Portfolio January 2016

The business of life & living

The billion-dollar unicorns of silicon Valley

Thought to be imaginary, there are now over 140 of them, but does it mean the dotcom bubble is about to burst again?

from dubai to the red Planet Paul allen’s philanthropy drive

how we eat is set to change an adventure break in the wild The fuTure of foodbison herding

uae’s mars mission giVing away billions

issue121

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Portfolio.

8

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Obaid Humaid al Tayer

MANAGING PARTNER & GROUP EDITOR ian Fairservice

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Gina JOHnsOn

GROUP EDITOR mark evans [email protected]

EDITOR maTTHew POmrOy [email protected]

sENIOR ART DIRECTOR sara raFaGHellO [email protected]

sENIOR DEsIGNER rOui FranciscO [email protected]

sUb-EDITOR salil kumar [email protected]

EDITORIAL AssIsTANT lOndresa FlOres [email protected]

GENERAL MANAGER – PRODUCTION sunil kumar [email protected]

PRODUCTION MANAGER r. murali krisHnan [email protected]

PRODUCTION sUPERvIsOR veniTa PinTO [email protected]

CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER anTHOny milne [email protected] GROUP sALEs DIRECTOR craiG waGsTaFF [email protected]

INTERNATIONAL sALEs MANAGER marTin balmer [email protected]

GROUP sALEs MANAGER Jaya balakrisHnan [email protected]

sENIOR sALEs MANAGER micHael underdOwn [email protected]

Emirates takes care to ensure that all facts published herein are correct. In the event of any inaccuracy please contact the editor. Any opinion expressed is the honest belief of the author based on all available facts. Comments and facts should not be relied upon by the reader in taking commercial, legal, financial or other decisions. Articles are by their nature general and specialist advice should always be consulted before any actions are taken.

Published for Emirates by

All dollar prices throughout the magazine refer to US dollars.

THE sCIENCE bEHIND EATING84When the book Modernist Cuisine: The Art And Science Of Cooking was released in 2011 people paid more attention to the price and incredible images than the information within. But now that it’s released in interactive app form, it’s more accessible and even more influential.

The business of life & living

Exclusive to Emirates First Class and Business Class

Head Office Media One Tower, Dubai Media City, PO Box 2331, Dubai, UAE Tel +971 4 427 3000 Fax +971 4 428 2270 Dubai Media City Office 508, 5th Floor, Building 8, Dubai, UAE Tel: +971 4 390 3550 Fax: +971 4 390 4845 Abu Dhabi PO Box 43072, UAE Tel: +971 2 677 2005 Fax: +971 2 677 0124 London Acre House, 11/15 William Road, London NW1 3ER, UK

Printed by Emirates Printing Press, Dubai

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JANUARY

ISSUE 121

PORTFOLIO.

11

UPFRONT

LIVING

14INFORMATIONA map of the top 80 restaurants

17MOST WANTEDHeadphones, projectors and rides you can build

18SOLAR ENERGYWhy

20HOTEL WI-FIThe economics of why it should be free for all guests

22PAUL ALLENThe Microsoft billionaire giving away his fortune

26DAVID DE ROTHSCHILDThe Rothschild who turned his back on banking and went eco

CONTENTS

72HOTEL RESORTVelaa Private Island in the Maldives

79INVESTMENT PIECEThe Zegna 10-pocket jacket

80TIPS FROM A BOSSFrom Sir Paul Smith

83TOP TABLEOne of Asia’s finest, Andre in Singapore

86HOTELThe refurbished Hotel Les Bains in Paris

31,041 copies January - June 2015


JANUARY

ISSUE 121

PORTFOLIO.

12

FEATURES30THE FUTURE OF FOODWhat are the next trends and where is dining going?

36BISON HERDINGThe weekend break that lets you become an actual cowboy

42IS THE DOTCOM BUBBLE ABOUT TO BURST... AGAINThere are almost 150 companies valued at over $1 billion. Is that really sustainable?

50THE UAE’S MISSION TO MARSThe Emirates is becoming a player in space exploration

56TSUKIJI’S FUTUREWhat next for Tokyo’s famous fish market and the businesses within?

60CHINA’S NAPA VALLEYThe business of vinyards in a country not known for their wine... yet

CONTENTS

INTERNATIONAL MEDIA REPRESENTATIVESAUSTRALIA/NEW ZEALAND Okeeffe Media; Tel + 61 894 472 734, [email protected] BELGIUM AND LUXEMBOURG M.P.S. Benelux;

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INDIA Media Star; Tel +91 22 4220 2103, [email protected] SWITZERLAND, FRANCE/ITALY & SPAIN IMM International; Tel +331 40 1300 30, [email protected] JAPAN Tandem Inc.; Tel + 81 3 3541 4166, [email protected] NETHERLANDS giO media; Tel +31 (0)6 22238420, [email protected]

TURKEY Media Ltd.; Tel +90 212 275 51 52, [email protected] UK Spafax Inflight Media; Tel +44 207 906 2001, [email protected] USA Totem Brand Stories; Tel +1 4168475100, [email protected]


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PORTFOLIO.

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UP

FR

ON

TPO

RTF

OLI

O.

The top 80 restaurants worldwide

Of course, it’s subjective. How a top 80 restaurants list can fail to mention [insert your own favourite here] is an obvious oversight, but according to the people at San Pellegrino (who put to-gether the annual list), this is as a snapshot of places that are currrently being celebrated, and as tips for dining if you are travelling to any of these countries, it’s well worth noting.

Global dining elite

BRAZIL

D.O.M.Maní

MEXICO

PujolQuintonilBiko

USA

Eleven Madison ParkLe BernardinAlineaPer SeBlue Hill at Stone BarnsThe French LaundrySaisonNomadMomofuku KoRestaurant At MeadowoodCoiDaniel

CHILE

Boragó

PERU

CentralAstrid y GastónMaido

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15

Global dining elite

AUSTRALIA

AtticaQuay

SINGAPORE

Restaurant André(See page 83 for more information)Waku GhinJaan

THAILAND

GagganNahm

INDIA

Indian Accent

SOUTH AFRICA

The Test Kitchen

AUSTRIASteirereck

NORWAYMaaemo

DENMARKNomaRelaeGeraniumAmass

SWEDENFävikenRestaurant Frantzén

JAPANNarisawaNihonryori RyuGin

BELGIUMHertog Jan

Hof Van Cleve

HOLLANDDe Librije

GERMANYVendômeAquaTim Raue

SWITZERLANDSchloss Schauenstein

ITALYOsteria FrancescanaPiazza DuomoLe CalandreCombal Zero

SOUTH KOREARyunique

FRANCE

L’ArpègeLe ChateaubriandL’AstranceAlain Ducasse au Plaza AthénéeSeptimeL’atelier de joël robuchon parisLa maison troisgros

SPAIN

El Celler de Can RocaMugaritzAsador EtxebarriArzakAzurmendiQuique DacostaTicketsDiverxoMartin BerasateguiNerua

CHINA

Ultraviolet By Paul PairetAmber8 ½ Otto E Mezzo BombanaFu He Hui

RUSSIAWhite Rabbit

UNITED KINGDOM

Dinner By Heston BlumenthalThe LedburyThe Clove ClubHedoneThe Fat Duck

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ISSUE 121

17

UPFRONT / SPEND

MOST WANTED

1

DUCATI 1299 PANIGALE S Of all the bikes released this year, it’s this one that really wowed, and terrified, people. With 205 horsepower in a relatively light bike, you can get up to speeds of almost 300km/h in a worryingly short amount of time. Essentially a (somehow) street-legal sports racing bike, it’s a 1,285cc, V-twin mid-life crisis and probably the greatest two-wheeled ride you’ll ever experience. $31,350, ducati.com

MOST WANTED

2

INFENTO CONSTRUCTABLE RIDES Like a giant Mechano or Technics LEGO set, there are 18 different kits (for toddlers to young teens) which can be assembled with just an Allen key to create up to 11 different rides – including skis rather than wheels for winter fun. $300+, infentorides.com

3

RHA T20I HEADPHONES Award-winning, high-performance headphones featuring DualCoil tech to create realistic sound reproduction across all genres of music. Made from stainless steel using metal injection moulding for the ergonomic shape. $250, rha.co.uk

5

DOVETAIL RECORD CRATES With a nostalgic return to vinyl and a desire to own physical copies of music once again, this is a lovely way to store your records. Available in oak and wallnut, with leather handles and brass fasteners, each crate can store up to 100 LPs $225, shop.symbolaudio.com

4EPSON 3LCD PROJECTOR As TVs have grown bigger and better, so projectors have fallen out of favour, but this full HD 1080p film projector is three times brighter than most other models and can project your Blu-ray DVD crisply up to 300-inches in size. $800, epson.com

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upfront

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How trillions of little solar panels could power the internet of things. Words: Jeff Kettle

The tiny solar future

It could herald a great leap forward in the way we live our lives. The internet of things, the idea that objects can be interconnected via

a global network, will run your home, keep you healthy and even check how much food is in your fridge. It will mean a trillion new “smart sensors” being installed around the world by 2020. But what’s going to power these devices?

In some cases, the energy source is obvious: sensors in fridges or traffic lights can simply tap into mains electricity. But it’s much trickier to power something that

detects water quality in remote reservoirs, cracks in railway lines, or whether a farmer’s cows are happy and healthy.

Organic solar panels might be the answer. They’re cheap, and are flexible enough to power minuscule sensors whatever their shape. The cells can be just two micrometres thick – around a 50th the width of a human hair – but they are able to absorb a huge amount of light for such a thin surface.

These organic photovoltaics (OPVs) differ from silicon solar cells as they can be made entirely from specially-synthesised organic materials, which are deposited onto cheap

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/energy

So

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substrates such as PET, a form of polyester also used in soft drink bottles and crisp packets. This material is lighter, more flexible and can even be tuned to provide different colours – who said solar cells have to be plain black?

Critically, it takes just one day for OPVs to earn back the energy invested in their manufacture, known as the “energy payback time”, which compares to around one to two years for regular silicon solar cells.

Organic photovoltaics can also be moulded onto 3-D surfaces such as roof tiling or even clothing. In our latest research, colleagues and I demonstrated that this makes them more effective at capturing diffuse or slanting light. This wouldn’t make much difference for a regular solar farm in a sunny country, but cloudier places at higher latitudes would see benefits.

For the internet of things, however, these improvements are a game-changer. Few of those trillion sensors will be placed conveniently in the sunshine, facing upwards; far more will be in unusual locations where light only falls indirectly. Tiny organic solar cells will enable energy to be captured throughout the day, even indoors or when attached to clothes.

There’s no denying the huge need for such a technology. The trillion sensors figure at first seems outlandish, but consider the fact that a typical smartphone, for example, possesses around ten smart sensors that measure light, temperature, sound, touch, movement, position, humidity and more. More than a billion smartphones will be sold this year, so that’s 10 billion new sensors just in phones. And not all smart sensors

“Many smart sensors may be placed in remote locations, often far from the electricity grid or without a power connection”

are confined to smartphones, of course; they are already routinely used in personal care, environmental monitoring, security and transport.

Whatever the exact numbers, we can assume that many, many more sensors will be deployed in future and their complexity and usefulness is growing exponentially. As a lecturer in electronic engineering my colleagues and I are interested in how we could power them all, which is what led us to organic solar. Though engineers will always try to reduce energy consumption through better design and putting sensors to “sleep” when they are not required, even ultra-low

power sensors still consume around 3.5mW (milliWatts) per measurement. Poorer quality sensors might use considerably more.

Now assuming the “average” sensor actually consumes 5mW per measurement, and assuming one measurement is

Solar photovoltaic power

made every minute and takes 30 seconds to complete, this average smart sensor will need 22 Wh (watt-hours) in a calendar year. On it’s own, this is not a substantial value and equivalent to running your TV for about five minutes.

But it all adds up. Based on this simple analysis, 1 trillion sensors will use 21,900 Gigawatt hours (GWh) per year. That’s an incredible demand on electricity grids, equivalent to the combined output from a few typical nuclear power plants. This is all before considering the extra demand needed by data centres to handle and store such large sums of information.

Yes, low-power electronics will be developed that should reduce the amount of energy that the sensors need. But, for long term operation, many sensors can’t rely upon an internal battery, as a battery has a finite energy store. This is particularly pertinent as many smart sensors may be placed in remote locations, often far from the electricity grid or without a power connection.

Therefore we must create smart sensors that can harvest their own energy from the local environment – and it’s here that organic solar technology will find its niche.

source: solarpower europe

cumulative installed capacity, mw

europe asia pacific americas china othermiddle east and africa

200,000

150,000

178,391

0

2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014

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upfront

Why it should be standard and how giving it away can make you money long term. Words: Martha C. White

Free hotel Wi-Fi

Travellers sometimes compare Wi-Fi to hot water, electricity or air – and when wireless access at a hotel shows up as a line item on their bill, they tend to make a few other

comparisons as well.“I imagine the Wi-Fi fee has to be what phones

were 30 years ago,” Brian Watkins, chief executive of the jewellery company Ritani, said. “It’s found money.” Watkins has taken to bringing along a mobile Wi-Fi hot spot to avoid daily charges of up to $25 for wireless access on business trips.

“The nicer the hotel, the more expensive the Wi-Fi is,” he said. “I expect at that price point, some things are going to be included.”

For years, free internet access has been a standard perk at limited-service hotels more likely to offer a vending machine than 24-hour room service. But at their high-end flagship brands, hotel companies have watched a growing parade of laptops, smartphones and tablets chip away at the revenue they earned from in-room telephones and entertainment.

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21

/hotels

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Data backs up travellers’ anecdotes of annoyance at paying for Wi-Fi. In the JD Power 2014 North America Hotel Guest Satisfaction Index Study, guests at luxury hotels – a category that includes JW Marriott, InterContinental Hotels & Resorts and W Hotels, among others – registered a 65-point drop in satisfaction with costs and fees when they had to pay for internet access. On a 1,000-point scale, that is a significant difference, said Jennifer Corwin, who helps run the company’s travel practice.

“It’s the value, really, not the cost,” she said. “A lot of times people just don’t like that feeling of being nickel and dimed.”

Bruce Claxton, a former design executive at Motorola, now a professor at the Savannah College Of Art And Design in Georgia who also does consulting work, said, “I resented it because I felt this to be a baseline feature.”

He said he “felt kind of forced into it”, when he found out Wi-Fi was not included in the room rate on a recent business trip to a high-end hotel.

According to Loews Hotels & Resorts, Wi-Fi charges were the top guest complaint before the

brand eliminated them at the beginning of 2014. Subsequently, guest satisfaction has risen, the hotel chain said.

“This has got to be part of the basic package,” said Chekitan Dev, a marketing professor at the Cornell University School Of Hotel Administration. He said hotels should scrap the two-speed system most are embracing, arguing that the next generation of traveller will not make the distinction between text and high-definition video.

“Given millennials’ voracious appetite for internet content the only suitable answer is free, fast and uninterrupted,” he said.

Free Wi-Fi makes for more satisfied customers, Dev said, which generates repeat business and referrals. And tying free Wi-Fi to participation in a loyalty programme is smart because loyal customers are likelier to book multiple stays and to be receptive to buying extra services.

“There’s money to be made, but the money is to be made in a non-obvious way,” he said.

