Portfolio | November 2015

The business of life & living

ISSUE

119 FROM HOBBIES TO EMPIRES How Kickstarter companies are taking on the big watch brands

SIRI IS LEARNING

MAKING CITIES GREEN

Will your phone become sentient?

The importance of natural spaces

BLACK HOLE HUNTERS

ACCESS NOT OWNERSHIP

Inside the Event Horizon Telescope

The future of the music industry

I N C I N EMAS

JAMES BOND’S CHOICE

More information available at OMEGA Middle East, Emirates Towers, Dubai, UAE. Tel: +971 4 3300455

november issue 119

The business of life & living

Exclusive to Emirates First Class and Business Class

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Obaid Humaid al Tayer MANAGING PARTNER & GROUP EDITOR ian Fairservice EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Gina JOHnsOn GROUP EDITOR mark evans marke@motivate.ae EDITOR maTTHew POmrOy matthew.pomroy@motivate.ae sENIOR ART DIRECTOR sara raFaGHellO sarar@motivate.ae sENIOR DEsIGNER rOui FranciscO rom@motivate.ae sUb-EDITOR salil kumar salil@motivate.ae EDITORIAL AssIsTANT lOndresa FlOres londresa@motivate.ae GENERAL MANAGER – PRODUCTION sunil kumar sunil@motivate.ae PRODUCTION MANAGER r. murali krisHnan muralik@motivate.ae PRODUCTION sUPERvIsOR veniTa PinTO venita@motivate.ae CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER anTHOny milne anthony@motivate.ae GROUP sALEs DIRECTOR craiG waGsTaFF craig.wagstaff@motivate.ae INTERNATIONAL sALEs MANAGER marTin balmer martin.balmer@motivate.ae GROUP sALEs MANAGER Jaya balakrisHnan jaya@motivate.ae sENIOR sALEs MANAGER micHael underdOwn michael@motivate.ae 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.

All dollar prices throughout the magazine refer to US dollars.

Published for Emirates by

10

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Portfolio.

THE bLACk HOLE HUNTERs

48 The Galactic Center of the Milky Way, as seen by infrared telescopes, is located in the bright upper

left portion of this image and there is strong evidence of a supermassive black hole at the centre. So the Event Horizon Telescope team are now using the world’s biggest telescope to try and find it.

We are celebrating F. A. Lange’s 200th birthday – by devoting every minute to our watches.

F. A. Lange devoted his entire life to perfecting the mechanical

passionately pursue the perfection of every watch down to the

watch. He invented pioneering designs and production methods

smallest detail – for example of the Datograph Up/Down. Even

and developed totally new precision measuring instruments –

those parts of its movement that remain hidden from the eye of

based, for the very first time, on the metric system. Today, we also

the beholder are lavishly decorated. www.alange-soehne.com

You are cordially invited to discover the collection at: A. Lange & Söhne Boutique Dubai · Dubai Mall, Tel. +971 4 325 39 23, dubai@lange-soehne.ae

PERFECT TIMING INCLUDED: WITH PUSHBUTTON EASE. It has always been the objective of Moritz Grossmann to bring precision to the point.

Our solution: a small pusher which does exactly that – with pinpoint accuracy. www.grossmann-uhren.com

OR IGI N OF A N E W T I M E

Moritz Grossmann Japan Co., Ltd., Tokyo · Leicht Juweliere, Dresden · Juwelier CW Müller, Koblenz · Juwelier Reuer, Berlin Juwelier Carl Glück, München · Juwelier Windecker, Oberursel · Juwelier Seiler, Basel · Haute Horlogerie Schindler, Zermatt Atelier Wassmann, Zug · William & Son, London · Independence Limited, Hong Kong · Ahmed Seddiqi & Sons, Dubai

NOVEMBER ISSUE 119

CONTENTS UPFRONT

16

INFORMATION

How much space does $10 get you?

19

TECHNOLOGY

Porsche and their fully electric car

22

MOST WANTED

Some inventive ways to spend your money

LIVING

80

25

HOTEL RESORT

Why the age of overt luxury is coming to an end

87

28

89

BRANDING

AREA WATCH

West Zurich: a part of Switzerland that’s actually pretty cool

32

VIRTUAL WEALTH

The vast sums of money being made from video games

41

CAREERS

The man who makes a living mining for 100-year-old jeans

Luxury in the Wild West FIVE TIPS FROM A CEO

A few pointers from the boss INVESTMENT PIECE

The luggage brand used by royals and explorers

91

TOP TABLE

Eleven Madison Park, the best restaurant in the US?

94

BOOK

The greatest collection of surfing images in one place

13

31,041 copies January - June 2015

PORTFOLIO.

NOVEMBER ISSUE 119

CONTENTS FEATURES

44 GREEN CITY SPACES

How cities around the world can create more green spaces

56 OVERTHINKING GAMES

A statistical and scientific approach to board games

66 THE NEW SILICON VALLEY?

How did Sweden end up being a thriving place for startups?

70 THE MUSIC INDUSTRY 2.0

Chairman of Parlaphone records makes the case for a non-owning digital future

76 GENERATION Z

What are we to make of the people born in the age of the smartphone?

14

INTERNATIONAL MEDIA REPRESENTATIVES AUSTRALIA/NEW ZEALAND Okeeffe Media; Tel + 61 894 472 734, okeeffekev@bigpond.com.au BELGIUM AND LUXEMBOURG M.P.S. Benelux; Tel +322 720 9799, francesco.sutton@mps-adv.com CHINA Publicitas Advertising; Tel +86 10 5879 5885 GERMANY IMV Internationale Medien Vermarktung GmbH; Tel +49 8151 550 8959, w.jaeger@imv-media.com HONG KONG/THAILAND Sonney Media Networks; Tel +852 2151 2351, hemant@sonneymedia.com INDIA Media Star; Tel +91 22 4220 2103, ravi@mediastar.co.in SWITZERLAND, FRANCE/ITALY & SPAIN IMM International; Tel +331 40 1300 30, n.devos@imminternational.com JAPAN Tandem Inc.; Tel + 81 3 3541 4166, all@tandem-inc.com NETHERLANDS giO media; Tel +31 (0)6 22238420, giovanni@giO-media.nl TURKEY Media Ltd.; Tel +90 212 275 51 52, mediamarketingtr@medialtd.com.tr UK Spafax Inflight Media; Tel +44 207 906 2001, nhopkins@spafax.com USA Totem Brand Stories; Tel +1 4168475100, nicole.mullin@tc.tc PORTFOLIO.

Quick floor-space guide How much office space will $10 buy you in 1:1 scale?

UPFRONT

PORTFOLIO.

When it comes to office space, we’re increasingly paying more for less. With London office rents predicted to increase by 13 per cent by 2017 and New York getting too expensive for some businesses, who in turn had already priced out residents, it’s getting tough out there. So how much floor space will $10 currently get you? The below shows you in actual 1:1 scale. And if nothing else, it might make you think twice about using up valauble floorspace in the office for a ficus plant that everyone forgets to water.

PORTFOLIO.

PORTFOLIO. PORTFOLIO.

Stockholm Rome

Mumbai Stockholm

Geneva Mumbai

Geneva Tokyo

Tokyo Moscow

Moscow New York

New York Hong Kong Island

London

Hong Kong Island

Monaco

London

Monaco

16

NOVEMBER NOVEMBER NOVEMBER /UPFRONT 119 /INFOGRAPHICS /UPFRONT ISSUEISSUE ISSUE 119 119

THIS THIS MUCHMUCH SPACE = $10= $10 SPACE

17 18

Prague

Prague

Madrid

Auckland

Madrid

Auckland

Berlin

Dubai

Berlin

Dublin

Dubai

Dublin

Toronto

Amsterdam

Toronto

Sydney Amsterdam

Rome Sydney

18

PORTFOLIO.

PORTFOLIO. PORTFOLIO.

november upfront / automotive

issue 119

cars | global

Porsche goes electric

Mission E Concept marks a huge breakthrough in EV technology. Words: Jack Rogers

U

nveiled at the recent Frankfurt Motor Show, Porsche’s Mission E Concept is the company’s first allelectric car in its 84-year history.

Loosely based on the architecture of the Porsche 918 Spyder, it’s a four-door, four-seat, battery powered sports car, but still pushes out 600 horsepower that will send you from 0-62mph (0-100km/h) in 3.5 seconds and reach a top speed of 155mph (250km/h).

