Folks,
These are not just mini staves that I am talking about here. I have seen mini-staves before, but these have a toasting process they call XOV (extra oak vanilla).
I found out a little more..
This is comming out from Australia. Apparently, shipping oak (as with shipping cork) to Austrailia is rather expensive, so they experimented with different methods of toasting oak. This convection toast (XOV) is supposed to drastically increase the size of the caramelized layer of the wood, giving a much pronounced mouthfeel and extract of vanilla compounds. They found that less oak was needed to be used, thus reducing production costs.
I ordered some yesterday. I will give it a test and report back in a number of months. The issue is that they only seem to be available in 11 pound batches (1000 liter's worth of treatment) and come in an infusement bag. I plan on testing it out on a small batch by adding about 8oz to a 54 liter demi.