“Given millennials’ voracious appetite for internet content the only suitable answer is free, fast and uninterrupted”

These days, travellers accustomed to free Wi-Fi nearly everywhere, including airports and fast-food restaurants, are less willing to pay for the growing amount of bandwidth their devices demand.

“The public’s expectation switched from ‘It’s nice when you have Wi-Fi’ to ‘You must have Wi-Fi,’” said Max Rayner, a partner at the travel consulting company Hudson Crossing. “That evolution is a problem for hotels,” he said, because hotels are discovering that charges for extra services may account for much of their profit margins.

Surcharges and fees at hotels in the United States were on track to reach a record $2.25 billion in 2014, up from $2.1 billion in 2013, according to research published last year by the New York University Tisch Center For Hospitality And Tourism.

Some major hotel brands are turning complimentary connectivity into a carrot, promising free Wi-Fi for guests who sign up for their loyalty programmes and book rooms directly through the hotel. “Now you couldn’t imagine being at home or travelling or in the airport or a restaurant and not having access to the internet,” said Lara Hernandez, vice president for digital, loyalty and partner marketing for the Americas at the InterContinental Hotels Group. “It’s a traveller expectation.”

In July 2013, InterContinental announced it would offer free internet to its loyalty programme members, a perk it added across its portfolio last year.

Others are following InterContinental’s lead. In recent months, Marriott International, Starwood Hotels & Resorts and Hilton Hotels And Resorts have introduced such plans. Hyatt began offering free Wi-Fi to all guests, whether or not they were loyalty members and regardless of how they booked, in February.

In many cases, hotels still charge for a faster tier of internet access, suitable more for streaming movies or playing online video games than for email or web surfing, although this, too, may be waived for a hotel’s best customers.

“It’s to a point today where the expectations are that Wi-Fi is expected” just as much as a clean room, running water and a comfortable bed are, said Jeff Bzdawka, Hyatt’s senior vice president for global hotel operations. “The comments through all of the channels have been very positive” since fees for access were eliminated, he said. “We were able to remove an immediate pain point.”

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Why Paul Allen’s philanthropy mirrors his passions and business approach. Words: Quentin Hardy

Giving away his billions

charity | USa

The Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen has given more than $100 million in the past year to battle Ebola in Africa, visiting doctors

who are on the front lines. He works on animal conservation there, too.

Allen has allocated much of his giving – which so far exceeds $2 billion of a $17 billion fortune – to his hometown, Seattle. His interests are diverse, including creating museums devoted to rock music and vintage computers, as well as building institutes devoted to learning about the human cell, brains and artificial intelligence.

He celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Allen Institute For Artificial Intelligence with his band, the Underthinkers, playing rhythm guitar on his vintage Strat.

“It always comes back to what you are passionate about,” said Allen, 62. Through philanthropy, he said, “you are transmitting your hopes, and keeping them going in the future”.

Most of history’s richest givers have mined their lives, looking for the most effective ways to donate money. Their charity has shaped large parts of our world, and served as a powerful marker of their times.

A long time ago, kings gave alms to win merit somewhere beyond their chance-ridden worlds. Industrialists created a kind of industrial philanthropy, creating durable institutions and seeking a kind of mass-scale moral betterment akin to a factory output of better people.

In our age of software-based technological disruption, digital billionaires look for breakthroughs that will transform society and reward individual creativity. The results are

$2bn Amount that

Paul Allen has given away to charities

$100m Given to

battle Ebola in Africa in the past 12

months

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/paul allen

mixed, but the donors seem dedicated to their models, the same way a venture capitalist keeps funding a hopeful startup.

Allen, who recently got a medal from Carnegie Corp for his giving, says he’ll give away most of his money eventually, aiming for something perhaps as programmatic as Microsoft, but as inspirational as a great guitar riff.

“The past few years I’ve felt I’m on a path,” he said in an interview. “I’m trying to transmit the visions of creativity and build institutions that are incredibly catalytic to their fields.”

While many people seek to leave their mark on the world, philanthropists can do it in the means and method of their giving. Biography can inform the style and impact of the giving itself, with significant consequences for society.

“Personalisation is enormously important,” said Karl Zinsmeister, author of The Almanac Of American Philanthropy and an executive at the Philanthropy Roundtable, a nonprofit network of charitable donors. “Passion and instincts for how you change the world are as important as a checkbook. But it is double-edged: people can come with experience in one field, and they think it applies to all the rest.”

Andrew Carnegie was self-educated and pious, in the style of his times. The nearly 3,000 free public libraries he built worldwide were, like the 7,000 church organs he donated during his lifetime, aimed at a kind of moral betterment that he felt would elevate the individual and society. Allen sees music as personally inspiring. But in Carnegie’s time, music elevated the masses.

In our age of software-based technological disruption, digital billionaires look for breakthroughs that will transform society and reward individual creativity


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upfront / paul allen

Besides donating to charity, Pierre Omidyar, who founded eBay, runs a network that funds businesses that he thinks have a high potential. Manoj Bhargava, who gave the world the 5-Hour Energy drink beloved by programmers, has created Stage 2 Innovations, a lab and investment fund dedicated to bringing clean water and electricity to poor nations.

The foundation formed by Allen’s onetime business partner, Bill Gates, along with his wife, Melinda, is more programmatic. It attacks global health problems and education with immense amounts of data, goals and metrics. His senior executives include a chief digital officer.

“Bill frequently reads reports on the state of polio in Afghanistan,” Allen said. “He’s taking on education and big epidemiological problems, huge and worthy goals.”

Allen’s institutions have separate locations and staffs, like a modern diversified portfolio. Funded in some cases with more than $100 million, the ones that show the greatest potential are likely to get the bulk of Allen’s estate (like many ultrarich people, Allen is a signatory to ‘the Pledge’ to give most of his wealth away).

This may also be a good way for an aging geek to have fun.

“Paul showed up for a whole day of our science advisory board meeting,” said Oren Etzioni, chief executive of Allen’s AI institute. He contrasts the involvement of Allen with Warren E Buffett, “who says he’ll just give his money to the Gates Foundation”.

Allen, a science fiction fan, has launched rockets into space. He owns the Portland Trail Blazers and the Seattle Seahawks, which are entertaining ways to make money. As with many billionaires, his boundaries of public, private and profit endeavors do not delineate crisply.

Allen joined in a lawsuit in 2014 to force the Interior Department to better account for the environmental impact of mining coal on public land. While not a charitable effort, the lawsuit is a kind of social activism, informed by scientific concerns.

“Something that is a characteristic of me is the breadth of my interests,” he said. “I’m trying to show people that they can activate their own passions, and find their own path.”

Like many ultra-rich people, Allen is a signatory to ‘the Pledge’ to give away the majority of his wealth

CTRL-ATL-DONATEOther big donators from the tech world and what they’ve given to charity in the last year

John D Rockefeller developed the first modern multinational corporation in Standard Oil. His namesake Rockefeller Foundation seems informed by that experience; in funding and scale, it became the first mission-driven multinational personal charity, treating millions around the world for hookworm, yellow fever and other diseases.

Unlike refineries and steel plants, the software and biological businesses of the information age arise from small teams of gifted individuals who don’t require a lot of infrastructure to get rich. Their products get big fast.

This has led to a mentality of shock and awe, or so-called venture philanthropy, which seeds with relatively small amounts of money projects that seem as if they could make an outsize difference.

“If you want the charitable equivalent of making a lot of money, you should be in 30 ventures, without guessing which one is going to take off,” said Steve Kirsch, 59, an internet entrepreneur who estimates he has given $20 million to various medical researchers over the past decade.

“No breakthroughs yet,” he says of this giving, “but you hope for the best.”

In a similar big bet approach, the XPrize Foundation, supported by a number of tech companies and millionaires (as well as some more traditional givers), describes itself as “an innovation engine” working “for the benefit of humanity”.

Taking a cue from the prize Charles A Lindbergh won by crossing the Atlantic in a solo aircraft, sponsors have established a Google-funded XPrize for someone to put a robot on the moon and a prize to build a Star Trek-like medical tricorder, a multifunctional hand-held device. Making everyone on the globe literate and quantifiably improving the world’s net happiness are among other XPrize goals.

$1,92bBill & Melinda Gates Foundation

$556mJan Koum, co-founder of WhatsApp

$550mSean Parker, Napster creator and the founding president of Facebook

$500mNicholas Woodman, founder of GoPro

$383m Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google

$180mPierre Omidyar, eBay

$177mLarry Page, co-founder of Google

$154mMarc R Benioff, founder salesforce.com

$110m Steve Balmer, former chief executive of Microsoft

$102m John P Morgridge, chairman emeritus of Cisco Systems

source: Philanthopy.com


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From adventurer to eco-fashion. Words: Cody Delistraty

David de Rothschild

startup | los angeles

On a warm day in London, David de Rothschild, an heir to a centuries-

old banking fortune, was pointing at a butterfly with translucent blue wings. “Look, look at that,” he said with awe. “Nature has four-and-a-half billion years of R&D. Incredible.”

He was walking through a butterfly exhibition in a white tent on the grounds of the Natural History Museum. De Rothschild, 36 years old and six-foot-four, was the tallest person in a space filled with families and squealing schoolchildren.

“That one’s huge!” de Rothschild said, pointing at a brown butterfly that had come to rest in front of his eyes. “Can you imagine what the world was like before we came and messed it all up?”

He left the tent and strolled down nearby Exhibition Road. His mood seemed to go sour when he spotted plants in a window.

“That’s nature now,” he said. “When did this happen? Everything is so premeditated and formulaic. Our idea of nature is a window box with plants in it.”

De Rothschild has grown tired of the modern world: the disconnection with nature, the urban grid, the digital life.

“We’re hyperconnected and we’re hyperdisconnected,” he said. “We’re losing a sense of wonder; we’re losing a sense of stimulation from the natural world; we’re

losing that interaction with nature. Nature is not ‘out there.’ ‘Out there’ is here.”

David Mayer de Rothschild was born to the banker Sir Evelyn de Rothschild and his second wife, Victoria Lou Schott. His father, now 83, was the chairman of NM Rothschild & Sons bank in London.

In his teens and early 20s, David was a skilled equestrian, bungee jumper and kite skier. At 26, he traversed Antarctica by foot, ski and kite. A year later, he crossed the North Pole with a dog sled and skis, making him the youngest Briton ever to ski both the North and South poles.

In 2010, he sailed the Plastiki – a boat made of 12,500 two-litre recycled plastic bottles and other flotsam – on a 12,875-kilometre journey, from San Francisco, California, to Sydney, Australia, to raise awareness of ocean pollution.

Paradoxically, part of what made it possible for de Rothschild to escape the grid is what has kept him tethered to it. Although he prefers not to talk about it, de Rothschild is, after all, a Rothschild.

His lineage leads back to Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who was born in the Jewish ghetto of Frankfurt, Germany, in 1744 and went on to serve as the financial overseer to Crown Prince Wilhelm, who later became Wilhelm IX. Mayer taught his five sons the banking business and dispatched them across Europe. The family bank financed the Duke Of Wellington’s


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defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo and, later in the 19th century, the railways and mining businesses at the heart of the Industrial Revolution.

In many ways, David’s own life came as premeditated as that of a window plant. He was a Rothschild. Great expectations were implicit.

He attended the all-boys Harrow School in London, but when it came time for college, he did not go the Oxbridge or Ivy League route, settling on the less heralded Oxford Brookes University. He subsequently received a master’s degree in natural medicine from the College of Naturopathic Medicine in London.

When he was 22, he bought a farm near Christchurch, New Zealand, and lived and worked in Australia for three years. He said it never crossed his mind to go into banking.

In 2003, when it was time to choose a successor to head the family business, Sir Evelyn de Rothschild went with a cousin from the French branch of the family, Baron David René de Rothschild.

“Everyone’s like, ‘Well, surely, you should just be a banker,’” David Mayer de Rothschild said, “and I’m like, ‘Well, it could be an obvious route, but if I have a choice, which I’m fortunate enough that I do, do I want to sit in an office all day with a tie on, doing things that I might not necessarily believe in or be in 100 per cent emotionally; or, do I want to follow the things to which I’m really connected and passionate and maybe have an impact?’”

He faced an enviable but existentially dreadful conundrum: What would you do if you could do almost anything?

With minimal experience, he went on the Antarctica trip. Ever since, his life has revolved around adventuring and eco-entrepreneurship. In addition to the adventures that earned him comparisons to the explorer Sir

Richard Francis Burton in The New Yorker, he has written books like The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook: 77 Essential Skills to Stop Climate Change and hosted a Sundance television show, Eco-Trip: The Real Cost Of Living.

Now de Rothschild has started a business. It is called, aptly, the Lost Explorer. “I’ve been an adventurer for 15 years,” he said. “I’ve done loads of expeditions with loads of different partners, loads of different brands, and I’m always getting approached by brands where I’m like, ‘Oh, I could do it with them, but I’m not sure if I’m really aligned with their ethos.’ So why wouldn’t I build my own company, my own brand that comes from the things that I believe in, the things that I want to do?”

The Lost Explorer is in the Venice neighbourhood of Los Angeles. Among the eight people who work

“There’s no such thing as an original idea anymore, it’s just looking through a different lens and presenting it in a different way”

for the company are Jonathan Kirby, a former Levi’s designer, and Len Peltier, who was Levi’s creative director. Also on board is Chris Spira, a luxury goods consultant and a partner at True Capital, a London asset management firm.

The company plans to release its first line of outerwear in October: a wool-based collection that includes two mountain jackets, a pair of trousers and a shirt. Shortly afterward, if things go according to schedule, it will follow with two more pieces, a merino-cashmere shirt and a merino-Ventile shirt. Most of the collection re-imagines pieces of clothing that de Rothschild has collected on his travels.

“There’s a very English side of David, and so he tends to pull things from late 1800s, early 1900s,” Peltier said. “He also has beautiful things from other countries. When he was in Mongolia, he picked up some pieces. We have a closet we jokingly call ‘the cabinet of curiosities.’”

De Rothschild has opted not to create a lookbook for his pieces, and he will sell them online or via pop-up shops in London and New York. The idea is to group the pieces by fabric and material rather than by season or style.

“We don’t want to tell you how to wear it,” Peltier said. “You can mix these things with your jeans, with shorts, whatever you wear.”

Most of the Lost Explorer’s apparel is made with materials that integrate what de Rothschild called “bio-mimicry”, like a heat-wicking technology that imitates the action of a pine cone, with fibers that open when it senses you are hot and close when it senses you are chilly. For the technological side of things, the Lost Explorer has teamed up with Schoeller, a Swiss fabric-maker.

“There’s no such thing really as an original idea anymore,” de Rothschild said. “It’s just looking at it through a different lens and presenting it in a different way. The Lost Explorer is the David lens. But I also respect the people around me. I respect the refining of that lens.”


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FUTURE FOODS

What a new report from multinational research company The Innovation Group tells us about where dining out and eating is heading Words: Jon Horsley

Imagine at the end of your journey, you’ve kicked off your shoes, slid onto a chair and begun to feel the first twinges of hunger. Before you pick up your phone, a flying skateboard arrives through the letterbox. Inside a heated box on top is a cheap, healthy burger, which though it

is made from plants, bleeds like it’s steak. How do you know it is for you? Because it is accompanied by vegetables that have been 3D printed to be an exact replica of your face.