The car’s menu navigation is controlled through eye tracking. Using cameras, the system detects the desired instrument, which is then activated at the Global EV Sales

+53%

300 250 +70%

200 150

+57% +150% +54%

100 +729%

50 00

81%

81%

2010

2011

49%

+43%

+46%

Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles

51%

2012

Battery Electric Vehicle

2013

2014

click of a button on the steering wheel.

Porsche has also opted for mounted cameras that feed video into the lower corners of the windscreen, rather than traditional wing mirrors.

Porsche’s design chief, Michael Mauer, has said that elements of the Mission E have been designed only as a concept, but believes a final version will “be close” to the prototype.

The real breakthrough, however, comes in the form of the Misson E’s 800-volt battery system, which takes just 15 minutes to charge to 80 per cent capacity. On a full battery, it will give you a 500-kilometre range – five times further than most new electric cars.

The industry has understandably seen this as a move to take on the Tesla S but, more significantly, other luxury brands, including Aston Martin, Audi, Bentley and McLaren, all unveiled models that use the technology at the Geneva Motor Show last March.

Porsche say a decision about full production will be taken at the end of the year, but this is further proof – if it were ever needed – that the idea of fully electric cars is becoming workable. And with top designers from the likes of Porsche creating sports cars, exciting as well.

Portfolio.

19

november issue 119

upfront / design

gangnEung rEsort hotEl

by Planning Korea Architects & Artists Group

Gangneung SEOUL

hotel | south korea

Möbius brand

Currently being built for the 2018 Winter Olympics, the Gangneung resort hotel in South Korea will be a landmark long after the games are over

E

vents like Expos and big sports tournaments bring with them opportunities for new architecture that will live on long after the games… and divide opinion. This seaside accommodation for the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics – as the nonwintery illustrations show – is an example currently under construction. While opinion is split on the aesthetics, the concept is at least interesting.

From the Seoul-based Planning Korea, the 20 structure’s loop-shape structure, which resembles a Möbius strip (or infinity sign as some are suggesting), has two cores and two crossed slopes along each exterior wall linked to the main body.

The seaside area in front of the building has pools and buildings to form a village inspired by Portfolio.

the designs of traditional Hanok-style Korean housing.

The architects says the figure-eight form actually draws inspiration from the ecological structure of the plankton, and references the project’s conceptual basis of “a strip of healing or recreation”. In the centre of the two opposing loops will be a suspended swimming pool, while the roof will have a “sky spa”.

The stadiums for the Olympic Games, also under construction, are five kilometres inland and it’s expected that competitors will stay at the hotel. And, thanks to LED technology on the ocean-side of the building, the lower part of the façade can be turned into a giant TV screen for residents to watch the events.

317,460 Square feet of property

946

Rooms in the hotel

NOVEMBER UPFRONT / SPEND

ISSUE 119

Most wanted Classic Porsche, video doorbell and a designer kennel

1

1969 PORSCHE 911 TARGA If you’re looking for an investment Porsche, then the Porsche 911 2.7 Carrera RS has increased in value by over 600 per cent in the last decade – a greater percentage than any other car. But really, if you have a heart then you don’t buy a Porsche as an investment, you buy it to give you pleasure right now. And a late-1960s 911 Targa is a beautiful work of art you can drive. They crop up in good condition for around $115,000.

22

TIMELESS CLASSIC Increasingly, one of the best places to buy a watch is at auction, and on the tenth of this month at Sotheby’s a rare stainless steel Comograph Daytona “Paul Newman” is going to be on offer. The 1971 timepiece is a classic of the era, but equally will never go out of style and Rolex Daytonas are, arguably, the most sought-after watches right now.

Sotheby’s says it’s expected to fetch between $61,000 and $82,000.

classiccars.com

PORTFOLIO.

2

3

4

D’AGOSTINO MLIFE STREAMING AMP

WI-FI VIDEO DOORBELL

MID-CENTURY MODERN KENNEL

A beautifully designed amp that lets you stream music losslessly through Apple AirPlay; browse thousands of online radio stations through built-in vTuner internet radio capability; access Tidal highfidelity music streaming; and connect to smartphones, tablets and computers wirelessly.

It’s certainly not cheap, but probably not bettered.

The Zmodo Greet Smart Wi-Fi video doorbell lets you answer the door wherever you are.

Via a wide-angle HD camera you can see, as well as hear and speak to, visitors via your smartphone from anywhere, whether you are out the house, or just on the sofa feeling lazy. It also lets you pre-record messages to be played to anyone who rings.

The mid-century modern Puphaus is perhaps one of the last places you might think to co-ordinate your interior decor, but it is nonetheless a beautifully-designed item. And it’s ideal if your dog has recently hit that mid-life period where he’s now into jazz and prefers chewing coffee-table books about sleek 1950s architecture.

$48,000, dandagostino.com

$150, zmodo.com

$990, pyramddesignco.com

NOVEMBER UPFRONT / MARKETING

Are we past overt luxury?

The rise of inconspicuous consumption

F

or nearly a decade marketers have been talking about the rise of “inconspicuous consumption”: elite consumers’ growing affinity for discreet rather than traditionally branded luxuries. Giana Eckhardt, a professor of marketing at Royal Holloway, University Of London, watched with interest as the trend developed in Europe and the United States. But it took a sabbatical in China to convince her that this was a global phenomenon to which she – and every chief marketing officer in the luxury sector – should devote full attention.

“China was supposed to be the land of conspicuousness, but all of a sudden people were making fun of overt wealth and even taking the labels off their clothes,” Eckhardt recalls. To find out why, and what companies could do in response, she and two colleagues reviewed the research on the trend and investigated consumer behavior in markets around the world. Although the evidence is more anecdotal than scientific, they concluded that three factors are driving the change.

First, now that luxury brands have spread to the middle class through diffusion and accessory lines, services such as Rent The Runway, fast-fashion copycats and

high-quality counterfeits, logos don’t signal wealth the way they once did. As Wharton’s Jonah Berger pointed out in a 2010 study, “If most of the buyers are merely thousandaires, rather than millionaires, the [product becomes] a signal of the wannabe rich.”

Second, upper-class consumers have become intrinsically less drawn to overt status symbols.

Eckhardt and her colleagues say that although this may have started with a reluctance to stand out during the economic downturn of the late 2000s, it has persisted.

Third, social media have enabled the rise of niche brands (Goat womenswear, Bottega Veneta

KEEP IT SIMPLE Guess what brand of watch Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, wears on his wrist. A Patek Philippe? A Rolex? A vintage Cartier?

No, he wears a $100 Swatch. It’s part of a strange trend of billionaires and world leaders wearing some of the cheapest watches on the market. Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone, also wears a Swatch. As does the French president François Hollande. Meanwhile Russian billionaire Roman Abramovic has been spotted wearing a $100 Polar M61. Many other Wall Street CEOs and hedge funders also wear cheap watches. They may own yachts, cars, privates jets and property all over the world but strangely, many of them countdown to the opening bell with the same timepiece as a 16-year-old. Because when you really are that rich and powerful, you don’t need to advertise it.

ISSUE 119

PORTFOLIO.

25

NOVEMBER UPFRONT / MARKETING

ISSUE 119 leather goods, Kimpton hotels, and Blue Bottle Coffee, for example) through which like-minded people of any socioeconomic stratum can send what Berger calls “subtle signals” to one another. His lab studies have shown that “the educated elite” – say, fashion students choosing which bag to buy – have a significant preference for “discreetly marked products, subtle but distinct styles or highend brands that fly beneath the radar”, which gives the providers of those offerings greater longevity than their “more blatant counterparts”.

Of course, all this poses a big problem for companies that have bet the farm on conspicuous branding.

“Eighty per cent of the organisations we talk to are not on top of it,” Eckhardt says. “Their reaction is, ‘What are we going to do? Our entire strategy is based on people buying products to signal their social status to others.’ That’s what they learned in their MBA programmes. But we think this is a long-term shift, not a cyclical one.

“We see inconspicuous as a global trend going forward.

Luxury is becoming more personal than social”

Twenty years from now people will look back and say, ‘I can’t believe we ever used brands in that way.’”

So far executives, consultants, analysts and academics have been slow to recognise the trend’s momentum and develop a response. But some best practices are emerging.

Eckhardt’s team cites two they think can help companies get out in front.

Some companies, including Louis Vuitton, Michael Kors, Tesla and Audi, have begun downsizing their logos, hiding them (putting them on the lining of a handbag rather than on the exterior, for example) or making them optional. Patrón has reduced the gilding on its tequila bottles, and Tiffany has dropped the spelled-out brand name from its fashion jewellery line in favour of a simple ‘T’.

