith hopes to illuminate the critical need for humanitarian design. "It's a call to action," says Smith, who has worked for the Lee Skolnick Architecture + Design Partnership and studied at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "We're trying to show that design can change lives."

While these consumers face many issues—poor shelter, limited medical care, and substandard school systems—developing appropriate solutions is easier said than done. To craft low-cost, high-impact remedies, like the ones featured in "Design for the Other 90%," Smith says innovators must "get creative." "There's more than one way to fix the world's problems," she explains, adding that roughly 2.8 billion people live on less than $2 a day. "We're trying to showcase a variety of solutions."

Read more and see a slideshow of some of the innovations at Businessweek online.

NPD in Amsterdam

Postcard 'poop scoop' with fold out bag. Bio-degradable and recycled. Of course.

Balti Wine

Following on from the success of Cobra Beer which cashed in on Brits' love of curry and beer, Balti Wine hopes to capture wine/curry lovers.

The Independent reports:

“One in four people in Britain eats a curry at least once a week. Couple this with British people's growing love of wine and you'll see why Ashraf Sharif's business idea has been such a hit. Balti Wine, his simple range of five wines to complement spicy foods, is already revolutionising the drinking habits of curry lovers and the company looks set to grow from strength to strength.

"It's no gimmick," insists Sharif, 53, whose headquarters are in Newton Heath, Manchester. Indeed, it took four years of extensive research in collaboration with Manchester University's food science department, and samples from around the globe, before Sharif and his advisers were happy with the grape selections.

"At first, Indian wines seemed the obvious answer, but we found people didn't like them because they're not used to them," he says, explaining that the wines they eventually chose come from the Southern Hemisphere. The New World, he explains, tends to make wines that have an upfront fruity style that complements the spice in the food.

"These wines - three whites and two reds - each have a 'chilli rating' from one chilli to five, helping drinkers to choose which one is appropriate for their selected food," he adds.

Since the company's launch in 2004, Balti Wine has sold over 700,000 bottles, which retail at between £10 and £15 in restaurants. Sharif now supplies 65 per cent of the North-west's Indian restaurants and six per cent of all Indian restaurants nationally. "Between 50 to 100 restaurants a day are taking on Balti Wines," he says.”

Having secured VC funding, Balti Wine now has plans to expand into the States. One to watch.

Well Golly

• Five hundred Britons are leaving the UK every day to live in the sun or find work abroad, according to the Office of National Statistics. A record 380,000 people left the country in 2005.

• Comics account for 25% all book sales in South Korea.

• Traffic injuries are the leading cause of death in people ages 10 to 24 around the world, according to the World Health Organisation.

• Nearly 182,000 new items were launched globally during 2006, according to market analysts Mintel. Food and drink products made up nearly 105,000 of the releases - around 290 new goods for every day of the year.

• More than a third of American adult internet users (36%) consult the citizen-generated online encyclopedia Wikipedia, according to a new nationwide survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. And on a typical day in the winter of 2007, 8% of online Americans consulted Wikipedia.