To drink alongside, there’s a cocktail that you inhale or beer with a virtual reality helmet attached, and for afters there’s an absolutely delicious choco-late dessert made mainly of leftover carrot peelings. Don’t worry about health either, your phone has already ordered you the exact amount of extra vitamins and fibre you require for the ultimate nutrition in pill form.

It might not happen to you this time but Lucie Greene, the author of a new report from multinational research company The Innovation Group about the future of food, believes these things are either available or on the verge of arriving in our homes. She takes us through a menu of what could be to come in the future of food.

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1. 3D PRINTINGThis is already available in high-end kitchens where most of the work is currently being done with sugar and choco-late, which can easily be melted, then sprayed layer by layer upon itself to make exact 3D images.

But, there are also already real-world applications in the field of medicine. Until now, older patients and people with disorders that leave them unable to chew food have had to be fed pulps, which are so unappetising to look at, they are often rejected. As a result already malnourished people can turn away food.

Scientists can now mash up carrots, broccoli and peas and 3D print them into beautiful shapes, which are soft but hold their shape thanks to a gelling agent. A company called Biozoon is already serving a variety of attractive nutrient rich meals, which melt in the mouths of patients in hundreds of care homes.

If, for your own home use, you fancy dipping a toe in the market, next year you will be able to pick up a printer called a ‘Foodini’ from Natural Machines for around $1,000. The machine can print sweets as well as stream-lining some of cooking’s more boring activities – forming dough into a dozen breadsticks, or filling and forming indi-vidual ravioli. It’s clearly technology that needs to be refined but will find its way into our lives.

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2.RobotsRobot chefs sound so futuristic they’re approaching come-dic, the staple of a 1970s sketch show. But Greene reckons they’re already on the way.

“Moley Robotics has recorded Tim Anderson, a win-ner of MasterChef UK, cooking while wearing motion-capture gloves, allowing for even the subtlest move to be mapped. Then robotic arms incorporated into a specially designed kitchen are able to reproduce the movements in order to create a meal from scratch.”

The robot and its own kitchen – complete with a high-grade oven, hob, fridge, dishwasher and two robotic arms – will be available for around $30,000. While this may be steep for the average consumer, the company intends to make a version ready for the home in the next two years.

3.DRone DeliveRyThe advent of driverless cars and drones means delivery costs for food will soon approach zero so there are going to be more and more restaurants adopting new forms of getting diners meals.

“Look at Arcade delivery service in New York,” says Greene. “They offer people one option a day picked from a variety of top restaurants in New York. You text back ‘yes’ by 11am and it arrives on your desk at 1pm.”

Arcade delivers high-level cuisine from fashionable res-taurants. And as more services like this becomes available, consumers will expect better food delivered within minutes. Of course with Amazon trialling drone deliveries already, unmanned food deliveries are almost inevitable. A recent tech conference in Silicon Valley heard that the next form of delivery will most likely come in the form of machines that are like “driverless, heated skateboards” – and don’t worry, you won’t need to tip them.

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3.WASTE“Waste is the next frontier,” explains Greene. “It’s going to be important to consumers and a way of cost cutting for restaurants. I’m really excited about Roy Choi’s new fast-food restaurant in America called LocoL that will make healthy low-cost food by using every single part of the vegetable and meat, so you get dips from peelings, that kind of thing. It’s a concept which is extremely popular with the younger generation.”

The ‘no waste’ movement has also touched fine dining. In March 2015, chef Dan Barber’s pop-up restaurant wastED enlisted high-profile chefs like Alain Ducasse to serve scrap-based meals to diners in Manhattan’s West Village. A health food chain then created the wastED ‘scrap’ salad, featuring standard ingredients plus kale stems, cabbage cores and broccoli stalks – roasted in discarded anchovy oil for flavour.

1.FLEXITARIANISMGreene’s research included global survey of consumers and respondents aged 18 to 35 had most interest in where their food came from and were much more likely to make choices based on environmental impact. This means the continuing rise of ‘flexitarianism’, whereby people have a diet of either vegetable or vegan foods with meat only being consumed as a cel-ebration or a special occasion – and it will generally be well-husbanded meat with clearly labelled origins.

With this in mind, there will be more vegetarian foods coming onto the market – with scientific companies involved in innovation in order to cash in.

Impossible foods founder Pat Brown claims they have a ‘shock and awe’ burger made entirely from soy, wheat and spinach proteins. Despite its components the patty is indistinguishable in taste and chemi-cal composition from real beef and even ‘bleeds’ like meat. The company says it aims to launch the product in 2016.

“Our target market is not vegetar-ians. It’s not vegans. It’s not fringy health nuts,” Brown told New York Magazine. “It’s mainstream, uncompromising, meat-loving carnivores.”

2.HEALTHIn the same way restaurants will be using technology to use precise amounts, phone apps can help deliver exact nutritional requirements. Forget calorie counting, there are apps on the way which will match your exercise level and body weight to what you’re eating without you having to do more than photograph your plate. And they can also then link straight to shops to have any missing ingredients dispatched straight to you.


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Can’t believe it? Well, bear in mind what is happening now. Culinary firm Bompass and Parr set up a cocktail bar in London last year where the cocktails were in a mist all around customers, which they then inhaled. And last year beer brand Dos Equis gave 21 bars around the world a virtual reality ‘Occulus Rift’ headset, which for a few moments transported them to a cool party. Sales went up by 18 per cent, so more is sure to follow.

“It all sounds totally amazing,” says Green. “It used to take five years for inventions to come to market now it’s more like 18 months to two years. The future comes quickly.”

2.Social media trendSRestaurants have to adapt fast as trends cross the globe instantly thanks to Instagram and Twitter. This means that there are new leaders in food fashion.

“It used to be America and Europe that led the way,” says Greene. “Now trends from Asia and Hong Kong can be caught up almost immediately. An attractive dish pictured in Dubai could be copied, updated and on a menu in London the next week.

“The look of food will continue to be very important because of this. I expect to see more Instagram sites like This Is Mold, who do amazing things with food imagery.”

1.croSS-Sector collaborationThe worlds of art, music and film will all feed into dining more and more. Food producers are already making note of a recent study from Professor Charles Spence at Oxford University has proved that music can affect our tastebuds, so eating paella while listening to flamenco music can make the paella taste different.

There are food theatre experiences such as The Table Of Delights, in London where the audience sits round a chef who tells the story of food from field to plate and also serves up a tasting menu.

Art is continuing to claim food as its own, in Milan Design Week, London practice Studio Appétit created Things of Edible Beauty, a set of hybrid ‘culinary art’ objects that combine flavors, fragrances and jewellery.

Film is everywhere, with more and more restaurants following in the footsteps of Grant Achatz’s Next and releasing ‘trailers’ of their forthcoming menus. Combining them all is the world’s most expensive res-taurant, called Sublimotion on Ibiza, where customers pay $1,500 to go on a journey featuring full screen projections, drinks that mix themselves and balloons filled with chocolate cake.

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3.end of artiSanWitty presentation of dishes and storytelling are expected to come more and more into focus in restaurants – and this might finally see an end to a word many of us have come to dread seeing on menus.

“I think we’ve reached peak artisan,” says Greene. “Food is being created with a playful wink. It’s no longer about just the most authentic homemade ingredients. The ingredients are now expected to be of high quality but there also has to be a certain amount of humour or wit. You can see this most clearly in the cocktail world where mixologists are remaking ’70s classics with top ingredients. The old classic The Grasshopper is being served in Brooklyn, using organic green dyes and premi-um crème de menthe. We’re seeing a lot of drinks served in interesting containers, such as old-fashioned Sprite cans with sprigs of mint in them and there’s a cocktail bar called Genuine Liquorette in Little Italy, New York, which serves cocktails in miniature bottles like the ones you might find on a plane.”


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Wanted: Bison Herders. Tenderfoots Welcome

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bison herders

If one city in the world has embraced meat-free eating then it’s Los Angeles. And the result means some thriving businesses and outstanding places to eat. No, really.

Words: Julie TurkewitzPhotos: Jim Urquhart

Wanted: Bison Herders. Tenderfoots Welcome

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ntelope Island, Utah – the morning sky had turned to pink and it was to time to saddle up, so Benedikt Preisler, 59, strode across this grassy island to make use of the riding boots and cowboy hat he had bought the day before. “The outfit,” said Preisler, a German tourist standing in a sea of ten-gallon hats, “is neces-sary.”

It was the annual Antelope Island bison roundup, a Utah tradition that brings together seasoned cowboys and wide-eyed neophytes for a weekend of Western romance. Participants camp out on this island in the Great Salt Lake and spend a day on horseback chasing hun-dreds of bison toward corrals, where the ani-mals are vaccinated and about 200 are readied for sale. (The auctioned animals later become burgers, steaks and jerky.)

The event attracts local ranchers toting well-worn bullwhips as well as urban desk workers craving respite from the tyranny of the computer. For some, it is the only opportunity to inter-act with bison – those iconic, furry, fast-moving ungulates that are often called American buffalo and once numbered in the tens of millions before they were decimated by early settlers.

“I’m a surgeon – it’s very boring compared to this,” said Paul Olive, 57, who drove more than 2,000 kilometres from Springfield, Missouri, for the event. “It is an adrenaline rush to be on a horse, chasing a wild buffalo. Because it can be very dangerous.”

Antelope Island is a rugged, salt-ringed expanse just an hour’s drive from Salt Lake City, and its eastern shore faces the city’s


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twinkling skyline. The island’s bison are the descendants of 12 animals transported by boat in 1893 by frontiersmen who sought to protect a few of the endangered animals – and turn a profit – by creating a hunting reserve for the wealthy. By 1926, it cost $300 to shoot one of the animals – the equivalent of about $4,000 today.

Today, about 775 bison are on the island, making them one of the oldest and largest pub-licly owned bison herds in the nation. And the island is now a state park teeming with native creatures, including pronghorn antelope.

Park rangers began the roundup and auc-tion in 1986 to ensure that the animals did not overrun the island. Pulling a move from Tom Sawyer, officials billed the task as entertain-ment, and began inviting the public to help.

The roundup was added to tourist booklets, and the 1991 movie City Slickers – starring Billy Crystal as a New Yorker out West – helped

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THE NEW YORK TIMES

“IT’S AN ADRENALINE RUSH TO BE ON A HORSE, CHASING A WILD BUFFALO, BECAUSE IT CAN BE VERY DANGEROUS”

Above: The annual Antelope Island bison roundup, a Utah state tradition, brings together seasoned cowboys and wide-eyed neophytes for a weekend of Western romance Left: In an annual roundup on Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake, about 775 bison are corralled and then vaccinated


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popularise the idea of a cowboy vacation.This year’s roundup took place in late

October. Standing in a dew-kissed field, Preisler explained that he had flown from Germany just for the ride after learning about the event dur-ing a business trip to Utah last year. His horse, Joe, was a rental.

Nearby, an experienced horseman named Dean Holliday, 83, said he had worked the event since its inception and lived not far away.

“Touch of the Old West,” said Holliday, who had brought two grandsons along. One, a profes-sional photographer, circled the scene with an elaborate camera rig, treating his grandfather – in a neckerchief and a cowboy hat – as if he were the star of a Western epic.

“One of these days I’m going to hang up my spurs,” Holliday added. “And these guys are going to continue on.”

During a brief orientation, roundup leaders explained that the group would flank nearby clusters of bison and chase them north for several kilometres. Shouts and skyward whip cracks were appropriate means of coercion. Off limits were guns, iPods and attempts to touch the animals.

Weighing up to 900 kilograms, bison look like bears but run more like gazelles, reaching speeds of nearly 50 or even 65 kilometres an hour, and they will occasionally charge at agitators. Horses are occasionally gored.

“These animals are wild, and they don’t do exactly what you want them to,” said Chad Bywater, 40, a longtime participant, explaining that cattle roundups tend to be far tamer.

A local news team readied a drone to capture video, and the 250 or so riders set off, travelling up steep hills and across plains of yellow grass, galloping behind the bison.

At one point, the animals turned on the riders, forcing a brief retreat. At another, a bison broke from the herd and went careering toward tourists watching from the roadside.

Onlookers raced to their minivans, pulling binocu-lars behind them.

By 1pm, the riders had the bison in the corrals, clicking fence doors shut. It was the fastest roundup anyone could remember.

Tyra Canary, 46, a fraud detection analyst from a nearby suburb, called the ride “therapy”.

“I watch your credit card for fraud eight hours a day, five days a week,” she said. “It’s really good to just get out in the sun.”

Horses lapped from a trough. Men with chaps and handlebar mustaches recounted the morning’s exploits and planned for the evening campout.

Preisler, the German visitor, dismounted and declared the ride a success. “You should do it once in a lifetime,” he said.

A night in a tent, however, was not on the itinerary. “No – oh, God, no,” he said, explaining that he had opted for the comfort of a nearby hotel.

“These animals are wild, and They don’T do exacTly whaT you wanT Them To”

Above: Bison in a corral after the annual Antelope Island bison roundup Left: The boot (bought just the day before) and stirrup of Benedikt Preisler, a tourist from Germany


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Is the dotcom

bubble about to

burst (again)?

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In Silicon Valley, millions of dollars change hands every day as investors hunt the next big thing – the ‘unicorn’, or billion-dollar tech firm. There are now almost 150, but can they all succeed? Words: Carole Cadwalladr

Have you heard the story about the tip from the shoeshine boy, a Brit called James Pallot asks me on my last day at TechCrunch Disrupt. I have, I say, though later I Google it to get the facts straight.

It’s attributed to Joseph Kennedy, pater-familias of the Kennedy clan who, in 1929, was getting his shoes shined by a young boy who was also making confident predictions about which stocks would rise. For Kennedy, it was a moment of revelation. He sold his portfolio. Not long afterwards, Wall Street crashed and the world was plunged into the greatest depression ever seen. So a tip from the shoeshine boy is a sign that the bubble is about to burst. That the wave of confidence will finally crash upon the shore. That the jig is up.

Pallot used to be the digital editorial director of Condé Nast in New York and now he has a startup. But then, we’re at the world’s biggest startup conference in San Francisco, a few miles down the road from Silicon Valley where the world’s greatest concentration of technology startups first started up.

His company is in the booming field of VR, or virtual reality, which is to 2015 roughly what Rubik’s Cubes were to 1982, though with rather bigger potential consequences. Pallot claims it’s the logical next step for journalistic content. In 20 years’ time, you won’t be reading this on the page, I’ll probably be leading you by the hand through a 3D rendering of a virtual TechCrunch conference floor. Or, more likely, you’ll be leading yourself and I’ll be claiming jobseeker’s allowance.


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But anyway. In the meantime, Pallot asks me if I’ve heard of the tip from the shoeshine boy. I have, I say, and tell him it’s been on my mind. Because for three days, I’ve been hearing about “unicorns” – a Silicon Valley term for companies that have been valued at more than $1 billion. When this usage was first coined, less than two years ago, there were 39 of them. Today, there are 147. Or as Matthew Wong, a senior analyst at CB Insights, tells me: “The funding is at levels that we haven’t seen since 2000.”

As those with longer memories will recall, that was the year the dotcom bubble burst. It needs explaining because there are an awful lot of people at TechCrunch whose memories simply don’t go back that far: the typical startup founder is male and in his 20s. Back in 2000, Google was less than 18 months old and Facebook wasn’t even a glimmer in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye – he was still at high school. At 31, he’s now Silicon Valley’s elder statesman.