Eckhardt compares the Chinese luxury apparel brands Shanghai Tang (part of the Richemont group) and Shang Xia (owned by Hermès). She says that the former

‘WE FOCUS ON AN IMMERSIVE STRATEGY’

Alison Broadhead, chief commercial officer of Jumeirah Group, on the hotel chain’s response to the rise of inconspicuous consumption How are you adapting to changing consumer tastes?

Our ethos is: stay different. No hotel in our portfolio is like another. Our resort in the Maldives is very pared back; space is the luxury, which means you might have a 2,500-square-foot room. At Port Soller (in Mallorca, Spain) the views are what’s luxurious. In Istanbul and Rome we’re in historic buildings; the idea is to blend in and focus on local culture. Dubai is a more traditional luxury market, but we have a range of offerings, including boutique-style hotels and beachfront villas. There’s something for everyone.

26

Do you think the backlash against conspicuous consumption will spread everywhere?

People in developed economies have become a lot more focused on fulfilling emotional needs, and this includes travel and ensuring that their limited downtime is well spent. There’s still an appetite for conspicuousness in emerging markets, but it’s shifting quickly. Russian and Chinese people have really only been travelling for a generation, but they’re already looking for more curated experiences.

How have you shifted your marketing?

We focus on a much more immersive strategy – we want to be visible and available when customers are looking for us, when they’re dreaming and researching and of the mind to book travel. That’s different from the big advertising splashes popular five or ten years ago. We emphasise packages – food and beverage or spa and wellness, say – that offer extra value to different customer segments. And we’ve invested in online videos to create an emotional connection with current and potential guests. We’re now the most viewed hotel brand on YouTube.

PORTFOLIO.

emits “very loud brand signals” and is “floundering”, while the latter has a quieter presence — emphasising the artisans behind its products, its tasteful stores and its high-quality customer service – and is growing rapidly, especially in China.

Eckhardt also cites the hotel and resort chain Jumeirah, which markets the unique qualities of each of its properties – for example, tea service with honey collected from a rooftop hive (Frankfurt) and access to turtle rehabilitation projects (Dubai).

Other examples include the UK department store Selfridges, which has created “intimate shopping spaces” that de-emphasise brand and price; Apple, which competes with luxury watch manufacturers by highlighting the practical benefits of its iWatch, not its social-signalling power; and highend farm-to-table restaurants that tout locally brewed ciders, free-range chicken and organic heirloom tomatoes, not Dom Pérignon Champagne, Kobe beef and Almas caviar.

Eckhardt’s team notes that some companies manage to have it both ways, however. Take Daimler, which still markets its conspicuously branded Mercedes line in China but has also launched the subtler, all-electric Denza brand there, or the fashion brand Tom Ford, which famously puts no logos on its clothes and packages its Private Blend fragrance collection in an equally plain way but sells the scent in oversized bottles in the Gulf.

“The balance in a brand portfolio depends on the geographic market and the consumer the company is trying to reach today,” Eckhardt says.

“But we see inconspicuous as an overarching global trend going forward. Luxury is becoming more personal than social.”

The Rise of Inconspicuous Consumption,

by Jonathan AJ Wilson, Giana M Eckhardt and Russell W Belk.

upfront

28

Portfolio.

november issue 119

focus on Zurich west, Zurich

/living report

Out of its gritty past, this happening neighbourhood adds spark to Switzerland’s most intriguing city Words: Bill Harby

29 Zurich

ZRH

Portfolio.

upfront

accoModation 25hours Hotel, Neni Restaurant Budapester Str. 40 Bold, whimsical, colourful design with exceptional low-key service and cuisine to match in the house restaurant.

hot spot dining LaSalle Restaurant Schiffbaustrasse Four Fine continental cuisine.

And yes, as is not uncommon in Switzerland, you can order a horse meat fillet.

Im Viadukt Viaduktstrasse Gourmet groceries, furniture, fashion, gear.

gastro lounge

Area map: Zurich West, Zurich

Recommended…

Alice Choo Limmatstrasse 275 Fusion Asian cuisine.

Then they clear the tables, and it morphs into a nightclub.

30

Portfolio.

MuseuM Museum of Design Pfingstweidstrasse 96 Provocative exhibitions of design, photography and applied arts.

hot spot Frau Gerolds Garten Geroldstrasse 23/23 This has become a neighbourhood institution with its odd combo of casual three-season alfresco beer garden, winter fondue yurt and minimalist fashion boutiques.

Legend Art Shop Stay To see Dining

drinKs Hotel Rivington and Sons Hardstrasse 201 Sophisticated cocktails and not a hotel. Ask your bartender about the American Prohibition connection.

Kid’s shopping Nepomuk Kinderladen Klingenstrasse 23 Cool children’s couture and toys.

november

S

ome people who’ve never been to Switzerland’s largest city have the wrong idea – that it’s “just an international banking centre with a fancy boulevard of luxury designer boutiques you can easily find in any big city. Plus some medieval churches. And a lake with pretty parks.

Nice, but… let’s go skiing in the Alps”.

Aficionados of über urban culture might want to check out “Züri West,” the city’s stylish neighbourhood with a gritty past.

A good place to start is Im Viadukt, where the neighbourhood’s past and present meld. A railway viaduct handbuilt in 1894 to transport coal for the area’s 19th-century factories, today the 36 archways are home to boutiques featuring fashion, furniture, housewares, toys, books and outdoor gear, as well as cafés, bars and restaurants. There’s also Markethalle with gourmet groceries, wines, whiskies and prepared ethnic foods that make a great takeout lunch to enjoy in nearby Josefwiese Park. Around the Viadukt you find a mix of locals and visitors, business execs and families, people curious to see what they can find, or just out for a stroll.

On Limmatstrasse is Löwenbräu-Areal, a handsome orange brick brewery built in 1897, now home to condos, art expos and the ateliers of international artists creating original fine and applied arts.

This is just one of the formerly industrial buildings in Kreis 5 (District 5), as Zürich West is officially known. Now imaginative artisans and entrepreneurs have redefined these buildings once devoted to shipbuilding, machine production, and other heavy industry.

Like Schiffbau, formerly a shipyard, now home to three small theatres, the classy LaSalle Restaurant, snazzy NietturmBar and Moods, a scruffy jazz club that brings in exceptional international acts.

A few blocks away, the gleaming glass Prime Tower, Switzerland’s tallest building (only 36 floors), marks a clean break from the area’s industrial past. Besides office space, the tower has the whitetablecloth Clouds restaurant on the top floor, offering panoramas of the city. Back down at street level, a tony Americanstyle cocktail bar with the confusing name of Hotel Rivington And Sons (your bartender will explain). Nearby is

/living report

a neighbourhood favourite, Frau Gerolds Garten with its casual three-season alfresco eatery, winter fondue yurt, and sleek little clothing boutiques.

Other cafés and restaurants all over the quarter offer everything from local sausages and beers to international dishes.

Wander, look in the window, scan the sidewalk menu, take a chance. That’s what real travel is all about, right?

On other streets in Kreis 5, like Josefstrasse and Geroldstrasse between the rail tracks and the Limmat River, you’ll find small independent storefronts selling all sorts of curios, including vintage and modern furniture (Walter Vintage Moebel),

issue 119

colourful custom bicycles tweaked for city riding (UrbanRider), and various odd items that you suddenly can’t do without.

For Züri West rest, there’s one fivestar hotel in the neighbourhood: the Marriott Renaissance Zürich Tower. But it’s the four-star 25hours Hotel Zürich West that really reflects the creative character of the neighbourhood. This boutique hotel is a dream for anyone who loves whimsical, colourful interior design, not to mention exceptional, unpretentious service. And it’s next door to the fascinating Museum Of Design at the new campus of the Zürich University Of The Arts.

cost of living Blocks of modest apartment buildings constructed for yesteryear’s factory labourers still house longtime residents. More luxurious apartments and office suites are available in places like the Mobimo Tower (pictured) Löwenbräu-Areal and EscherTerrassen, as well as on streets like Shiffbaustrasse, Langstrasse and Heinrichstrasse. The new Hard Turm Park has office space and rental apartments, with more becoming available in the next few years.

Real estate is never cheap in Zürich, often called the world’s “most expensive city”. In Kreis 5, two-bedroom flats rent for a rough average of CHF4,500 ($4,631) and up, and sell for CHF4 million ($4.11 million) and up. These prices can be double, triple or more of what they are in other parts of Zürich.

