We often end the week hosting a 'show and tell' session, with Crowd folk in London and Amsterdam united via Skype and learning something new (over a beer, obviously), either from a project we've just wrapped up or another interesting source. But then some weeks we just eat poppadoms...

More specifically, some bright spark suggested a poppadom eating competition. Participants had three poppadoms and a variety of condiments – yeah, we know, hardly a marathon stretch but time was a bit tight. The aim was to eat them as quickly as possible and, with a time of one min 33 secs, Michael Chan was declared the victor, proving the ‘stacking’ technique as being the most effective. Bravo Michael.

Here’s some of the more flattering photos from the event.

Some exciting and well deserved promotions to report at Crowd DNA, as we embark on a spot of restructuring to help us to optimise the quality of our work and the strength of our client relationships...

Chris Haydon, previously one of our associate directors, is promoted to the role of insight & innovation director. Sarah Brierley, also previously an associate director, moves up into the role of strategic initiatives director. They now join commercial director Kelvin Amos and managing director Andy Crysell in making up the senior UK team, with strategic initiatives director Lydia Jones heading up the Amsterdam office.

Also in the UK, Claire Moon has been promoted to associate director from her former role at senior consultant.

Big congrats to all.

Congrats to Crowd's innovation knowledge leader, Aurelie Jamard, for being the latest recipient of our seriously prestigious Kling Klang award - dished out quarterly to the Crowd bod who's really, really delivered (not that we don't all really, really deliver, natch)...

Aurelie has masterminded some fantastic multi-phase development work for one of our telecomm clients; next to juggling commitments across a number of other noteworthy trends projects, co-hosting our brilliant Youth Club event and generally furthering the cause of innovation at Crowd DNA with much energy and gusto. Check out some of her posts for Wired’s Innovation Insights blog

This is blog post number one on Crowd DNA website number three. We hope you like it (the website; not the blog post)...

We’ve loved our last two websites (getting through three websites in six years is about right, we reckon, considering the pace of design/UX evolution), but we love this one even more. It allows us to share our cultural edge in greater detail; to tell better stories. We’d best get typing…