Everything has changed. And is changing at an ever-faster pace. Eight years ago, TechCrunch launched its Disrupt confer-ence with 45 startups. This year, there are 5,000 of them. Over three days I talk to founders of companies from San Francisco and Texas and Uruguay and Beirut and Stockholm and Tel Aviv and Warsaw. There are apps for crowdfunded mortgages and cheaper divorces. There’s “Expedia for golf” and “Facebook for cars” and “Nest for water” and “Tinder for dogs” and a virtual reality teddy bear, a device that claims it will be able to read your emotions via a contact lens in your eye. I miss the panel on nuclear fusion startups but they’re around.

They’ve all paid upwards of $3,000 to be here and they’re all trying to attract the attention of Silicon Valley’s biggest beasts. The VCs – venture capitalists to you and me.

The money guys.“How do you spot them?” I ask Peter Becronis, the founder of

a real estate startup called Owner’s Vault. “Oh, it’s easy,” he says. “They’re all men, older guys who are in jeans and brown boots and perhaps a blue jacket. Oh, and a good watch. They’re the ones who shuffle past you trying not to catch your eye.”

It’s a long shot for the likes of Becronis to be here, but not

David Sacks, founder and chief executive officer of Yammer, speaks at

the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in 2010. In 2012

Microsoft bought Yammer for $1.2 billion

a total pipe dream. Because hundreds of startups are being funded each month. Vast sums of money are changing hands. Crunchbase, TechCrunch’s sister site, lists the deals that are being done on a daily basis. On the day I write this, I check it and find 24 companies that have just received funding, including Kreditech, which got $92 million (it uses “big data and complex machine-learning algorithms to credit score eve-ryone worldwide”) and Medium, which received $57 million (it’s a platform that has found another new business model that seems to involve not paying journalists).

Every month the amount of money being invested in early-stage startups goes up. And every month, more and more peo-ple are starting to use the B-word. Bubble. The last time this amount of money was swilling around, we know how it ended. “Back then, a lot of websites launched but that’s all they were, websites,” Mike Butcher, TechCrunch’s editor-at-large, tells me. “Now in 2015, all those technologies that were predicted – AI, drones, VR – have all turned up. The innovation is real. And it just continues to get bigger and bigger. There are more VC firms here than you can poke a stick at.

“Is it a bubble?” he asks and then answers the question him-self, vividly, if not entirely clearly. “It depends. How many uni-corns can you fit through the eye of a needle? Anyway, unicorns are over. It’s all about decacorns now. Companies that are worth tens of billions of dollars.”

In 2000 the bubble was in publicly listed companies – organ-isations like the then upstart AOL, which bought Time Warner for $164 billion, the largest merger in America business history, and then most spectacular blow-up. In 2015, it’s private money flowing into companies that may or may not go public one day.


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T he shoeshine boy wouldn’t be tipping stocks in 2015, but what would he be doing? I ask Ned Desmond, the chief operating officer of TechCrunch. He thinks for a moment. “He would probably be an Uber driver who

has his own angel investment line,” he says. But James Pallot tops that. He’s flown in from JFK and had his shoes shined in the airport. “And the guy had a startup. I literally got a tip from the shoeshine boy! He was trying to find an investor for his national shoeshine franchise.” But then, in many ways, there has never been a better time to be a startup. Niko Bonatsos, a VC with General Catalyst Partners, tells me that the sheer number of companies at TechCrunch “speaks volumes about how the barriers to entry have been removed. It’s really easy to start a company. And lots of companies from other parts of the world see this as a lottery ticket. And for some of them, it will be. It’s the survival of the fittest. And the luckiest.”

Pallot and his co-founder are currently “bootstrapping” their company, Emblematic Group, which is creating virtual reality news content. “Bootstrapping” is Silicon Valley jargon. It means getting by with what you’ve got. It’s how people have set up com-panies since the dawn of capitalism. You start a business with a bit of money you already have and you try to attract customers and build it from there.

“Bootstrapping” is how you figure out if there’s a market and, if so, how you reach it. It’s also, like, totally 20th cen-tury. The reason 5,000 companies pay $3,000-plus to come to TechCrunch is because Silicon Valley has another model. People – strangers – will give you vast sums of cash to build your company into a global brand overnight. If you can deliver the killer pitch. The pitch that convinces the top VCs that you

are the next Facebook, the next Uber, the next Airbnb.“It doesn’t work like this in the rest of the world,” Ned

Desmond tells me. “In Indonesia or Turkey or wherever, nor-mal business culture demands collateral and security. Venture investing has none of that. You are investing in potential.” You’re gambling, basically. Silicon Valley, in 2015, is a giant casino. And the bets are so large because the potential payoffs are so huge. The next Google has to start somewhere.

So is it a bubble? “Everything is cyclical,” says Desmond. Does he remember the last crash? “I was there! I was in it. It was terrible. We had just launched a magazine, Business 2.0. Even the name sounds so cringeworthy now. We launched in May 2000 with a record number of advertisements. We had 150 ad pages. A year on, we had 15.”

This is not exactly an answer, so I try again. Is it a bubble? “We published a graph showing the unicorns. It’s a hockey stick. It’s near vertical growth.”

So, is it a bubble? “Some people say we are living through a period of history that is unprecedented. They say that every-thing has changed. That it’s different now.”

So is it a bubble? “Look,” he says finally. “You can answer that question yourself. Look at the graph, it’s about common sense.”

Out on the exhibition floor, it’s mayhem. Everyone is pitch-ing everyone else. And it’s all being conducted at volume 11. Because if you have a big idea and you want to find a VC, it’s just possible that you might find one out there. I lived through the 2000 bubble and subsequent crash vicariously via a flat-mate who got a job with a thrusting new website, and it’s prob-ably my imagination, but there’s something of the atmosphere that I remember of the time: loud, overexcited twentysome-things who tended to leave a mess on the floor.

A dozen or more countries have bought into the Silicon Valley dream and sponsored their companies to be here: there are pavilions representing Brazil, the Middle East, Uruguay, Taiwan, Norway, the Czech Republic. And the posters above the stands look like they’ve been produced by an automatic startup buzzword generator. “Digital innovation platform!” reads one. “Accelerate growth disruption” another. A third offers to “quantify your coding”.

“Of course it’s a bubble. Everyone knows it’s a bubble. Which doesn’t mean that a lot of people won’t make a lot of money.


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But then, if there’s one thing that I learn, it’s that disrupting is to now what dropping out and tuning in was to the 1960s. Everyone’s disrupting. Or at least everyone thinks they are. The usage of the term was coined by Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, to describe how even massive, seemingly invincible companies like IBM can be displaced by scrappy little upstarts like (once upon a time) Microsoft. He called it the “technology mudslide hypothesis”. Or how some small new technological breakthrough can have huge world-changing consequences.

I also have no idea what revolution the world is waiting for. But then, as Tod Francis, a Silicon Valley VC with the firm Shasta Ventures, tells me, often the world has no idea either. Until it arrives. “It’s why you’ve got to keep an open mind. Think about what billion-dollar companies looked like at this stage. Most of the really big ideas were easy to dismiss. Nobody thought sleeping on people’s couches was some amazing business plan, but look at Airbnb. Look at FitBit – did anyone need that? No, but people bought it. We see crazy ideas every day. Often they’re the ones that are accepted.”

I meet him on the way into the startup “battlefield”. It’s the heart of TechCrunch, where 25 companies take to the stage and pitch their hearts out to a panel of VCs who make the judges on Dragons’ Den look like kindergarten teachers. It’s a big deal. Dropbox was a battlefield contender, as was Yammer (sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion), and Mint.

And it’s incredibly competitive. More than 950 startups applied and yet, to the outsider, it’s hard to quite see how the ones that got through, got through. There’s a company that is looking to change the world through its robotic nail-art machine. There’s a “personalised content relevancy platform”. And an app that will deliver food for your children’s lunchboxes. (You can’t move in Silicon Valley for delivery apps these days. Or, as one tech editor summarised the sector to me, “twentysomething men who have set up companies to provide things their mother used to do for them.”) The odds are that one of them will be the next unicorn, but I’m having a hard time spotting which, not least because the man sitting next to me is offering his own commentary.

“EasyPaint?” he says, as we watch a presentation for an app that’s going to revolutionise the painting and decorating

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$345m

60%In 2013, venture capitalist Aileen Lee coins the term “unicorn” (in an post on TechCrunch) as the name for companies valued at $1 billion or more. At the time the article was written, Lee counted only 39 companies that met the criteria to be labelled a unicorn. Now, CB Insights counts 143 that do

WhatsApp is bought by Facebook for a reported price equalling $345 million per WhatsApp employee

When he asked the CEO why he had valued his company at $1 bil-lion, he was told, ‘We need to be worth a billion dollars to be able to recruit new engineers. So we decided that was our valuation’

...of IPOs that went public in 2015 were trading below their IPO price. [Oct 2015]

Twitter announced plans to lay off 336 employees, eight per cent of their staff

Amount invested in startups in the first three quarters of 2015, according to CB Insights.

$42.5bn

Vanity Fair reports:


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industry. “EasyDud more like. People will use it once then take the guy’s number and call him directly.” Michael, who doesn’t want his full name in this article, works for a Japanese technology company and is at TechCrunch to make recom-mendations for early-stage startups that he thinks his company should acquire. He practically guffaws when I ask him if it’s a bubble.

“Of course it’s a bubble. Everyone knows it’s a bubble. Which doesn’t mean that a lot of people won’t make a lot of money. It’s like musical chairs. The question is not if it’s a bub-ble, but will it remain long enough for us to get in on it? The question is: am I too late?

“Look at how many companies are cash-negative. Twitter is still cash-negative. Even Uber is cash-negative. Silicon Valley is a hype machine. That’s how it works. And sometimes if there’s enough hype, it pays off. And sometimes it doesn’t. It’s like when you go house hunting and the real estate agent doesn’t say, ‘Look at how great the space is. Look at how great the area is.’ They say, ‘If you don’t buy now, it’ll be twice the price in six months’ time.’ It doesn’t reflect true value. It’s just a sort of herd mentality.”

A nd he gives me the example of San Francisco’s first gold rush, the huge influx of money in 1849 that created large swaths of the Victorian city that still stands today. “People thought prices would go up

and up and up and that eventually they would fill in the bay and build there. People were buying plots of land beneath the ocean because they thought that in the future prices would rise. It’s the same as we’re seeing today.”

It’s an apposite example because San Francisco is in the grip of a property boom that makes London’s look almost sane and reasonable by comparison. The average rent on a one-bed apartment has just hit $3,500 a month, and that’s if you can find one. The entire city is pinched. I can’t find a single hotel

room for under $350 and so rent a room in someone’s house via Airbnb, and even that is $150 a night.

The founders of a Parisian startup, Aircall, tell me they’ve come to look for funding. “We are four guys so we thought, OK, we will share an apartment and it is $10,000 a month! We were like, wow!” They still came though. “But we left the tech team in France. Europe is like the third world to Silicon Valley now.” Mike Butcher tells me that “Silicon Valley isn’t a place any more. It’s a state of mind. You can be in Ukraine or Berlin or wherever.”

You can. But if you want to be where the money is, you still want to be here. And it’s here in San Francisco that the tecton-ics of the tech industry are smashing up against those of the real world, a San Andreas-sized faultline rumbling deep beneath the ground. “Silicon Valley” used to be a chain of dormitory towns a commuter train ride away from San Francisco where the likes of Google and Apple have their campuses. But increas-ingly, it’s moving to San Francisco itself. Everyone wants to be downtown, where the bars and hipster cafes are. But the more attractive the city becomes to startups, the more expensive it is for everyone else.

The city that gave birth to the counterculture, that stuck it to the Man, that is still home to organic co-ops and vegan co-living spaces, is right in the path of the Great Disruption – a storm whipped up and driven by the most relentless form of capitalism ever witnessed.

Tim Fernando, 31-year-old co-founder of an Oxford-based startup, Esplorio, explains why they’re staying in Oxford. “A software engineer will [cost us] $120,000 here, whereas in Oxford, it’s more like £26,000.” And yet, it’s hard to ignore the benefits that just being here confers. “We’d literally just arrived and were sitting in a coffee shop and it turned out that the woman sitting opposite us was a director of marketing at Apple. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen in Britain.”

I rather like Esplorio. It uses data from your phone to create an automated travelogue of where you’ve been, and they tell me they’ve had $300,000 in early-stage funding.

“Well done, I say. “That’s sounds like a lot.” “Does it?” says Fernando and he sounds slightly mournful. “Not in Silicon Valley terms it’s not.”

Every month the amount of money being invested in early-stage startups goes up. And every month, more people are starting to use the B-word. Bubble

Vanity Fair reports:

The number of people on the internet last year, as opposed to 400 million in 1999, around the time of the last crash. Some suggest increased potential customers means this won’t be another bubble.

In April, the Nasdaq passed its previous high point at the height of the dot-com bubble

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And it’s true, it’s not. And it’s as useful a measure as any of how Silicon Valley has parted ways with reality. Or at least the reality that most of us know; a world where $300,000 remains quite a lot of money. Silicon Valley, on the other hand, is a place where billion-dollar companies are being created almost overnight. Six years ago, Uber didn’t exist. In its last round of funding, it raised $1 billion in capital from private investors, giving it a supposed value of $50 billion. It’s a penta-decacorn. Less a mythical creature, some might argue, more a Frankenstein monster.

But Silicon Valley’s primacy remains indisputable. “Look at how many world-changing technologies have been created within a few miles of here,” Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, tells me. “You’re using an iPhone, which was invented 25 minutes away. You’re staying in an Airbnb, which was invented five minutes from here. You’re probably using Twitter, which was dreamed up around the corner. It’s incredible how much has come out of one area.”

Y Combinator is probably the most famous of Silicon Valley’s seed funds. It runs a three-month programme that nurtures startups and eventually helps launch them into the world. Dropbox, Airbnb and Reddit all began life there. “Eight thousand companies applied for the last batch,” says Altman. “And we have two batches a year.”

There’s so much money in Silicon Valley at the moment, he says, because interest rates are so low and “startups have been one of the few asset classes that have generated real growth”.

A nd the reason there are so many unicorns is that VCs bet big or they go home. He says it doesn’t matter if there’s a bubble or not, good companies will still make it whatever, an argument that ech-

oes Bill Gates’s remarks from last year. He claimed that half the companies being created in Silicon Valley were “silly” and two-thirds of them would fail. “But the dozen or so ideas that emerge out of that are going to be really important.”

Already “unicorpses” have started to appear. Groupon’s value is dropping like a stone. It’s being predicted that Dropbox, once valued at $10 billion, will be “the first dead decacorn”. On the TechCrunch stage, people try not to say the “bubble” word. They say there is “frothiness”. That there is “a lot of capital that is seeking returns”. That “valuations are a bit robust”.

Elsewhere, most people are not so restrained. Earlier this year, Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark, a big Silicon Valley venture firm, sent out a series of tweets warning of a bubble, including this one: “Arguing we aren’t in a bubble because it’s not as bad as 1999 is like saying that Kim Jong-Un is fine because he’s not as bad as Hitler.”