31

Portfolio.

NOVEMBER UPFRONT / TECHNOLOGY

ISSUE 119

OLDSCHOOL INCOME

Before the rise of home consoles, the arcade was king and the quarter was your access. And a lots of quarters were dropped into machines. Here are the top three.

GAMES | GLOBAL

Locked and loaded Have you seen the vast amounts of money being made from video games?

T

32

he idea that video games are for teenage boys has long been dismissed.

A 2008 study – one of many – showed that only 55 per cent of people who play video games are male and the average age is 35. What some people still fail to grasp, however, is the sheer scale of the business. This month offers a reminder as one of the big franchises releases its new title.

Call of Duty: Black Ops III is out on November 6 but it’s already a huge hit – at least financially.

By early August, three months before anyone would even get to touch it, the pre-release sales had well-passed the million copies mark for Xbox and PS4 alone.

For Call of Duty publisher Activision Blizzard, it’s business as

$11bn

Total earnings from Call of Duty franchise

PORTFOLIO.

normal. Last year, Bobby Kotick, president and CEO of Activision Blizzard, announced the culminate earnings for the Call of Duty franchise stand at over $11 billion.

That’s more than the combined lifetime-earnings for the top six highest-grossing films of all time.

While the pre-release sales are more than solid, the in-store sales are also expected to be huge. To give you an idea of scale, when it was released back in November 2011, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 made $775 million in its first five days – that’s $125 million more last summer’s Jurassic World which is the all-time highest-grossing film for week of release.

The model is changing, however, with digital distribution increasing rather than the need for buying

1,900

Years of cumulative play every day globally

$685m 2014 Q4 earnings for digital

physical copies in a store. The company announced record digital sales for last year, which now make up 46 per cent of revenue with fourth-quarter earnings of $685 million. More bad news for the high-street retailer.

Notably though, despite the huge sales Activision launched a free-to-play online version of Call of Duty this year, specifically to target the Chinese market where the freemium model is preferred – the game itself being free but offering in-game purchases.

Whether fremium becomes global standard remains to be seen, but demand for more is clearly there. In an age when ‘audience retention’ is a key goal, Activision has announced that players worldwide cumulatively spend the equivalent of 1,900 years playing Call of Duty every day. That equates to a total of over 2.85 million years of play for the franchise. The company’s projected 2015 earnings are $4.14 billion.

Hardly child’s play.

1. PAC MAN Year: 1980 Within two years, creator Namco had sold 400,000 cabinets worldwide (at $2,400 each) and by the end of the century it’s estimated that 10 billion quarters ($2.5 billion) had been spent on these machines.

2. SPACE INVADERS Year: 1978 It grossed an average of $600 million a year up until 1982, by which time it had taken $2.7 billion in quarters ($9.77 billion adjusted for 2015). It was the highest-grossing entertainment of the time, even making more than Star Wars.

3. STREET FIGHTER 2 Year: 1991 The only game post-1986 to make the top 12 most-successful arcade games. It’s estimated that it took about $2.3 billion, with one of the reasons for its success being the fast-game and high-turnover for coin-op action.

november upfront / propErtY

issue 119 for salE | nEw York

The house Hadid built The first residential apartments in New York designed by starchitect Zaha Hadid

Two-to-five bedrooms

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Wellness level

Roof terrace

hen Pritzker Prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid announced her first residential building in New York the feedback was largely positive.

For a start, it appeared to have avoided the beautifulbut-impractical tag that blighted some of her other buildings. Apartments have now gone on sale.

The 11-storey building at West 28th Street – overlooking the highline – will house 39 luxury apartments, including a $50 million penthouse.

Each apartment has private entrance foyers, up to 590-square-metres of space and is undeniable in the style of Hadid, who designed the kitchens in conjunction with experts Boffi. Bathrooms feature white marble and a six-foot sculpted bathtub, but crucially, there are touches that soften the feel of the design, such as wide-plank white oak flooring.

Shared amenities in the building include a dedicated “wellness level” with state-of-the-art fitness centre, 12-seat IMAX cinema and 70-foot sky-lit indoor pool.

For fans of Hadid’s idiosyncratic style, this is a rare chance to live in one of her works, in a prime area in one of the world’s greatest cities.

Portfolio.

Spa suite

New York

Price $4.9m to $50m

520w28.com

Parking portal

70ft indoor pool

IMAX cinema

NOVEMBER UPFRONT / TECHNOLOGY

ISSUE 119

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | USA

Siri is learning.

Is that creepy?

New developments point to a robotic future. Words: Farhad Manjoo

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he headline feature in Apple’s latest smartphones, the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, is something called 3D Touch, which lets you activate shortcuts on the phone by pressing a bit harder on the screen. For now, though, I found a less novel, but far handier feature in the new iPhone – one that has long been the butt of jokes but is now becoming a necessary part of modern computing.

You may have heard of it: it’s called Siri, and together with voicecontrol initiatives from Google,

Amazon, Microsoft and several startups, it is poised to change the way we think of computers.

As David Pierce wrote recently in Wired, voice recognition and artificial intelligence are getting so good so quickly that it isn’t really a stretch to imagine that talking to computers will soon become one of the signature ways we interact with them. The new Siri is paving the way to what you might call “ambient computing” – a future in which robotic assistants are always on hand to answer questions, take notes, take orders or otherwise

1 billion

The number requests globally to Siri every week

40%

Claimed that on iOS 9, Siri will be up to 40 per cent faster and 40 per cent more accurate

function as auxiliary brains to whom you might offload many of your chores.

Picture the Star Trek computer, but instead of powering a starship, it’s turning off the basement lights, finding you a good movie on Netflix and, after listening in on a fight between you and your spouse, reminding you to buy flowers the next day. It will be slightly creepy and completely helpful – and it’s coming faster than you think.

There is one key improvement to Siri in the iPhone 6s that suggests these grand possibilities. Rather than having to reach for your phone, you can now activate Siri by yelling at it from nearby. “Hey, Siri!” you bellow, and the robotic assistant springs to life. This is not groundbreaking; hands-free voice control has Susan Bennett: The voice of been around American Siri in competing smartphones at least since Motorola introduced it in 2013, and several phone makers have adopted it since. Handsfree Siri is also available on older iPhones when the phone is plugged into its charger, because constantly listening for “Hey, Siri” consumes battery power. (The iPhone 6s, however, reduces the drain on the battery through hardware changes.)

But “Hey, Siri” is not the only improvement. In iOS 9, Apple’s new mobile operating system, Siri also has more powers to connect to deeper parts of your phone. It can control devices compatible with Apple’s home-automation system, called HomeKit – you can tell it to turn down the lights, for example.

Siri also controls Apple Music, the company’s new streaming service.

Then there’s the ubiquity of voicecontrol devices. Besides the phone, 37 Apple has put Siri in its watch and its coming Apple TV set-top box. Amazon has it on the Echo, a voice-controlled computer that is constantly listening and PORTFOLIO.

november upfront / technology

issue 119

ready to help you out, and also in its TV streaming devices. Google and Microsoft also have embedded voice in phones, computers and TV devices.

A host of startups are entering the game, too. One, called SoundHound, offers a taste of the possibilities of talking to machines: rather than going through several sites to make a hotel reservation, you can ask, “Find me a three- or four-star hotel in New York next Friday for less than $300,” and off it goes.

The ubiquity of voice-controlled assistants changes the way we interact with them. When Siri and other voice systems were new, they seemed gimmicky. Nobody quite knew what to do with them, and interactions veered toward the awkward. But the more assistants there are, and the more you use them, the more natural they feel — and that means the more you’ll use them, feeding the cycle.

38 I’ve felt this happen most impressively with Amazon’s Echo, a machine that one addresses with the keyword “Alexa”, and which I keep in my kitchen, the place I most often need a hands-free Portfolio.

Apple’s senior vice president of iOS Scott Forstall speaks about Siri at the event introducing the new iPhone 4s in 2011

device. The more I stuck with the Echo, the better I understood its capabilities. Now I consult the Echo several times a day for the weather, to set timers, to do quick kitchen math and to play music or audiobooks. It’s become one of the most useful gadgets I own. (And the voice-recognition hardware in the Echo is more powerful than that of the iPhone – Alexa can hear me from far across the room, while with the iPhone 6s, “Hey, Siri” stopped working beyond about 1.5 metres.)

The coming pervasiveness of voice-controlled machines will not occur without some social anxiety.

