Raise your glasses to a corker idea

By PATRICK COCKBURN

MOSCOW - I have always had a slightly queasy feeling at parties in Moscow when the host turns to me and suggests I make a toast. Russians are good at this. Most foreigners are not. My mind goes unpleasantly blank as I try to think of something witty but apposite to say.

Now an engineer named Dmitri Zhurin has invented a talking vodka bottle cap. It takes care of all the rituals of Russian drinking without human intervention. The voice synthesis chip starts as soon as you open the bottle. I am not sure I could ever, without a quiver of embarrassment, raise my glass and say: "To the beauty of the women gathered here this evening, which outshines the splendour of nature." But in future I may not need to because the bottle cap will do the toasting for me.

The problem about drinking in Russia is that it is difficult to stop after a few glasses without causing offence. Toast succeeds toast for hours on end. It is easier to be holier-than-thou about this. Social drinking in Russia usually takes place in friends' homes and it is not easy to break free.

Zhurin, president of Information Technologies and Electronic Machines, is bemused by the interest in his device. He insists that he was sober when he invented it.

He recalls that he was sitting in his office with some colleagues holding a cork in his hands when "I just had an idea: It would be nice to make the cork do the toasting."

"Everybody laughed at first and then we began to think about it and concluded that we could make it."

Ten patents later, the talking vodka bottle cap is about to go into production at a cost of $7-$17 each. In addition to making toasts, the cap, its voice becoming slurred as the evening goes on, sings songs and produces all the uproarious background noise of a Russian party.

It also reproduces some annoying little habits such as asking: "How about another one?" It then immediately makes glugging sounds as it pours a full glass of vodka without waiting for an answer.

Zhurin, once a high-powered Soviet military researcher, is refreshingly low-key about his approach to technology. He says that if he was transported into the middle of the third millennium and only allowed to take a few items with him "I would probably take a book rather than a telephone or a computer." His approach is to use high technology to make everyday items - such as bottle caps - more interesting.

After starting up his company Zhurin looked for Russian investment and got nowhere at home or in the West.

He laughs ruefully as he recalls meetings with American and British venture capitalists whom he found depressingly bureaucratic in their approach.

"They wanted endless business plans, information about my health and the health of my grandmother."

But he adds that this is now changing and for the first time Russians are prepared to invest.

- INDEPENDENT