Out on the exhibition floor, I meet Marcus Hawkins, another Brit. He’s from Norfolk and has successfully run his own software company for a decade or so but he recently set up a new company, Patrolo, a business-to-business enterprise offering a website mis-take-correction service. We swap other bits of jargon we’ve picked up. Have you pivoted, I say, a piece of startup-ese I’d learned five minutes earlier. It means to change your business strategy rapidly. “I’ve pivoted so many times I’m practically facing backwards,” he says. “But it’s OK. I have a lot of runway left.” Which is the amount of time a startup has before the money runs out, he explains.

With the flights and so on, it was a £6,000 gamble to come, he says, “but I know everyone says this. But what we’re offering is unique.”

And unique is what Sam Altman tells me is what investors want. They want unique. Quirky. Crazy. And he cites the Airbnb example that everyone cites, though in fairness he was actually there at the time. “When Airbnb first pitched their idea at me, that you’d stay on an airbed in a stranger’s house, I was not excited by that. Only halfway through did they develop the idea of renting the whole apartment and then I got excited. If the ideas aren’t crazy enough, the industry is not taking enough risk.”

It’s something you’d be hard-pushed to say of some of the start-ups here. I inspect a smart dog bowl aimed at preventing your dog from overeating, a wristband that will tell a woman precisely when she’s at her most fertile, and a robotic cooking machine that has a lot of parts that look like they’d need washing up.

According to the research company CB Insights there are currently 146 companies valued at over $1 billion. Their cumulative value is a staggering $506 billion. Some you’ll know and probably use, such as Uber, Pinterest, Spotify, etc. But here are six more that are predicted by CB Insights to become unicorns in the near future.

The next unicorns?

GustoEnables businesses to set up payroll from any web enabled device. All payroll taxes and reporting done automatically.

UpworkFreelance talent marketplace making it faster and easier for clients to connect and work with talent in near real-time.


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The inventiveness of the hardware and ingenuity of the soft-ware and chutzpah of everyone is mind-boggling. There are so many ideas and so much energy and hard work and, more often than not, hard-earned cash being invested in them. If you have come from Bratislava, you’ll have put your own money into the business, a Slovak startup founder called Lukas Alner tells me. “Whereas here, they all graduate from Stanford and Harvard and then go and work in the same places. If they want to make a contact or raise money, they just pick up the phone. It’s hard to break into that as an outsider. They are pack animals.”

And then there’s the matter of what it may all mean one day not long from now. Where all this innovation will lead – a question I contemplate when a founder from Hong Kong called Henry Hu shows me Cafe X, a robotic coffee machine which, he claims, makes perfect artisanal cappuccino.

So you’re disrupting baristas? “No,” he says. “A barista will design the programme which the machine will copy. So, we are extending the skills of talented baristas to a lot more people.”

The truth is, it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. Disrupt or be dis-rupted. As Vinod Khosla, a somewhat irascible billionaire and head of a leading venture capital firm reminds the audience: “We all love to talk about disruption. But if you are doing something disruptive, people are getting hurt. Revolutions are hard on people.”

It’s what is forgotten in all of this. If it is a bubble, and it bursts, the VCs will be OK. They’re already rich. It’ll be the little people who will suffer. The 1,100 employees of Groupon who

just lost their jobs will be a tiny taste of the pain to come. The ripple of potential consequences vast and as yet unknowable.

And if it isn’t a bubble, if the world really has changed, and economic laws too, and everything keeps going up and up, it’s still the little people who’ll suffer. The great swaths whose services will no longer be required in a coming era that is just around the corner. In the past 18 months, all of us who live in cities around the world have watched as taxi drivers have protested and lost their livelihoods and Uber has swept in and cleaned up, taking 20 per cent of every fare along the way. Don’t think this is going to stop at taxis – where Uber is going to end up is more or less anyone’s guess. Last month I met the head of Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics faculty, whose entire department has just been poached by the firm. Including him.

First they came for the booksellers and I did not speak out because I was not a bookseller. Next they came for the taxi driv-ers etc etc. Then baristas, divorce lawyers, artists, journalists… there are not going to be an awful lot of jobs of any description left. How any of us are going to be earning a living in 20 years’ time, in ten years’ time, is something that most of us aren’t think-ing about. In this light, building a startup that has a 90 per cent chance of failure looks like a pretty smart option.

“I think there is going to be massive job destruction in the next ten to 20 years,” says Sam Altman. “I think we are already seeing it. Technology increases wealth but it also concentrates it. There’s a huge coming threat to all of us.”

Companies in Silicon Valley think differently, their ambition is of a different order. Their rate of growth is like nothing we’ve ever seen before. And it’s in San Francisco, where technology meets the real world that we’re starting to see the beginnings of what this clash of civilisations will look like. Or as Altman puts it: “If founders in San Francisco can build a new $50 billion company in five years but the city can’t approve a single new housing development in that time, that’s a mismatch.”

It’s all a mismatch. We and the great tech world we’re build-ing. But then I probably would say that. My industry is just one of hundreds in the throes of the Great Disruption. Yours too, possibly. Even if you haven’t realised it yet, it might not just be startups that need to learn to pivot.

“We love to talk about disruption. But if you are doing something disruptive, people are getting hurt. Revolutions are hard on people”

HotelTonightMobile booking of same-day unsold hotel inventory that aims to fill last-minute rooms that would otherwise remain empty.

DoorDashA local delivery service that aims to enable every restaurant to get into delivering food by acting as their delivery people.

CoinbaseA bitcoin wallet and platform where merchants and consum-ers can transact with the new digital currency.

PostmatesA same day urban logistics and delivery platform that enables you to ship any product within a city in one hour.


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Mission To MarsThe fledgling UAE Space Agency, founded in 2014, is already in the process of developing an ambitious space programme, with plans to send a probe to Mars in 2020. But what role will it play in the future of space exploration? Words: Gareth Rees

July 21, 1969. Edwin Eugene ‘Buzz’ Aldrin steps on to the surface of the Moon, following in the footsteps of Apollo 11 mission commander Neil Armstrong who, as he set foot on Earth’s only natural satellite, had announced, “That’s one small step for

a man, one giant leap for mankind”. The team back on Earth missed the ‘a’, and as a result Armstrong is often misquoted. Armstrong and Aldrin’s mission was the National Aeronautics And Space Administration’s (Nasa) response to the challenge set by president John F Kennedy on May 25, 1961, at the height of the Cold War. “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth,” Kennedy said in his now famous speech to the United States Congress.

December 2, 2015. A column written by Yousef Al Otaiba, the UAE’s ambassador to America, is posted on Foreign Policy magazine’s website, which includes the following two sentences: “In Washington this week, the UAE will join with Nasa in recognising the UAE Space Agency and its ambitious plans to put a probe on

Mars in 2021 – our country’s 50th anniversary. For the UAE, this is the Arab world’s version of president John F Kennedy’s Moon shot – a galvanising vision for the future that can engage and excite a new generation of Emirati and Arab youth.”

At the Dubai Airshow, in November 2015, the United States, wishing the UAE every success with its planned Emirates Mars Mission, had presented the UAE Space Agency with the American flag carried to the Moon on board Nasa’s Apollo 14 mission in 1971, the year of the Emirates’ independence from Britain. The flag, signed by Lunar Module pilot Edgar Mitchell, was reportedly also inscribed with the fol-lowing message: “In the spirit of innovation, explora-tion and discovery that unites all mankind, we present this flag of the US, flown to the Moon on Apollo 14 on January 30 to February 9 1971, to the UAE Space Agency, with sincere best wishes for success.”

But in August 2015, Buzz Aldrin himself, having applauded the UAE Space Agency’s ambition to send a probe to Mars during a visit to Dubai to encourage children to take an interest in space exploration, sound-ed a word of caution: “Mars is not an easy place to go. Many nations have tried. Russia failed abysmally and [the US] has failed several times. It’s very ambitious,” he said to assembled members of the UAE press.

Bernhard Hufenbach, head of the Strategic Planning Office in the Directorate Of Human Spaceflight and Operations at the European Space Agency (ESA), agrees with the legendary Apollo 11 Lunar Module pilot. “Sending a probe to Mars is defi-nitely not an easy undertaking – it’s a bold ambition,” he says. “I think it demonstrates a commitment to becoming a player in this field [of space exploration].” Hufenbach believes the Emirates Mars Mission is “doable” with sufficient investment in space infra-structure and the right partnerships.

The global space industry is valued at $300 bil-lion, and the UAE’s investment in space technologies

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has already reportedly exceeded $5.5 billion. The country is clearly serious about space. Prior to the establishment of the UAE Space Agency in 2014, the UAE had already invested in a number of satel-lites: Al Yah Satellite Communications, owned by Mubadala, the investment arm of the Abu Dhabi government, launched communications satellites Y1A and Y1B in April 2011 and 2012 respectively; Thuraya Telecommunications Company, the satellite phone provider that counts Etisalat (in which the UAE government has a 60 per cent) and the government-owned Abu Dhabi Investment Company among its shareholders, operates two geostationary satellites, Thuraya-2 and Thuraya-3; and Emirates Institution

For Advanced Science And Technology (EIAST), a subdivision of the government’s Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC), has launched two observation satellites, DubaiSat-1 and DubaiSat-2, with a third observation satellite, KhalifaSat, sched-uled to be launched in 2017. KhalifaSat will be the first satellite developed solely by a team of Emirati engineers, who have been working on the project since 2013. DubaiSat-1 and DubaiSat-2 were both developed with engineers from South Korean Satellite manufacturer Satrec.

The UAE Space Agency signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) in December 2015; it had previously signed a similar MoU with France’s Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in April 2015. But the clearest sign so far that the agency is committed to working with global partners to achieve its aims is its recent successful application to join the International Space Exploration Coordination Group (ISECG), a collective of 14 space agencies, including UAE partners CNES and Roscosmos, as well the Agenzia Speciale Italiana (Italian Space Agency), the China National Space Administration (CNSA), the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), the Commonwealth Scientific And Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), the ESA, the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa), the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (Kari), Nasa, the National Space Agency Of Ukraine (NSAU) and the UK Space Agency (UKSA).

ISECG is currently chaired by the ESA, and Bernard Hufenbach, who officially welcomed the UAE Space Agency as a member in Cologne, Germany, on October 5, 2015, explains that the group of agencies was formed to work on advancing the implementation of a global strategy for space exploration. At the highest level, ISECG meets twice a year and conducts monthly telecons, but individual agencies also form working groups and cooperate outside of the those meetings.

Hufenbach is keen to point out that membership

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of ISECG is open to any national space agency that demonstrates a commitment to space exploration, but nevertheless, the UAE Space Agency is the first to join since the organisation was founded in 2007.

Hufenbach believes that membership of the ISECG is particularly important for a country that, like the UAE, is in the primary phase of defining its future space strategy and policy. “I think probably one of the main reasons they wanted to join is that in defining this plan they are really aware of what is happening with space exploration globally,” he says. Membership of the ISECG will also enable the UAE to find strategic partners for realising their future ambitions, including the Emirates Mars Mission.

The man who shook Hufenbach’s hand in Cologne, officially accepting the UAE’s membership of ISECG, was Khaled Al Hashmi, the director of space missions at the UAE Space Agency. With a bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from Saint Louis University in America, a master’s degree in Thermal Power And Fluid Engineering from the University Of Manchester in the United Kingdom and experience working at British Aerospace, Al Hashmi is now part of a team responsible for defining the future strategy for UAE space exploration.

Al Hashmi is currently working with colleagues to create a roadmap for the future of the UAE’s space programme. “Once we have defined this roadmap, we will make a recommendation to the government. From there we will define what sort of funding [is required], who will fund which projects, who will be responsible for each project and how we are going to cooperate with international organisations,” he says. “That’s a big task, which we are focusing on now. We will present that roadmap [to the government] in 2016.”

“We will define the opportunities globally, and then, assessing the capabilities of the UAE, we will recom-mend areas where there is potential for us to develop,” he adds.

Al Hashmi stresses that this roadmap is for all future space projects – and he doesn’t rule out send-ing astronauts into space one day – but admits that the Emirates Mars Mission is the biggest, the flagship

project around which the country’s space infrastruc-ture will be built. The UAE Space Agency is respon-sible for overseeing the Emirates Mars Mission, from funding to design and manufacture of the probe, with another Dubai government entity, the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre, responsible for execut-ing the project. “We have completed the conceptual design and the system requirement review. The next stage is the preliminary design review, which will take place in 2016,” says Al Hashmi.

Hope, or Al Amal in Arabic, will be an unmanned orbiter probe, constructed of aluminium, 1,500kg in weight, including fuel, and 2.37m in width and 2.9m in height – making it similar in size to a small car. It will be launched in July 2020, and then make a 60 million-kilometre journey over the course of seven months, reaching Mars in 2021, in time for that important anniversary. Hope will then remain in space for two years, during which time it will transmit 1,000GB of data, gathered whilst orbiting the Red Planet, back to Earth, where more than 200 global institutions will have access to the probe’s findings.

“The scientific objective for this mission was defined with the international scientific community to ensure the investigation will add to the knowledge of humankind, understanding the reasons why Mars became a dry planet,” says Al Hashmi. “Mars

“Sending a probe to Mars is not easy – it’s a bold ambition that demonstrates a commitment to becoming a player in this field”

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was once like Earth. You had water, you had plant life.” This is what makes Mars such a fascinating sub-

ject. Hydrogen and oxygen have been steadily escap-ing the planet’s upper atmosphere over time, and Mars is now so cold and thin that it can no longer sustain liquid on the surface. Hope’s objective will be to study the weather on Mars, how the atmosphere changes on a daily and a seasonal basis and, if all goes to plan, to discover why these elements are escaping into space.

Al Hashmi confirms reports that Hope will be launched outside of the UAE. “We don’t have launch capabilities [here in the UAE],” he says. “We don’t know where it will be launched yet. We are awaiting a set of options, and I think we will announce it in 2016.” DubaiSat-1 was launched from Russia and DubaiSat-2 from Kazakhstan.

The UAE is seeking to work with international partners, which is why membership of an organisa-tion like the ISECG is so important, according to Al Hashmi. “We are going to benefit from this par-

ticipation, because, hopefully, any future space mission will be [launched] as a partnership rather than on our own. [Membership] ena-bles us to learn what

other missions are doing and to define areas where we can cooperate [and] form partnerships in science and technology, building the capabilities of the UAE.”

In this spirit of collaboration, Al Hashmi was one of two scientists from the UAE Space Agency who, along with ten colleagues from partner organisations includ-ing the International Astronomy Centre, the European Space Agency and Nasa, observed, from a jet over the Indian Ocean near Sri Lanka, as a piece of space debris between three and six metres in length and travelling at 38,000 kilometres per hour hurtled towards the Earth in November 2015. “It was very exciting,” he says. “This is a good example of very successful inter-national cooperation. We hadn’t had an experience like this before. This was the first time we deployed an aircraft and went up to record debris inside the Earth’s atmosphere as part of a team. Everybody had a role in this mission.”

There is interest in the “crazy amount” of debris entering the Earth’s atmosphere from international organisations, including the United Nations, accord-ing to Al Hashmi. “We are going to build our capabilities in the UAE to do some research on this topic with both local and international universi-ties in the near future,” he adds. The UAE Space Agency’s plans for 2016 include the construction of at least three meteor monitoring stations across the UAE in partnership with Abu Dhabi’s International Astronomy Centre.