There will be conventions to work out – is it OK to call out “Hey, Siri!” on a bus? Probably not soon, but in time, that may happen; you’ll cringe, and then it could become normal. The new iPhone tries to learn your voice to prevent other people from activating your device.

There will be questions of privacy, too. To start up when they hear certain keywords, systems like “Hey, Siri” have to constantly listen to their surroundings. Apple says Siri is watching for a pattern, not recording or storing any data.

But you can imagine that actually analysing all of your speech can’t be far off, because it would make voice assistants more useful. In fact, for years now, Google’s top search engineers have been describing the Star Trek computer as their vision of the future of search.

“The Star Trek computer is not just a metaphor that we use to explain to others what we’re building,” Amit Singhal, the head of Google’s search team, once told me. “It is the ideal that we’re aiming to build – the ideal version done realistically.”

That fictional computer not only responds to commands, but is also passively listening, analysing and predicting what you want based on what it’s hearing. It’s easy to see how such machines would become useful.

After all, why should I have to ask my computer to do something – if it’s listening, shouldn’t it just notice that I told my wife we’re out of bread and add it to the grocery list? For years, we’ve had to go to our computers to get things done.

Now the computers are all around us, in the air. They’re listening. They’re helping. They’re inescapable.

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november issue 119

working | california

I work mining for 100-year-old jeans Michael Allen Harris makes a living from the denim that miners left behind

T

he first time I dug up some vintage denim, I had no idea what it was worth. It just looked like some old rags, so instead of carefully uncovering it, I pulled on it and tore it to pieces. I’d actually been digging for antique whisky bottles, and what I didn’t know then was that those “rags” were likely worth thousands.

Out in the desert in California, Nevada and Arizona, there are abandoned silver mines like buried time capsules, virtually untouched,

and you can find vintage bottles down there that are worth a lot to collectors. But as I searched for them, I kept coming across these scraps of denim, because jeans, especially Levi’s, were worn by the silver miners in the late 1800s.

When a miner got a new pair of work pants, he’d cut up the old ones and use them for lagging around pipes, so there were a lot of antique jeans buried out here.

I did a bit of research into the history of Levi’s, and realised

collectors would pay a lot for them, even for scraps. I started going to the mines regularly with my father-in-law, a geologist, to look especially for denim. But the mines have been covered in rocks and trash, so it can take weeks and months to dig down, lifting big rocks one by one. We crawl around wearing hard hats and head lamps.

We don’t tunnel underground, just dig through rocks inside the mine opening, but it can be dangerous: we’re crawling around on

PrePare for “SofTware SubSTiTuTion” A 2013 paper by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, of the University Of Oxford, said that in almost half of the occupational categories into which work is usually sorted, automation could take over. Bill Gates agreed, claiming that in the next 20 years software will replace humans in many jobs. Telemarketers and retail salespeople top the list predicted to go the way of the lamplighter, pinsetter and, in the days before alarm clocks, a knocker-up (above)

(c) Joe Schmelzer / The Guardian

upfront / jobs

Portfolio.

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november issue 119

upfront / jobs

Left: Miners standing outside the Last Chance Mine, wearing Levi jeans in Placer County, California, circa 1882.

Above: Ad for Levi copperriveted overalls, circa 1875

probably 100 tonnes of unstable rocks.

The first time, we knew we’d dug down far enough when we found bits of newspaper dating back to the 1800s. It’s legal for anyone to go in there. One guy did try to copy us, but he used a tractor to dig and it didn’t really work.

I put a few of the denim items I’d dug up on eBay. A Japanese collector contacted me and came all the way out here to look at my collection in person. I sold him a jacket for $1,000. At the time, it seemed a good deal, but he told me not to talk to other people or tell them what I was doing; I realise now that he didn’t want me to find 42 out how much these things were worth. I talked to other dealers and collectors, and found out he was selling the pieces back to Levi’s for its archives – he’d sell them a pair of jeans for upwards of $100,000.

Portfolio.

$1.25

Cost of a pair of Levi’s 501 when launched in 1880

$46,532 Amout Levi’s themselves paid to buy back a pair from the 1880s

Only a few people are authorised to sell directly to Levi, so my father-in-law and I decided to strike out on our own. I started reading everything I could about denim history and it became a sort of obsession.

I’m not focused on the money – I’ve become a sort of archivist and historian. With my fatherin-law, I’ve started publishing books about denim history. I work as a commercial painter and a beekeeper, and denim mining is really more of a hobby. But some pieces are worth so much, it’s hard to justify keeping them.

A couple of months ago we found just a pocket, which is definitely worth something, but I’ll keep that for my collection. Then last week we found a complete pair of jeans. When you find something like that, it’s an enormous thrill. It’s what we’d been working so hard

for: 95 per cent of the time you never find anything complete.

This pair were actually by Neustadter Brothers, who were as big as Levi’s back in the day.

They’re from the early 1890s and in good enough condition to wear.

We were so excited. We sold those immediately on eBay for $21,000.

We could have got more, but my wife and I talked it over and decided to settle for that. The most I’ve sold a pair for is $30,000 to a guy in Osaka, Japan.

“The most I’ve sold a pair for is $30,000 to a guy in Osaka, Japan” A few years ago, my father-in-law dug up the holy grail: the oldest pair of Levi’s from 1873, the first year they were manufactured. They’re in really good condition – they look like a normal modern pair of jeans, really, only back then, they had a crotch rivet and no belt loops. I wish we could keep them for our personal archives, but recently I had an offer of about $100,000.

My father-in-law doesn’t want to sell them and neither do I, but I have two daughters to put through college, so they might have to go.

features

portfolio.

green cities

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green cities

Our cities need mOre green spaces fOr rest and play – here’s hOw words: Jason Byrne and christoph rupprecht of environmental planning, griffith university

y

our local park is likely playing a vital role in your city’s health, and probably your own too. Parks and other “green spaces” help keep cities cool, and as places of recreation, can help with health issues such as obesity. Even looking at greenery can make you feel better.

But in increasingly crowded cities, it can be difficult to find room for parks. Fortunately, there are other green spaces, or potential green spaces that can provide the same benefits.

In recent research, we found that these spaces are more common than we thought. And innovative green spaces overseas show how we might use them.

In the next 30 years, almost three quarters of the global population will live in cities. Underpinning this glib statistic is an astounding wave of migration driven by changing livelihoods, global economic changes and environmental change, which is unprecedented ‹ in human history.

A girl rides bike on This presents a number of challenges for the green way in urban planning ‒ more housing, schools and Liangzhu cultural hospitals, better infrastructure such as transVillage, once an experimental real portation, water, sanitation and electricity. estate project Parks in this competition for space are often developed by an afterthought. This can lead to some big Vanke, now is a problems, especially in higher-density cities. 45 tourist attraction for its special Such problems include urban heat (from concommunity ideal crete, bitumen and glass), storm water run-off,

portfolio.

‹ Seoul has restored a 5.8-kilometre stretch of the stream, which was buried under concrete for decades during South Korea’s scramble for economic development.

The recovery of Cheonggyecheon, or ‘clear stream’, cost $370 million

Short-term financial gain from selling parks could well lead to longterm pains

and fewer parks to play and relax. Fewer parks can in turn lead to health impacts such as obesity, anxiety and depression.

Worse still, in some cities parks and other green-spaces are regarded as a luxury, not a necessity. In a climate of fiscal austerity, some city managers and elected officials are making decisions that will potentially harm the quality of life of urban residents, now and into the future.

Some local governments regard under-utilised parks as surplus assets, which might be sold to bolster strained coffers.

Other cities, like Melbourne, have sacrificed some park spaces for new road and tunnel projects. But the short-term financial gain from selling parks or converting them to other purposes could very well lead to long-term pain.

Around the world, city planners and design professionals have begun to respond to the problem of park shortages by finding innovative solutions to add more green-spaces to cities. These include green roofs, green walls and pocket-parks.

Some unconventional solutions are emerging too. Parking lots, former industrial sites (brown fields) and even abandoned infrastructure like old railway lines are being converted into new green spaces.

Some cities like Seoul in Korea, for instance, have torn down freeways to make room for new green spaces for people, plants and animals, with big financial and social dividends. The Seoul Metropolitan Government has seen billion-dollar returns from its Cheonggyecheon stream restoration project, and has realised other 46 benefits too such as cooler temperatures, increased use of public transport, adaptive re-use of buildings, increased tourism, and a return of plants and animals to the “concrete jungle”.

The parklets of San Francisco are reinvigorating urban spaces, improving street life and encouraging more people into active lifestyles. portfolio.