Education, as well as developing relationships with international partners, is key to the growth of the UAE space programme. The Emirates Mars

“We are keen to develop a position for the UAE as one of the players in space applica-tions and services”


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MARS MISSION JOURNEY

Mission team will be made up of 150 people – all of them Emiratis. A $27 million state-of-the-art space research centre, a partnership between the UAE Space Agency and UAE University, is scheduled to open in Al Ain in 2016, but it is not the only initiative geared towards inspiring future genera-tions to take an interest in space. The Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre will launch Nayif-1, a nanosatellite designed with the American University Of Sharjah to aid in the training of engineering students in the field of space science and advanced technology, in Q1 2016; and, in December 2015, the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority’s (TRA) ICT Fund signed an agreement with the UAE Space Agency guaranteeing funding for 15 space sci-ence scholarships. These initiatives complement the space-related degree programmes already offered at UAE educational institutions including Khalifa University, Masdar Institute nd the Centre For Space Science at Abu Dhabi’s New York University.

“We have the space centre, the scholarship pro-gramme, the Emirates Mars Mission, the satellites. I think the UAE is one of the leaders in the region.

We are keen to develop a position for the UAE as one of the players in space applications and services. We cannot compete with the big nations, but we are strong enough,” says Al Hashmi.

The UAE Space Agency might not be able to compete with Nasa, but as the existence of the ISECG shows, space exploration in the 21st century is not a matter of competing with other nations, as it was in the 1960s. Rather it is con-ducted in the spirit of cooperation, working towards a shared vision.

“Our aim is to position the UAE as one of the nations, part of the club, who are exploring space, to inspire our youth, to emphasise the importance of space study and exploration, to encourage them to go to university and conduct research in this area, and to build the capabilities in the UAE in terms of manufacturing certain parts [of the space probe]. Once you have a project, you are going to recruit young UAE nationals, you are going to educate them. We are lucky to have established the UAE Space Agency and to have a big project like the Emirates Mars Mission to focus on.”

13-20 minsSignals Delay

Altitude of science orbit22,000km - 44,000km

eliptical

Orbit Period55 Hours

Mars Insertion OrbitCruising Speed

126,000 km/h

200 daysCruising distances from Earth

to Mars 600m kilometres

Mars at arrival

Earth at arrival

Mars at launch

Earth at launch Probetrajectory

Launch Speed 36,000 km/h

Unfolding solar panels to recharge

Probes uses star trackers to navigate


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Tsukiji’suncerTain fuTureWhat next for Tokyo’s famous fish market? Words: ken Belson

Tokyo is known for its neon lights and armies of salarymen who spill out of office towers in often indistinct neigh-bourhoods.

But amid that giant urban crush is Tsukiji fish market, the world’s largest.

In a city in a rush to wipe away its history, the market is a gem that evokes Japan’s pre-Second World War past and its love of food.

The wholesale market on the banks of the Sumida River, several minutes from Ginza, opened in 1935 and is best known for its predawn tuna auction. But navigating the market’s cramped and slippery corridors can be treacherous and, while fascinating, is primarily for viewing, not sampling.

The retail market next door is more inviting. Roughly 8 square blocks, the outer market, or Jogai (pronounced JOE-guy), is chockablock with small,

family-owned retail shops selling fish and meat, sea-weed and sweets, knickknacks and kitchen supplies. Shopkeepers with raspy voices invite passers-by to look at their goods or eat in their restaurants, some of which are tucked away in alleys.

In my dozen years working in Tokyo and on my annual visits since then, my wife and I have never grown tired of wandering the market’s maze-like streets. We stock up on dried seaweed, Japanese snacks and other sundries, and dine at surprisingly affordable restaurants. We love the shopkeepers and their quick wit and candid opinions.

Yet this gustatory wonderland is in danger. Next year, the Tokyo government will move the wholesale market a few kilometres away to Toyosu. There, mammoth fishing ships will dock next to the market, speeding delivery of tons of fish. A road that the city is building will pass through where the wholesale market is now, to connect the Olympic Village for the 2020 Tokyo Games with the main sporting venues about 16 kilometres away.

When the wholesale market vanishes, Tsukiji will lose some of its working-class feel and potentially some of the merchants who now cater to the market’s many workers, something that makes some people in Jogai anxious.

The good news for visitors to Tokyo is that many of them expect the market to continue to be a magnet for some of the freshest food in the city. But they fear that without the wholesale market, Jogai will lose some of the buzz that made it unique. Four of them shared stories about their decades in Tsukiji, and their hopes and worries for the future.

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“Putting aside whether people buy or not, our shop has become a social place, which is a lot of fun for me”

tsukiji market

Obayashi Shoten is tucked in the back of Jogai, off the path that most tour-ists take. Wandering the area one

day, we saw a signboard in front of a three-story building that had black-and-white pho-tos from decades past of the original owners of the shop.

Akiko Kawanami, the cheerful, soft-spo-ken woman who now runs the shop with her brother, explained that the photos were of her grandfather and father who, like her, made kat-suobushi, or dried bonito flakes that are used in soup broth and other dishes.

“Since I was small, the same customers have

been coming here,” she said. “Quality is our main selling point.”

Kawanami, 42, said she suspects that the neighborhood will continue to evolve. To her, Tsukiji is a collection of neighbors who look out for one another.

These days, the market is filled more with tourists who arrive by bus, not bicycle. At first, Kawanami was taken aback. Now, she hopes that more of them visit her shop.

“In the beginning, I didn’t know how to deal with” the tourists, she said. “Putting aside whether people buy or not, our shop has become a social place, which is a lot of fun for me.”

Obayashi shOten


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Tourists flock to the many sushi bars in Jogai because of the fresh fish. But ramen is the daily fuel for many of the

market’s workers.For three decades, Goro Wakabayashi has pro-

vided that fuel from his impossibly cramped ramen stand that faces Shin-Ohashi Dori, the road along the west side of the market. We’ve wandered past his open kitchen, the size of one tatami mat, dozens of times and marvelled at the lines of people slurping his noodles and broth with gusto. We’ve joined them, too.

The operation is hyper-efficient. Wakabayashi’s kitchen includes just four gas burners, a sink and a hanging closet and shelves for bowls. There are only three stools at the 1.8-metre-long counter, so most customers stand at makeshift tables by the curb. Each day for more than 30 years, starting at 5am, Wakabayashi, his wife and now their two sons have served hundreds of bowls of ramen, mainly to workers looking for quick calories dur-

Tsukiji Wakaba

“a lot of people who come here every day have to eat fast. These people can’t wait long”

ing their breaks. “The busiest time for us is when most of Jogai is quiet,” he said. “A lot of people who come here every day have to eat fast. These people can’t wait long.”

Wakabayashi’s most basic dish, chuka soba, costs just 700 yen ($6 at 117 yen to the dollar) and because he uses thin noodles, he can make a bowl of it, topped with bamboo shoots, a dollop of scallion and a few slices of meat, in less than 90 seconds. The savory-salty mix, slurped loudly, warms your stomach and keeps you going for hours.

During Japan’s go-go years, Wakabayashi sold about 300 bowls a day. He serves about half as many customers now because more restaurants have opened in Jogai and more people order fish by fax or online instead of visiting Tsukiji to shop.

Now he frets about what will happen when the market workers, in their Wellington boots and industrial smocks, disappear. “I don’t know if the customers will keep coming when the wholesale market leaves,” he said.


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Starting at 5am most days, Kenichi Yonemoto flits in and out of his nar-row coffee shop on Harumi Dori, the

main road that runs past Jogai. In black pants, white shirt and herringbone vest, he hands out laminated menus and serves coffee, iced coffee, coffee jelly and other such items.

Because he is outside his coffee shop often, tourists ask Yonemoto for directions and res-taurant recommendations, which he happily provides.

“Tsukiji is about customers who want fresh and cheap food, so the coffee should be reason-able, too,” he said.

As a member of the local shopkeepers asso-ciation, he has his finger on the pulse of the neighborhood. He cannot do anything about the departure of the wholesale market, and he is not sure what will replace it.

“People are worried,” he said. “But if Jogai fits into the plan, it will be good.”

Yonemoto Coffee

When I returned to Tokyo in 2011 to help report on the nuclear crisis in Fukushima, I often ran out of the

office to grab dinner at the main branch of Tsukiji Sushiko. Night after night, Osamu Semba, the shop’s floor manager, greeted me. Upbeat and curious, he made me feel welcome.

Every visit since then, Semba, 52, has greeted us as if we had been away a week, not a year.

Sushiko caters primarily to office workers, so it is unlikely to be affected when the wholesale market moves. The menu, packed with grilled fish, sashimi and appetisers like grilled stingray fin, is geared more to people with time to linger than workers dashing back to the market.

“We have a lot of regular customers, people I’ve gotten used to and feel part of their fami-lies,” Semba said.

Thanks to Tsukiji’s transformation into a hub for serious diners, more tourists are arriving. Even on Sundays, which used to be slow, the restaurant draws a crowd, he said.

“Basically, I’m a salesman, so I know how to serve,” he said.

tSukiji SuShiko


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Big Reds

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Growing a Napa Valley in China

O n an autumn evening in a fluorescent-lit classroom at Tsinghua University in Beijing, a dozen students listened intently. The speak-er, Emma Gao, held a glass to the light and

asked them to study the swirling liquid inside. Tsinghua is known as the ‘MIT of China’, but this was no freshman seminar in fluid mechanics. It was a gathering of the student wine club.

Gao, a diminutive woman with a quick smile, was conducting a tasting of recent vintages from her family-run winery in Ningxia, a remote Chinese region on the edge of the Gobi Desert. Behind desktops lined with glasses, the students sniffed and sipped, comparing a fruity red with a richer, oakier French-style wine.

Since her winery has begun to win international acclaim, Gao, 38, has emerged as the unlikely new star of an even more unlikely new Chinese industry. The winery, Silver Heights, has been a pioneer in China, bringing sophisticated Western winemaking techniques to what had been an industry focused on bulk production.

Taking a cue from that boutique-winery model, Ningxia has ambitions to become the Napa Valley of China. Local winemakers have won prestigious awards, and plans are underway to double the region’s vineyards and create a wine tourism hub. Foreign investors have also taken notice. French Champagne maker Moët & Chandon makes spar-kling wines there, while spirits giant Pernod Ricard is spending heavily to modernise its local winery.

Aided by the same long-range planning and govern-ment support that have brought success in everything from textiles to high-end electronics, China made 120 million cases of wine in 2014. That’s a bit less than a third of what is produced in the United States and just behind the export powerhouses Australia and Argentina.

But Chinese wine is made almost exclusively for the domestic market, says Ma Huiqin, a professor at China Agricultural University in Beijing who works closely with Ningxia’s wine industry. And until recently, most of it was barely drinkable by Western standards, produced by giant industrial winemakers.

Now a new generation of Chinese winemakers is try-ing to upgrade quality in an effort to win over local wine drinkers as their tastes become more discerning, as well as capture the aficionados who drink mostly imports from France, America and elsewhere. And eventually, as with many other Chinese industries, the most successful will look to sell their wines overseas.

“They’ve got all the money in the world, they’ve got all the ambition in the world, and they’ve hired all the top consultants,” said Steven Spurrier, the British wine mer-chant who organised the ‘Judgment Of Paris’, the 1976

Big Reds

A view of vineyards from

the roof of Chataeu Moser


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blind tasting that stunned the wine world when California wines beat the French. “It’s inevitable the Chinese are going to make better and better wines.”

Sitting in the courtyard of her family’s ramshackle compound outside the regional capital of Yinchuan, Gao of Silver Heights looked out over the vineyard her father planted nearly 20 years ago. Among the first in the region to plant grapes, he suggested she go to France to study winemaking in 1999. “I was 21. I said, sure, why not?” she said. “It was France that interested me, not winemaking.”

A fter earning a degree in oenology, she did a stint at the highly regarded Château Calon-Ségur, where she met, and eventually married, the winemaker.

French attitudes made a deep impression. “I learned to focus on quality, to make the best wine you can with the material you have,” she said.

After Gao returned to China, the first vintage she and her father produced in 2007 was just ten barrels, or 3,000 bottles. Today, Gao makes four wines, with total produc-tion of 60,000 bottles. A 2013 bottle of her Summit label sells for around $75.

“She’s considered the best winemaker, with practically the best wine, in all of China,” said Gérard Colin, a French consultant who helped Château Lafite Rothschild develop a winery in China. “Emma put Ningxia on the map.”

A poor coal region wedged below Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, with its hilly, arid scrubland, is ill-suited for most agricul-ture. It’s dry and hot in the summer, with long, freezing winters. But its sandy, rocky soil proved ideal for growing grapes. The Helan Mountains to the west protect the vineyards from harsh desert winds, while cool nights keep the grapes from ripening too fast.

Eager to create a new industry, the regional govern-ment built extensive irrigation systems starting in the late 1990s and put winemaking at the centre of develop-ment plans. In 2005, the government helped start the area’s first demonstration winery, Helan Qingxue.

A major turning point came in 2011 when Helan Qingxue won a gold medal in a prestigious international competition by the British wine publication Decanter. A 2009 bottle of its Jia Bei Lan was named best red Bordeaux varietal over ten British pounds, beating out rivals from Napa, Australia and Bordeaux.

Suddenly, what had been a slow build-up turned into a stampede. The award “made people realise that wine could be a great business,” said Guo Xiaoheng, a native of the region who trained as a sommelier in France before returning to sell winemaking equipment. Demand – and prices – for Ningxia’s wines began to take off.

Today, Ningxia has more than 70 wineries, with 40 more under con-struction, and the government plans to reach 200 by 2020. As elsewhere in

China, red wines dominate, mostly the Bordeaux blends – principally mixtures of cabernet sauvignon, merlot and cabernet franc – popular in China.

Moët & Chandon’s new sparkling wine facility – with its clean modern lines and state-of-the-art equipment – has become one of the area’s biggest standouts since it opened two years ago.

Pointing out the giant tanks used to produce 50,000 cases last year, the estate director, Shen Yang, says Moët & Chandon is in the first phase of a long-term invest-ment aimed at getting China’s white-collar professionals to drink more sparkling wine.

“Our mission in China is to create a new market for this wine,” Shen said.

Ningxia’s growing reputation has attracted invest-ment, as domestic and international players alike look

Emma Gao, whose family-run the winery Silver Heights, a pioneer in China

China made 120 million cases of wine in 2014, just behind the exports of Australia and Argentina


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at China’s market. The resulting boom has reshaped Yinchuan. Signs of prosperity are everywhere, from the five-star Kempinski Hotel to the office towers and apart-ment complexes popping up all across the city. On the city’s outskirts, a constant flow of tractors and trucks race along winding two-lane roadways rutted with potholes. A new highway to speed visitors to the wineries is under construction.

Changyu Pioneer Wine, China’s oldest domestic wine producer – and one of the three giants that dominate the market – has spent more than $100 million creating a Disneyesque, 13,010-square-metre chateau, complete with fountains, turrets and two suits of medieval armor guarding the gates. Run in partnership with Austrian winemaker Lenz Moser, it is the latest of six castles that Changyu has built around China to draw middle-class Chinese who have begun to enjoy Western-style holidays. The general manager, Ruan Shi Li, says he expects 80,000 visitors this year, more than double its first year.

To build a customer base, Ningxia’s producers say they are concentrating on getting their wines into shops and restaurants in Beijing and other major cities. Few Ningxia wines are available outside the region, and prices are high.

“Even if people love our wines, they cannot find us,” said Wang Fang of Kanaan Winery.

Above: A wine bottling machine at Chataeu Moser, in Ningxia, China

Left: A driveway at Silver Heights Winery leads directly into the vineyards, in Ningxia


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Wha

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be

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whe

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W hen they were children, Chet and Betts DeHart, the twin brothers who created the streetwear line Lucid FC, strug-gled academically. “They had so much

trouble in the school system, but it was so apparent to my husband and I they were going to be brilliant in some other way that wasn’t going to be on a piece of paper,” said their mother, Jessica DeHart.

At age 19, the DeHart brothers (or Lucid twins, as they are often called), have found their niche and may be headed to moguldom.

Their clothing line, which they started when they were 14, is carried at the boutiques A Number Of Names in London, Standard in Atlanta, Georgia, and VFiles in New York. The pieces, which cost $13 to $245, include hooded sweatshirts, painter’s pants and button-down shirts: clothes for the street, clothes for the club.

Producer and DJ Alexander Ridha (known as Boys Noize) and hip-hop artist Makonnen Sheran (that’s ILoveMakonnen to you), among others, wear Lucid FC. Rihanna is a fan, too, and she gave the fledgling label a boost when she was photographed wearing vari-ous Lucid items, including the Crest Logo Parka ($95) and the Logo Trucker Cap ($40).

The industrious DeHart boys got their first jobs at 12, at a Menchie’s Frozen Yogurt franchise in their hometown, Atlanta. Their parents, along with a school administrator, signed forms to allow them to work at such a young age, according to Jessica DeHart.

“They hated it,” she said with a laugh. “But they would take their $27 paycheck and pool their money together and get a really good pair of sneakers.”

They built a collection. “We had a basement of sneakers,” Chet DeHart said.

A crucial moment came on Thanksgiving Day when the boys were in eighth grade. “Betts was very much the business twin,” Jessica DeHart said. “He picked up a shoe and started talking about how many were being made, where they were being made, and he had all this business knowledge. I don’t know where it came from.”

Jessica DeHart, a children’s book author who lives in Atlanta with her husband, Jeff DeHart, a real estate developer, recalled the turning point: “Chet, the creative one, started recording it and uploaded it to this thing I had never heard of – YouTube – and Google called and said, ‘We’d love to put some ads on it.’”

Their YouTube channel, SoleBrothers, turned them into sensations among sneaker geeks. As minors, they couldn’t have access to the money it generated, so an account was set up in their parents’

names. (The old SoleBrothers videos now appear on YouTube on the Lucid FC channel.)

At 14, they decided that owning sneakers wasn’t enough anymore. “We sold them all to start the brand, because we wanted to make our own shoes,” Chet said.

In 2010, with help from the wife of a driving instructor who was familiar with manufacturing in Asia, they started Lucid Footwear. A nontraditional high school experience at the Ben Franklin Academy in Atlanta, where they attended classes until 11am each day, gave them time to work on their careers.

“They would take their $27 paycheck and pool their money together and get a really good pair of sneakers”

From Saturday jobs and a YouTube channel to their own clothing line worn by RihannaWords: Carson Griffith


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They changed the brand name in 2012 to Lucid FC, to reflect that the company makes clothing (it does not make footwear anymore).

The DeHarts left Atlanta for New York in September 2014 to attend LIM College, a New York school that specialises in the fashion business, only to drop out after one semester. During their brief time in col-lege, they scoured the fashion district and found two manufacturers: Johnny Wu Designs (to handle “cut and sew” pieces) and Jonathan Embroidery Plus (for items emblazoned with their logo, which resembles a sideways hashtag).

“It wasn’t that easy to find people to help make things for us,” Betts said.

“There were a lot of people we paid who didn’t help us,” Chet said.

No longer in school, they found jobs at VFiles, the too-cool-for-almost-everyone clothing shop on Mercer Street founded by Julie Anne Quay. “I heard there were these cute twins shopping in the store, and of course I came down to check them out,” Quay said.

After three months or so, the DeHarts graduated from working the floor (and impressing Quay with their knowledge of fashion and music) to having Lucid FC clothing on display in the VFiles showroom.

The brothers said they have no outside financial backers. “We’re still talking to people, but nothing has happened,” Betts said.

The twins live in a one-bedroom apartment on the first floor of a walk-up in New York City. One sleeps in the bedroom, the other on a bed in the living area among boxes and racks of inventory. They paid the rent a year in advance, half of it covered by their parents, they said. Jeff and Jessica DeHart also send $500 a month for groceries.

“I think all they’re eating is basically granola,” Jessica DeHart said.

A lawyer, Peter Pawlak Jr, has been assisting them at no charge with trademark and copyright issues. Their office space, also free, belongs to artist and investor Steven

Himmel, whom the twins met through Sheran, the hip-hop artist.

“I’ve been in their shoes before, being someone who is young with a dream, and I always appreciated look-ing back and seeing who helped me get to those goals today,” Himmel said.

Other mentors include photographer Steven Klein, who said, “They reminded me of someone from the Warhol era.” Also on Team DeHart is Carolyn Murphy, a model and the women’s design director for the Detroit-based label Shinola. She met the twins through Quay and said she was charmed by the boys’ quiet Southern manners. “I’m kind of like a second mom to them here in the city,” Murphy said.

She introduced the DeHarts to Tom Kartsotis, the founder of Bedrock Manufacturing, which owns Shinola. Kartsotis, who keeps a Lucid FC cap on a shelf in his office, said: “The thing that’s enamoured me is that they’re taking pretty big risks in business for a 19-year-old, which is similar to what I did. Even if this doesn’t work out for them, I’ll tell you, I’m way more impressed if I see six years of a failed startup on a résumé than a college degree.”

In January, the brothers will face a new obstacle, professionally and personally. Chet has been accepted to a three-month design and illustration programme at Central Saint Martins in London. “I have to stay here for the business,” Betts said.

“We’ve never been apart before,” Chet said. “Not for more than a night.”

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golf

In 2013 alone, 158 golf courses closed in America and in Florida the changing economics of golf are a microcosm of the countryWords: Nick Madigan

Golf Economics

Weeds, crabgrass and fallen palm fronds cover the wildly overgrown greens of what was once the Mizner Trail Golf Club, its decrepit state emblem-

atic of the fate of hundreds of golf courses around the country, many of them derisively known as “rabbit patches” or “goat farms.”

A short drive away, however, perspiring con-struction workers in yellow vests swarmed on a recent afternoon over the emerging structure of a 13,953-square-meter activities centre, part of a $50 million renovation of the 44-year-old Boca West Country Club, home to some 6,000 residents, where fairways are newly planted and houses sell for as much as $5 million.

With the winter golf season beginning in Florida — The States’ leader in golf courses with more than 1,000 — the extremes of failure and success point to a nationwide upheaval in the sport. It was booming when players like Tiger Woods reigned, but has since been roiled by changing tastes and economics, an aging population of players, and the vagaries of the millennial generation’s evolving pastimes.

There are about four million fewer players in the United States than there were a decade ago, according to the National Golf Foundation. Almost 650 18-hole golf courses have closed since 2006, the group says. In 2013 alone, 158 golf courses closed and just 14 opened, the eighth consecutive year that closures outpaced openings. Between 130 and 160 courses are closing every 12 months, a trend that the foundation predicts will continue “for the next few years.”

Dozens of private and public golf courses in South Florida, and hundreds around the country, are in transition. Some courses have sought bank-ruptcy protection, while others have slipped into foreclosure. Many are under construction, with single-family homes and condominiums going up on land once dotted only with pin flags, sand traps

and water hazards. Others have gone to seed as they await resolution of legal and zoning disputes.

Many clubs have survived by lowering sign-up fees and other costs, reducing the number of play-able holes, and offering family-friendly amenities and activities that go far beyond hitting a ball with a 9-iron.

“Some courses are adapting, others are just not,” said Paul H. Chipok, a lawyer in Orlando, Florida, who specializes in land-use and environ-mental issues. “It costs $100,000 a month to oper-ate an 18-hole golf course — mowing the grass, fertilizing, regular maintenance. And that’s not including capital improvements. You need a lot of green fees to cover that.”

At private courses, members may be willing to pay more if necessary “because they expect a cer-tain level of service,” Chipok said. “But courses that are open to the general public may not have the money to keep up their maintenance, and with less maintenance, the courses look worse and so they have to charge less to play on them. It’s a vicious cycle. This is the correction phase we’re going through now.”

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Lesley Deutch, a senior vice presi-dent in the Boca Raton office of John Burns Real Estate Consulting, said the “old model” of private golf clubs with high initiation fees and “very exclusive” memberships is in decline.

“I don’t think the industry is over,” she said. “I think it’s just changing.”

In South Florida, where buildable land is fast disappearing, developers see golf courses as wasted space. Vast swaths of land that were once pristine courses in the middle of residential communities are becoming highly exploitable territory — prime oppor-tunities for profits much greater than what fairways and putting greens can provide. As a result, the fallout of the downturn in the sport has been felt most keenly by residents of communities where the holes are no longer being played, primarily because the value of their homes often drops markedly once the course has closed.

“There are big issues, and they’re being fought and litigated,” said Steven M. Ekovich, a bro-

ker based in Tampa, Florida, who represents sellers of golf courses. “Homeowners paid a 20 or 30 per-cent premium for a golf-course lot, and suddenly a developer comes in and wants to build in front of them. There are big fights over that.”

A few kilometres south, in Tamarac, Florida, the owner of the Woodmont Country Club, Mark Schmidt, faced stern opposition from some of the club’s homeown-ers to his plan for the course, which involved reducing the 36 holes to 18, putting up a 1.8-hectare com-mercial centre, and building 152 single-family homes — in addition

to the 1,900 houses already there. The plan was ultimately approved last year, but city officials have since balked at the owner’s proposal to build a 120-room hotel on the site.

“There’s always resistance,” said Schmidt, who bought the Woodmont property 10 years ago. “The cost of operating a golf course today is very difficult,

golf

“It costs $100,000 a month to operate an 18-hole golf course — You need a lot of green fees to cov-er that”


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so the land is being put to better use. As much as some people lost their views, others have gained better views. No point in allowing the land to remain fallow.”

Michelle F. Tanzer, a Boca Raton lawyer who represents resort developers and owners and sits on the board of the National Club Association, has helped country clubs adapt to what she said is growing demand for fitness facilities, resort-style pools, water parks and improved dining choices in places where previously only golf was the norm. The golf industry, she said, is “doing much better than it’s looked since 2009.”

The Boca West Country Club’s heavy invest-ment in its facilities, Tanzer said, “is a perfect exam-ple of adapting” to the changing economics of golf. “They’re spending a fortune on making the place family-friendly,” she said. “It’s a home run.”

Oliver K. Hedge, who appraises golf course properties for the real estate brokerage firm Cushman & Wakefield, said the golf industry had “made great strides” in shaking off underperform-ing courses in the last few years.

“A lot of clubs that have closed really should have closed,” Hedge said. “Florida is a good microcosm of the nation because we’re so dense with golf courses.”

Many of the closures, he said, have involved public and semi-private courses, the latter a refer-ence to clubs that have an active membership program but that let non-members play for a fee.

In 2009, under what Hedge called “the prior economy model,” the Marsh Landing Country Club, a private course 483 kilometres north of here in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, charged a $100,000 initiation fee, 90 per cent of it refundable upon res-ignation. Dues were $6,612 a year. Today, that same membership costs $25,000, but it is non-refunda-ble, while annual dues have gone up to $8,400.

A developer known to be bullish on golf is the ubiquitous Donald J. Trump, who in 2012 added to his portfolio of 14 courses by purchasing two more in Florida, the Ritz Carlton Golf Club and Spa in Jupiter, Florida, and the Doral Golf Resort and Spa near Miami.

The price of the Jupiter resort — now known as the Trump National Golf Club — was not dis-closed, although Trump’s company invested about $2 million in renovations, according to Hedge.

The developer invested far more — some $250 million — in fixing up the four-course Doral resort, after buying it out of bankruptcy for $145 million. On Oct. 23, during a presidential campaign appearance at the resort, now called Trump National Doral, the candidate boasted of his negotiating skills in whittling $25 million off the asking price of the property.

“The key to the success of these ventures was the broader market timing,” Hedge said, referring to the two Trump resorts. “I assume they saw the luxury golf market returning, which it has done.”

Ekovich, the golf-course broker in Tampa, was slightly less positive in his estimation of the mar-ket’s strength.

“Revenues are up a little bit, and so are rounds,” said Ekovich, who noted that during the years of the recession the price of some golf courses had “cratered” to about half their former value. “Things are moving in the right direction, but they are by no means meteoric rises.”


liv

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lio. Private residence

Velaa Golf Academy By Olazabal

Spa My Blend By Clarins including snow room

Solo Residence

Semi submarine

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NooNu Atoll, MAldives

Price doubles from

$1,500

rooms 43 villas

velaaprivateisland.com

Mle

The story goes that Czech billionaire Jiri Smejc was staying at the Huvafen Fushi island and decided he wanted even better, so asked his villa butler to find him an island. A few years, and a $200 million later he had his own resort –

Velaa Private Island. A 50-minute trip by seaplane from Malé, the 43-villa resort is one

of the newest editions to the Maldives and holds a solid claim to be one of the most luxurious. Attention to details is staggering (wood panelling brought in from Borneo, stone from Jordan, chairs from Italy, etc), but it’s also fun and family-friendly. There’s a children’s club, tennis and squash courts, a nine-hole golf course and range of diving and watersports to go with the indulgence that includes a Clarins spa with ocean-view sauna and snow room, a three-storey wine tower with 6,000 bottles and an overwater, open-kitchen restaurant and Champagne lounge with a French chef

But perhaps most intriguing is the ultra-private one-bedroom villa suspended above the lagoon that’s accessible only by boat. Even on a private island, there’s another level of privacy.

VelaaUltra luxury... even by Maldivian standards

Children’s club

velaa Golf Academy By olazabal

solo Residence

Aragu Restaurant & Cru lounge

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Historic Monte-carlo rallyArriving in Monte Carlo on Saturday, January 23, and with a full day’s racing in the principality on the Sunday, this is one of the great motorsport events and the oldest rally on the circuit. While the F1 race gets much of the attention, it’s the rally that is for the

purist and Sunday’s final leg, as is traditional, runs in the Alpes Maritimes mountains above Monaco and features the legendary Col de Turini. It finishes just outside the palace in Monaco, with monarch Prince Albert presenting the prizes. Then on to the famous Jimmy’z to celebrate into the small hours.

additional info

...for crisp weather in Monaco, and beyond

Average days of rain: 5.9

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1. Thom Browne cashmere sweater $1,590 2. Paul Smith silk scarf $325 3. Orlebar Brown down-filled quilted gillet $475 4. Thierry Lasry round-frame sunglasses $485 5. Acqua Di Parma Colonia Club fragrance $129 6. Hackett checked trousers $378

ac

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Lacoste loafers $170

Stone Island holdall $180

TAG Heuer Monaco 40th Anniversary Automatic Chronograph $5,500

Givenchy Skull silver tone keyring $450

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While the city can be overcrowded and hot in summers, January is a fine month to visit, not least because it’s carnival time.

the Venice carniValFrom wine tastings and galleon cruises to classical music concerts and murder tours, January/February is the elegant party time for the city of canals, but the big events are the

costumed balls that take place throughout the city with the most famous being the Venice Grand Carnival Masquerade Ball. Set in a beautiful 15th century palace (that is normally closed to the public) and overlooking the Grand Canal, the

ball is the one to attend. Traditional Venetian costume and mask can be hired and it starts at 8pm with a candlelit gala dinner. Tickets are €760 for the side room or €880 for a seat in the main noble room Giuseppe Sardi

venice-carnival-italy.com

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what to pack

additional info

...for Venice, and beyond

citylook

Chance of sun: 26%

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1. Diane von Furstenberg dress $517 2. Carolina Bucci pearl and multi-stone necklass $5,288 3. Simone Rocha wool mohair blend knit $745 4. Charlotte Olympia shoes $980 5. Ethan K, crocodile Westminster bag $9,912 6. Valentino fringed leather gloves $340 7. Dolce & Gabbana oversized sunglasses $1,113

accessories

The Echoes Of Love by Hannah Fielding

$10

Tumi international carry on bag $590

Marni jewel embellished horn earrings

$380

1

citylook

Back To Paris Eau de Parfum by Eisenberg $186

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Portfolio.