And in Hangzhou, China, the removal of old factories and conversion of grey space into linear parks, as well as park-making on “wasteland”, has opened up spaces for recreation and relaxation to millions of residents.

More parks aren’t always the solution But making new parks can be expensive, especially in the urban core. Park-making projects can also increase the value of surrounding properties. If these projects are undertaken in poorer neighbourhoods, they can harm marginalised and vulnerable residents, by forcing them out of their homes as rents and property values rise and wealthier residents move in (gentrification).

With our colleagues, we have noted that planners must take steps to prevent this from occurring, such as rent control or park-making on a more “informal” scale, making neighbourhoods “just green enough”.

If we can’t get city officials to buy land for more parks, then maybe we can convert grey spaces ‒ roads, rooftops and storm-water drains ‒ into functional, yet affordable, green-spaces that people can use for active and passive recreation.

In New York for example, the High Line Trail along a disused railway line has become a major attraction, and breathed life The High Line in Manhattan, back to a blighted space.

New York.

In Mexico, an oil pipeline easeBefore and after ment has been converted into a redevelopment beautiful and functional park ‒ La

green cities

› Línea Verde ‒ in socially vulnerable neighbourhoods. There would appear to be The Acros Fukuoka eco-building similar opportunities in other cities. and landmark Under-utilised and abandoned spaces of Fukuoka, Japan. Nearly such as railway corridors, vacant lots, street 100,000-squareverges or even power line easements could metres of park make excellent parks. have been placed onto 15 stepped Until recently, it has been hard for city terraces of planners to know how many of these spaces the building exist, what they are designated for, and whether people can easily access them.

Recent research on “informal greenspace” that we have published in PLoS One (the peer-reviewed open access journal from Public Library of Science) seeks to answer this question. We have designed a rapid assessment technique to identify how much “left-over” land exists in cities, which could be used for green-space.

Surprisingly, informal green-space made up around five per cent of the urban core in Brisbane (Australia) and Sapporo (Japan), the two cities we surveyed. This means it contributes 14 per cent to the city centres’ total green space ‒ that’s almost 900 soccer fields in Brisbane’s core alone.

We also found that over 80 per cent are at least partly accessible for people to use them. Have a look around on your next walk ‒ maybe a verge or vacant lot near you is just the place for a community garden?

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black holes

This infrared image from Nasa’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows the centre of the Milky Way galaxy, where the Event Horizon Telescope team hopes to find details of the black hole that scientists believe lurks there

S upe r m 48

portfolio.

black holes

assive Words: Dennis Overbye Images: Meridith Kohut

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portfolio.

black holes

ico De Orizaba National Park, Mexico – Dr Sheperd Doeleman’s project to take the first-ever picture of a black hole wasn’t going well.

For one thing, his telescope kept filling with snow.

For two weeks at the end of March, Volcan Sierra Negra, an extinct 4,570-metre volcano also known as Tliltepetl in southern Mexico, was the nerve centre for the largest telescope ever conceived, a network of antennas that reaches from Spain to Hawaii to Chile.

Known as the Event Horizon Telescope, its job was to see what has been until now unseeable: an exquisitely small, dark circle of nothing, a tiny shadow in the glow of radiation at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy.

There, astronomers think, lurks a supermassive black hole, a trap door into which the equivalent of four million suns has evidently disappeared.

If Doeleman and his colleagues succeed, the images they capture will be in textbooks forever, as definitive evidence of Einstein’s weirdest prediction: that space-time could curl up like a magician’s cloak around massive objects and vanish them from the universe. In short, that black holes – objects so dense that not even light can escape their maws – are real. That space and time as we know them can come to an end right under our noses.

Conversely, they could produce evidence that Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity, the rule radio energy can be squeezed from the accretion disks. of rules for the universe, needs fixing for the first time Astronomers believe this is what produces the energies since it was introduced a hundred years ago. of quasars, brilliant beacons in the cores of galaxies that far outshine the starry cities in which they dwell.

Seeking event HorizonS “Paradoxically, that makes black holes some of Astronomers today agree that space is sprinkled with brightest things in the sky,” said Doeleman, a 48-yearmassive objects that emit no light at all. Many of them old researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of are supposed to be the remnants of massive stars that Technology’s Haystack Observatory and the Harvardhave burned out, collapsed and imploded.

Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Generations of theorists, including Stephen Hawking, The centre of the Milky Way, 26,000 light-years from are still arguing about just what happens inside a black here, coincides with a faint source of radio noise called hole and the ultimate fate of whatever falls in.

Sagittarius A*. Astronomers tracking the orbits of stars Nearly every galaxy seems to harbour one of these circling the centre have been able to calculate that whatdark monsters, millions or even billions of times as ever is at the centre has the mass of four million suns. But 50 massive as the sun, squatting at the centre. Black holes it emits no visible or infrared light. lie with their mouths open, and when something – a If this is not a black hole, no one knows what it wayward star or gas cloud – falls toward it, it is heated could be. to billions of degrees as it swirls in a doughnut called an “That is the strongest evidence so far for an event accretion disk around the cosmic drain. Black holes are horizon,” said Doeleman, using the name for the sloppy eaters, and when they feed, jets of X-rays and boundary of a black hole that is the point of no return. portfolio.

Scientists checking the Large Millimeter Telescope for ice on its dish.

Inclement weather interferes with the telescope’s functioning

black holes

The Sagittarius black hole, if it is there, would appear as a ghostly dark circle amid a haze of radio waves, theorists say. Its exact shape would depend on details like how fast the hole is spinning.

The black hole’s own gravity will distort and magnify its image, resulting in a shadow about 80 million kilometres across, appearing about as big from here as an orange would on the moon. The proof would be if astronomers could determine that the shadow, the graveyard of four million suns, really was that small.

In 2005, a group led by Shen Zhiqiang of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory narrowed the diameter of Sagittarius A* to a cloud of energy less than 145 million kilometres across, about twice the size of the long-sought shadow.

But there was a problem getting measurements any finer. The ionized electrons and protons in interstellar space scattered the radio waves into a blur that obscured details of the source.

Above: Astronomer Sheperd Doeleman reacts unhappily to a report of more poor weather in the control room for the Large Millimeter Telescope Left: Sheperd Doeleman working inside the heart of the Large Millimeter Telescope to verify the alignment of a radio wave receiver

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portfolio.

BLACK HOLES

The Event Horizon Telescope A network of telescopes as big as the Earth is trying to measure the boundary of what astronomers suspect is a supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

Placing the telescopes as far apart as possible increases the array’s ability to discern small details and effectively increases the resolution of the resulting images.

CARMA Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy Cedar Flat, Calif.

J.C.M.T. AND S.M.A. James Clerk Maxwell Telescope and Small Millimeter Array Mauna Kea, Hawaii

S.M.T. Submillimeter Telescope Mount Graham, Ariz.

L.M.T. Large Millimeter Telescope Volcan Sierra Negra, Mexico

S.P.T. South Pole Telescope Amundsen– Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica

APEX Atacama Pathfinder Experiment Llano Chajnantor, Chile

30-METER TELESCOPE Pico Veleta, Spain

Generations of theorists are still arguing about just what happens inside a black hole

On each night, they hoped to have two black holes in their sights: Sagittarius A*, and one in a giant galaxy known as M87.

In late March, Doeleman’s collaborators were camped out on similarly uncomfortable mountains in Chile, Hawaii, California, Arizona and Spain, waiting for his signal, based on weather forecasts and the state of their equipment to begin observing. All the telescopes would point in unison at M87, and then at the galactic centre.

If everything went right they would see that any Enter the Event Horizon Telescope, which given wavefront would arrive bearing the marks of involves 20 universities, observatories, research interference, a complicated pattern of crests and institutions and government agencies, and more troughs - “fringes”, in the astronomical vernacular. With enough fringes from baselines going in than a hundred scientists. different directions across the sky from the various observatories, the astronomers could reconstruct a POINTING IN UNISON The observing run in March was the first time map of what was happening out there, thousands the group would have enough telescopes – seven of millions of light-years away.

Nobody would know if the whole telescope had radio telescopes, on six mountains – to begin to hope they could glimpse the black hole. They worked until the data recorded from each instruwould have five chances over a period of two ment had been correlated in a supercomputer back at MIT, a process that would take months. weeks.

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black holes

If this is not a black hole, no one knows what it could be

The Large Millimeter Telescope is on the summit of the dormant volcano Sierra Negra in Mexico, at an altitude of 4,600 metres

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Duct tapE to thE rEScuE The first setback occurred when the receiver of the radio telescope in Chile died. It had to be sent back to Europe for repairs. This put more of an onus on the Mexican telescope.

Sierra Negra was a natural choice as the fulcrum of the Event Horizon Telescope.

But snow kept collecting on its dish. Then there was the matter of a mysterious electrical buzz afflicting the telescope’s new receiver. As a result, the Mexican telescope had to sit out the first official observing run.

The telescope’s chances of helping to produce a black hole image were hanging in the balance. The black-hole party now became a race against time. One night, the Mexican telescope was shut out by the weather completely.

The expert on the receiver, Gopal Narayanan of the University Of Massachusetts, took it apart and traced the troublesome noise to mechanical vibrations, which he treated with duct tape. The scientists were now down to their last official chance Dark ShaDow of EtErnity to join the Event Horizon Telescope party.

As a result, some 200 terabytes of data are now at MIT. The weather remained unpromising, but they They showed striking signs of an interference pattern. went up Sierra Negra anyway.

The fringes were there.

Then they clicked with the Event Horizon Telescope If the scientists are lucky, sometime later this year, for good, first for Virgo and then for Sagittarius, col- they might see emerging from the computers at MIT lecting data until dawn. That night marked the end of the first rough image of a black hole. the Event Horizon Telescope’s official observing run, “We can see a black hole eat in real time,” Doeleman but as it happened, there was an encore. California, said. “If something is dancing around the edge of the Arizona and Mexico were available for an extra night. black hole, it doesn’t get any more fundamental than That was the best night of all. that. Hopefully we’ll find something amazing.”

How to beat, bankrupt and hang your friends Tom Whipple consulted preposterously overqualified people for tips on how to get a scientific advantage over adversaries in three of the world’s most popular games. This is what he learnt

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A

s everyone knows, it’s not the winning that counts: it’s the taking part. Nonsense!

That is the battle cry of the loser. There are two approaches to games. You can accept that, say, Pooh sticks is a fun family activity to enliven walks with the children – or you can consult a fluid dynamicist about the best way to drop a stick to leave your children trailing in your wake. You can treat Connect 4 as a mildly diverting game of skill, or you can enlist the help of a computer scientist whose master’s thesis described perfect play in all situations. Over the past year, I consulted preposterously overqualified people for tips on how to get a scientific advantage over adversaries in some of the world’s most popular games. This is what I learnt…

HOW TO WIN AT HANGMAN “There’s no easy way to say it,” says Nick Berry. “You’ve probably been playing Hangman wrong your entire life.” Fairly early on in most people’s hangman careers, they come to the realisation that beating the executioner is a matter of letter-frequency analysis.

Which letter can you guess that has the most chance of being in a randomly chosen word? Once you have one letter, the rest becomes significantly easier, says Nick, a data scientist for Facebook. “The key thing is, how quickly can you do that?”

One approach is for people to try all the vowels first or, gaining sophistication, look at the number of times letters pop up in the dictionary, going with the ordering ETAOIN. “People think they’re being smart because they read somewhere that is the frequency of letters in the English language,” says Nick. The problem, he notes, is that “we have so many glue words like ‘the’ and ‘on’ and ‘an’, that it skews the distribution”. Exclude those – if you have a friend who actually chooses “and” in Hangman you might need to reconsider your friendship – then you get a different frequency: ESIARN. But in Hangman you also know the length of the word. And, as analysis by Nick has shown, while E might be the most common letter in the English language, it is not the most common letter in five-letter words. S is. Neither is it the most common in fourletter words. That honour goes to A. Still this did not satisfy Nick, because your failures tell you a lot too. “Take a six-letter word,” he says. “E might be the most common letter in six-letter words, and S the second most common, but what if you guess E and E is not in it?” It turns out that in six-letter words without an E, S is no longer the next best letter to try.

It is A. Using this method Nick has created an attack strategy for guessing the first letter in any randomly chosen word.

What if you are the one choosing the word? Well, the best way to defeat someone applying Nick’s tactics is to choose the word “jazz”, which computer analysis has found would be the last word to be guessed by anyone using his methodology.

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PORTFOLIO.

OVERTHINKING GAMES

Risk overview 1. PIECES AND DICE Six colours of infantry and six dice (three white, three coloured)

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2. BOARD The world is divided into six continents and 42 regions.

Europe and Asia are the most beneficial continents to hold.

Australia is the easiest to defend

PORTFOLIO.

3. GAME CARDS 42 territory cards + two wild cards

HOW TO WIN AT RISK Risk works as a game because the probabilities – of success or failure – are just slightly too complex for people to understand them intuitively.

Just as in real war, you can never remove the element of chance – the rainstorm that left Napoleon’s Waterloo guns stuck in the mud, the little scrote of a nephew who persistently rolls just the required number – but if you understand the chances the game suddenly becomes as predictably unpredictable as snakes and ladders.

What, then, are the probabilities? When an attacker meets a defender, the attacker can roll three dice (assuming she has three armies or more), the defender two (assuming he has two or more).

The defence advantage comes from winning if two dice are tied.

Superficially, it seems relatively simple to work out who is most likely to win a given skirmish. Most battles that decide a game will involve the clash of big armies – in which the What he attacker rolls three dice found was against the defender’s two, that the and you keep on rolling until one side is destroyed. The idea that smallest battle with equally defence is matched armies in which the best you can throw this dice compolicy is bination is 3 vs 3, and the defender wins 53 per cent actually of the time. Since any bigan illusion ger clash of armies is going to involve multiples of such smaller clashes, so it appears pretty clear that the defender has the edge.

However, in 2003, Jason Osborne, now a professor at North Carolina State University, applied a technique known as Markov Chains to look at the statistics. What he found was that the idea that defence is the best policy is actually an illusion. For any evenly matched conflict of more than five armies a side, the attacker has a decisive, and growing, advantage.

For Prof Osborne, the conclusion is obvious. “The chances of winning a battle are considerably more favourable for the attacker than was originally suspected. The logical recommendation is then for the attacker to be more aggressive.” Of course, this is only in the aggregate. In Risk, perhaps the best guide might be Napoleon, who said, “I have plenty of clever generals but just give me a lucky one.”

Call us on +44 (0) 20 3393 6020 or go to worldfirst.com

OVERTHINKING GAMES

Monopoly overview 1. PIECES AND DIE Two die and eight playing token that currently comprise a wheelbarrow, battleship, racecar, thimble, boot, Scottie dog, top hat and (since 2013) cat

2. PLAY MONEY Each player is given £1,500 from the total £15,140 available

HOW TO WIN AT MONOPOLY A game theorist, John Haigh is unusual in that he has actually turned his mathematical attentions towards real games rather than, say, the financial markets. And he says that the most salient fact about Monopoly is that people go to prison.

“The single square that is landed on most often is jail,” says John. This is because there are so many ways of arriving at it — to land on Mayfair (or whatever the top-priced dark blue properties are in your set) you have to throw the correct numbers with the dice, but for jail, “you can hit it naturally; or hit the Go To Jail; or throw three doubles in succession”.

Ordinarily, people who have been incarcerated are not safe bets. Not so in Monopoly. It is not so much that they are sent to jail – it is that they leave it. What comes next is what is important in terms of buying: where do people setting out from jail land? Well, the most common numbers thrown with two dice are 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. So it seems the orange properties – 6, 8 and 9 throws away – offer the steadiest revenue stream.

John’s computer model (yes, he built one) confirms this: “For every 100 hits on purple or blue, you tend to get 110 on green or yellow, and 122 on orange or red.”

As every decent profiteering landlord will tell you, though, it is not just about the frequency but also the amount of rent you can extract. On this measure, too, the oranges do well. “Add up the total required to buy all the properties and put hotels on them,” says John.

It is not the high-rolling glamour of Mayfair that is your friend, but steady Bow Street

3 BOARD There are 40 squares and the property least-landed on statistically is Old Kent Road – the first the Go square

60

PORTFOLIO.

4 GAME CARDS Chance cards are more likely to move player, so when offered the choice, it’s better to take a chance early on and pay the fine later in the game

“Then add up the maximum rent on each property.

The higher the ratio of income to cost, the more attractive the set is to own. On this measure, light blue is best at 1.59, then orange (1.41), deep blue (1.27), purple (1.24), yellow (1.15), brown (1.13), red (1.09) and finally green (1.01).”