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living / investment

investment piece

One of the things that the Zegna brand have done really well over the years is to create items that are both stylish and practical. Perhaps the best example of this is their ten-pocket travel jacket. While a dark blue blazer is the idea jacket for smart travel, this is also made from a unique wrinkle-resistant fabric so you’ll look as sharp getting off the plane as you do getting on it. But the real innovation is inside, with pockets designed specifically to carry items you’ll need while travelling, from passport and boarding pass to cash, a pen and phone. You’ll soon wish all your jackets had a few more pockets. Available for around $2,295

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Unique wrinkle-resistant fabric

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Wallet and pen holder

3 Dedicated phone pocket and cord routing for headphones

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1

Passport and boarding

card holder

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Zip pocket for keys

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Two usable front pockets

Zegna ten-pocket jacketThe classic jacket designed for travel

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LIVING / ADVICE

HOTELHôtel Jules et Jim

Just around the corner from my studio in Paris is this lovely little local hotel. It’s a really charming place, nothing too fussy but a

lovely place to stay. It’s also very close to where I’m going to be opening a new shop very soon, so look out for that.

BOOK Tears & Tears, by David Bailey.

David and I go a long way back. He’s photographed me

lots of times and has even shot our advertising campaign.

I was thrilled recently to host the launch of his new book at my shop in London featuring

lots of never-before-seen photos of the likes of Mick

Jagger, George Michael and Michael Caine.

PHONEMy dad was an amateur

photographer and so I’ve always taken lots of pictures,

many of which influence various aspects of my designs. I never use a computer but I do now use an iPhone to take photos. My iPhone 6 is packed full of photos of all sorts of different things that inspire me. I also

have my own Instagram page (@paul_smith), which sort of

acts like a visual diary.

CAR I drive a Land Rover Defender whenever I’m in Italy and I

was recently very privileged to be asked to design a one-off special edition Defender. I’m famous for my use of colour and so I chose lots of different colours to put all over the

different panels of the car. It’s got lots of hidden details too, a signature of Paul Smith.

RESTAURANT I never like to say I have

favourites but a little restaurant, called Aller Retour

on Rue Charles-François Dupuis, in Paris, is certainly up there. It’s a great place

that I try to go to whenever I’m in town. Fantastic wine,

great steak and a really lovely atmosphere. Highly

recommend.

CAR CAR I drive a Land Rover Defender whenever I’m in Italy and I

RIDEAnyone who knows me, knows

how much I love cycling. Growing up I had dreams

of becoming a professional cyclist, but had a serious crash,

which put an end to them unfortunately. But I still I love

bikes of all shapes and sizes. A Brompton’s great if you live in a city, as it’s so easy to store away.

Don’t forget your helmet and ride safe.

Sir Paul SmithBritish designer

TIPS FROM

A BOSS

With thanks to Harvey Nichols, Dubai

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Full page trim : 265mm x 205mmFull page type : 222mm x 169mm

Full page bleed : 271mm x 211mm

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LIVING / FOOD

Chef and owner André Chiang works via his own ‘Octaphilosophy’

with a tasting menu divided into eight sections: pure, salt, artisan, south, texture, unique, memory and terroir. The soul of his work, however, is French.

Having trained under French chefs, including the great Pierre Gagnaire as well as at L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon, Chiang’s dishes are reinterpretations of French nouvelle cuisine.

Inventive and with unique takes on established recipes, Chiang has garnered a reputation as one of the world’s best young chefs and accolades have poured in.

His restaurant, set in a narrow former shophouse in Singapore’s China Town, has become a must-visit for food lovers when visiting the country and one of the most revered in Asia. Book in advance and just go with his tasting menu, because you won’t find these things anywhere else.

Top tableFrench nouvelle cuisine, reinterpreted

41 Bukit Pasoh Road, Singapore

089855

restaurantandre.com

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CHEF’S RECOMMENDATION | CHIANG’S PICK OF THREE RESTAURANTS TO TRY

1. Eleven Madison Park (New York, USA) 2. Maison Pic (Valence, France) 3. Relae (Copenhagen, Denmark)

Smoked sunchoke chips

Noirmoutier potatoes

Crispy Swiss chard

1 CANARD DE CHALLANS, GRANOLA, BOUDIN NOIR

Pearlycouscous

Duck breast

Pine nuts

Ultra thin chicken-skin chips that are presented with enoki mushroom caviar, some shredded kaffir and a light green curry pesto.

CHICKEN MASALA

3

The British classic deconstructed and reimagined. Japanese Wakasagi fish is wrapped in shredded potatoes and then deep fried and plated amid sea lettuce.

FISH AND CHIPS

2

Wild grains granola

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living / book

Upon release, it was dubbed the world’s most beautiful cookbook. The six volumes of Modernist Cuisine: The Art And Science Of Cooking was – and still is - a mind-blowing 2,438-page comprehensive cookbook full of incredible photography and the science behind techniques such as gelling to the physics of poaching an egg. However, it cost $625, which put off a few people.

It’s now available as an interactive app for considerably less – and with added features. Along with 416 recipes and 1,683 high-res photos (359 of which can’t be found in the book), the digital edition features a recipe finder, a shopping list feature, a glossary with links to recommended products, technique videos and a yield converter allowing users to scale recipes based on how many people they’re cooking for.

If you’ve got more than a passing interest in cooking, food, and why things work in the kitchen (or don’t), then this is the answer to pretty much everything. And you’ll find out how to make those dishes that amaze you in restaurants.

Modernist Cuisine: The Art And Science Of Cooking is available now for $79.99

Appy chef

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living / hotels

T he stone head of Bacchus, the god of wine and pleasure, presides over the entrance to Paris’ Hotel Les Bains,

an invitation to hedonism. Bacchus’ head is the hotel’s logo, stamped on visual elements. You might want to leave the kids at home.

Les Bains-Douches was originally built in 1885 as an upscale municipal bathhouse. It was the first spa in Paris, offering a variety of massages and treatments, frequented by Emile Zola and Marcel Proust.

A century later, the spirit of Bacchus prevailed. Les Bains-Douches became a legend, the hippest nightclub in the world. Models, artists and celebs including Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jack Nicholson and Johnny Depp came to party with Joy Division, Simple Minds, the Dead Kennedys and The Cure.

The current owner, Jean-Pierre Marois, has succeeded in realising his long-held dream – to transform Les Bains Douches into a five-star boutique hotel in a tribute to his favourite hotel in the world, the Chateau Marmont.

Before renovations began, Marois offered the 3,000 square metre empty space to 60 internationally acclaimed street artists as an ephemeral canvas. Curated by gallery owner Magda Danysz, the bare walls and empty rooms were transformed by the creative genius of artists spanning four generations, from octogenarian Jacques Villeglé, to multimedia

7 rue du Bourg-l’Abbé

75003 Paris

Price From $400 per

night

lesbains-paris.com

CDG

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Where to

stay

artists such as Ash, Mr Brainwash and Sten Lex. The project, La Résidence d’Artistes, was a farewell tribute to the artistic DNA of the building, and is documented in a photo book of the same name.

Interior designers Tristan Auer and Denis Montel preserved Les Bains’ unique atmosphere by maintaining and restoring many original features of the bathhouse – the wooden reception desk, the mosaic floor and the Chinese Salon with stained-glass windows miraculously preserved under more than a century’s worth of nicotine.

The hotel has 39 rooms in six categories: Classic, Superior, Deluxe, Executive, Junior Suite and the Superstar Penthouse Suite, with queen- and king-sized beds and balconies on request.

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Bathrooms live up to the hotel’s raison-d’être with clawfoot bathtubs, bespoke Descamps bathrobes and toiletries by cult fragrance brand, Le Labo. The balconies overlooking the courtyard conceal a surprise feature in an outdoor shower.

The Superstar suite’s bathroom also has a hammam, a steambath as well as a bathtub, and a fully equipped kitchen so a private chef can prepare dinner for up to ten guests.

The decor is sophisticated urban-chic in black, white and grey, with bare concrete walls contrasting with bronze velvet upholstery and white marble. The ambiance is more private club than luxury hotel. All rooms have stereo systems with Marshall speakers and a custom playlist, while the walls are hung with original artwork curated by resident gallery owner, Jérôme Pauchant.

The hotel even has its own olfactory identity

eat

Dessance offers dessert as appetiser, main and dessert, with

no sugar added in the preparation. Take a seat at the marble-topped bar and order the tasting menu that’s prepared in front of you.

invest

For the perfect memento of your stay, check out the limited-edition reproduction of Andy Warhol’s cult sofa on sale in the hotel’s boutique, or the selection of original artworks

curated by Jérôme Pauchant.

Bar

Brilliant for celebrity spotting, if that’s your thing, especially on Thursday nights (Parisians’ night out). Don’t miss the Bloody Mary, a brilliantly revisited classic.

spa

Les Bains Guerbois is currently being transformed into a 21st century version of a spa. The legendary pool of Les Bains Douches is replicated with a hammam in the famous blue and white ceramic tiled pool with power jets, bubbles and gentle spray, in a bow to the bathhouse’s history.

Le Reservoir is a bijou private dining area concealed behind the main restaurant in the converted tank that once supplied water to the Les Bains Guerbois bathhouse. The dining room, with its 15-metre-high ceiling, seats up to 12 and has never previously been open to the public.

extratouch

shop

Kabuki Paris is a concept store, with an up-to-the-minute men’s and

women’s clothing from the likes of Balenciaga, Balmain, Dior, Givenchy, Kenzo Balmain, Givenchy, Kenzo and

Stella McCartney.

culture

The Pompidou Centre is close by, as are the Louvre and Notre Dame,

but visit the lesser-known Gaîté Lyrique, the centre of digital culture covering visual arts, cinema, games

and design.

in the hotel

places of interest in the area

with a scent created by the famous French nose, Dorothée Piot, that has been diffused on all five floors.

On the ground floor, the spectacular horseshoe bar is crowned by the bubble-drop ceiling, with a system of acoustics that lets guests enjoy both the live music and their conversation. The bar is flanked on both sides by two glass-walled smokers’ lounges.

The restaurant, La Salle à Manger, is situated on the former nightclub’s black and white dance floor, designed in 1978 by the then unknown Philippe Starck. It serves neo-brasserie cuisine with a menu created by master chef Philippe Labbé.

And best of all, the Club des Bains lives on, the only nightclub in the world with a tiny, indoor swimming pool, open until 2am. Party on, Paris.

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Classic Italian food in bologna

Caffè Pasticceria ZanariniThe Bolognese people have been coming here to see and be seen since 1928, and it’s still a great place for aperitivo. Prosecco and stuzzicati – the Italian version of tapas. Piazza Galvani 1

DianaConsidered by some to be the “high temple of Bolognese cuisine”, start with homemade pastas, then roasted meats and ice cream cake to end. Via Indipendenza 24

Al PappagalloHave the $63 chef’s tasting menu and marvel at the likes of tortellini in capon broth, tagliatelle with ragu and Bolognese cutlet. Piazza Della Mercanzia 3

Trattoria MeloncelloCome here for some perfect polpette (meatballs in tomato sauce) or osso buco or other traditional local dishes they've been serving here since 1918. Via Saragozza 240a

And stay at...

Grand Hotel Majestic BaglioniThe oldest and most prestigious hotel in the city, centrally located and wonderfully elegant.

places to eat...

I t’s the home of tortellini, mortadella, tagliatelle, ragu and many other of the great foods to come of out Italy. While the city may be behind the likes of Milan,

Rome and Venice for some attractions, a trip to Bologna is a treat for lovers of north Italian cuisine, which is not only some of the best in the country, but the whole world. After all, who doesn’t like Italian food? Here are four places to get the best of the local flavours.

Emirates flys daily to Guglielmo Marconi airport in Bologna.

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Usually, I’m sceptical whenever some ultra-successful Silicon Valley firm gets held up as an example of how we’ll all be working in future. Sure, it’s possible that Google’s success is down to free yoga classes, napping pods and unlimited gourmet food consumed in “conversation areas designed to look like vintage subway cars”. But it’s surely equally likely that these are indulgences a rich company can afford, whether or not they help the bottom line – and they won’t be coming to call centres or council offices any time soon.

The latest trend might have more going for it, though: more tech businesses are experimenting with four-day weeks. As Ryan Carson, co-founder of the education startup Treehouse, put it: “You get all day Friday off, instead of just pretending like you’re working when you’re not.”

The most important reason to work fewer days, of course, is that it’s good for families, friendship, hobbies and the human spirit. But the most interesting implication of the current experiments, backed by some academic research, is that it appears to be good for productivity and work quality, too. Partly that’s because desk-based “knowledge work” relies on plenty of brain rest as well as exertion.

Pushing people past their natural limits doesn’t just make them inefficient, it actively damages work on the following days. In other cases, employees aren’t working fewer hours at all, but simply rearranging them, from five days of eight hours to four days of ten.

Yet even this provides a useful sense of constraint: knowing you’ve got to squeeze everything into fewer days seems to improve efficiency overall.

A similar philosophy of less-is-more informs Josh Davis’s recent book, Two Awesome Hours, which begins by rejecting the premise that it’s worth trying to squeeze value from every moment of every day.

To get more out of machines or computers, it’s almost always best to run them for longer. But they can’t get tired; humans can. Instead, to the extent that your job allows it, Davis proposes fighting hard to ringfence one two-hour period of

distraction-free work each day, at a time of peak energy – during which you’ll probably get more meaningful stuff done than in two whole days at half-power.

The big unspoken truth here is that we think about the work week in terms that might have outlived their usefulness. In the 1920s, the two-day weekend represented a major victory for workers’ rights, but that doesn’t mean five days of

work is the right number. Even the seven-day week itself is a human creation: unlike the year, month, or day, it has no close connection to nature. Revolutionary France had a ten-day week, and the Soviet Union tried a five-day “continuous work week”, with staggered days off, so production lines never needed to pause.

Besides, measuring work in hours, a legacy of the Industrial Revolution, makes little sense for knowledge work, save that it’s easy to quantify. If you can possibly get away with it, work less: you’ll find that you actually get more work done.

“Even the seven-day week itself

is a human creation: unlike the year, month, or day, it has no close connection

to nature”

Tell the boss: let me work less and I’ll produce moreBy Oliver Burkeman

Oliver Burkeman is the author of The Antidote: Happiness For People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking

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