Assuming you’ve beaten your opponents to the best property, and achieved the optimal cost-to-income ratio, what next? Well, it is time to crush them. Here, too, it is not the high-rolling glamour of Mayfair that is your friend, but the steady, dependable mediocrity of Bow Street. Let us assume that £750 is a sufficient sum to bankrupt Uncle Simon after a few glasses of sherry. What then is the minimum for each set of properties that we can spend to achieve that? With brown and light blue you can’t get this sum. For the rest you can get there by spending £1,760 (orange), £1,940 (purple), £1,950 (deep blue), £2,150 (yellow), £2,330 (red) or £2,720 (green).

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watch makers

Give them a biG hand Startups are not just tech firms, and watch enthusiasts are taking on old giants with Kickstarter companies

From top, left to right Watches by Instrmnt, Throne, Detroit Watch Company, Vortic, Yes Man and Wingman.

Words: alex Williams

F

or entrepreneurs, the watch industry would seem a strange place to start.

It is the definition of a mature industry, built on centuries-old technology such as balance springs and pinions, and it is dominated by centuries-old brands. Blancpain, for example, dates from 1735.

But that did not deter Zack Sears, 28, a digital product designer and watch aficionado in New York. Two years ago, Sears and three partners raised $49,000 on Kickstarter (where he happens to work in product development) to start Throne, which makes vintage-chic watches, complete with straps whose leather comes from Horween Leather Co. “The watch market is pretty well formed at the high end, with brands like Rolex, Omega and Breitling, and at the low end with Timex and Casio,” said Sears, whose company has sold more than 2,000 timepieces, many of them priced around $450. “But there’s a unique middle of the market that is still wide open.”

This startup fever may not register on a Silicon Valley scale, but through crowdfunding, watch geeks with no industry experience are creating the equivalent of a garage-band groundswell, carving out a thriving niche in the shadows of the watchmaking giants.

Sometimes all it takes is $41,000 and a dream. That is how much RT Custer, 24, and two fellow Penn State graduates raised to fund Vortic Watch Co, a startup based in Fort Collins, Colorado, that makes wristwatches with vintage American-made pocket watch movements.

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watch makers

“‘American made’ is hot right now, and there is a huge market ready to support it,” Custer said. “Our goal is to build a company with enough credibility and engineering prowess to help bring mechanical movement manufacturing back to the United States.”

Unlike global brands, these startups do not need a huge scale to turn a profit, so they can cater to specific customers. Wingman Watches, started by two military pilots who asked that their names not be used because they are on active duty, was founded to serve people like themselves: aviation nuts who are also watch enthusiasts, but who have a hard time coming up with the $5,000 for a pilot’s watch by Breitling or Bell & Ross. (Wingman’s watches hover around $350.)

“Watches are huge for aviators,” one founder said. “Like most overconfident a Glasgow-based company started narcissists, we like to dislast year that makes minimalist, play our greatness on our “now when Bauhaus-inspired watches priced wrist.” around $300.

Perhaps not surprisingClassmates The company surpassed its funly, many of these startup look For draising target fivefold, and it has watchmakers gravitate sold about 5,000 pieces in boutiques toward all things artisainternships, such as Assembly in New York. nal and small batch. Leo For startups that succeed, rewards Josephy, 27, a watchmaki look For can be considerable. Nathan Resnick, er in Canada, is trading interns 21, a senior at the University of San on the locavore impulse Diego, started his line of watches,Yes with his new line, Alberta to hire” Man, via Kickstarter while interning Watches. for a car company last summer.

“Large companies can Resnick’s playfully elegant dress try to craft a story behind watches have proved popular with their watches, but with small makers it’s built in,” Josephy millennials, and his sales have totalled about $150,000, said. “Most of our customers are from he said.

“Now every summer, when my classmates look for Alberta, and many of our straps are internships, I look for interns to hire,” he said. made here by a local saddlemaker.”

Crowdfunding is not the only avenue to startup Kickstarter is littered with would-be watchmakers who fizzled out, never able glory. Patrick and Amy Ayoub, a husband and wife in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, chose to go the analogue to raise even half the money needed.

Some campaigns are created by route, sketching their initial designs on paper and raid64 fledgling companies as trial balloons. ing their bank account to start their Motown-inspired “We launched the company via crowd- brand, Detroit Watch Co. “The company was founded purely on our passion for funding almost as a feasibility study to whether it would become a hobby or design and timepieces,” said Patrick Ayoub, a 52-yeara job,” said Ross Baynham, a graphic old automotive designer. “Our day jobs take care of designer who helped found Instrmnt, earning a living.” portfolio.

Five tips on starting a small business From ross baynham oF instrmnt 1. Choose your market the watch industry is massive and there are an abundance of divisions and niches within. Focus on one or a few of those sub-sectors and serve them well; one watch brand simply can’t appeal to everyone.

2. Design shoulD be timeless (exCuse the pun) in our opinion the underlying characteristic of a well-designed product – of any kind – is longevity.

3. soCial meDia is CruCial, For new branDs or olD. we wouldn’t have sold watches to beirut, angola, reunion, st lucia, and 110 other countries around the world without instagram, Facebook and twitter.

4. Collaborate. work with people you aDmire anD respeCt. not only does it bring fresh eyes and knowledge, but also it opens your business up to additional contacts and often a completely new customer base.

5. there are a lot oF pieCes in the puzzle. mechanics, design, operations, branding, staffing, product development, business development, customer service, sales, marketing the list goes on. prepare for a lot of hard work.

How Sweden became Europe’s startup capital Stockholm is the second most prolific tech hub in the world on a per capita basis, behind Silicon Valley.

How did that happen and where does it go from here?

Words: Lauren Davidson

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hen Apple, the Silicon Valley veteran that revolutionised the music industry by unbundling the physical album and allowing individual digital song downloads, announced the launch of Apple Music earlier this month, the implications were immense.

The world’s most valuable business was admitting that a six-and-a-halfyear-old company started by a 23-year-old from Stockholm had it right all along. The very next day, that Swedish startup – Spotify – unveiled a mammoth $526 million funding round, reaching a valuation of $8.53 billion and cementing its place as the most valu- companies, including three $1 billion exits and more able venture capital-backed company in Europe. than $13 billion in total exit value.

So how has Sweden – a country of 9.8 million peoThe music streaming service is the fifth unicorn, the name given to tech companies founded after 2003 that ple, slightly more than London and roughly a sixth have reached valuations of at least $1 billion, to come the size of the UK population – become the poster out of Sweden. Although the UK is home to more child of European innovation and why has the finance unicorns than Sweden – including Zoopla, Just Eat and world only just started to pay attention?

The country’s tech scene has thrived because of, Wonga – the Scandinavian country is the second most prolific tech hub in the world on a per capita basis, pro- not in spite of, its small population. “We think globducing 6.3 billion-dollar companies per million people, ally from the outset,” Zennström said. Stockholm’s compared to Silicon Valley’s 8.1, according to a recent successful startups “all realised the domestic market is not big enough”, with the average company from report from the investment firm Atomico.

In fact, if you played a game on your phone today, a small country expanding internationally within 1.4 listened to music online or video-phoned a friend, years, less than half the time it takes a company from a chances are you used a Swedish company. Skype country with a population of more than 50 million to became Stockholm’s first unicorn when it was bought look outside its borders.

As Gustav Borgefalk, founder of Sqore, the competiby eBay for $2.6 billion in 2005 – just two years after it launched – and has since been followed by Spotify, tions website that has helped clients including IBM, Candy Crush parent King, Minecraft maker Mojang Shell, and Morgan Stanley recruit talent, put it: “In Sweden, we’ve always been exporters, from Ericsson, and the payments service Klarna.

“Stockholm is becoming a world leader in technolo- Volvo and Saab… to Abba.”

This esteemed history of globally-renowned gy,” Skype creator Niklas Zennström, who also founded London-based Atomico, said earlier this month at the brands, which also includes H&M, Electrolux and inaugural Brilliant Minds conference, the brainchild Ikea, laid the foundations for the Swedish governof music manager Ash Pournouri and Spotify founder ment to invest heavily in its technology infrastructure Daniel Ek. “We are living in an extraordinary time, and in the 1990s, establishing high-speed internet and there is no doubt that Sweden is a leader in this proud giving citizens tax breaks to buy a computer, creatnew world. The dream we had of becoming a tech com- ing what the World Economic Forum declared a few years ago to be the world’s most digital economy. munity ten to 15 years ago is now becoming a reality.”

“It was a government intervention in the 1990s that The Nordic region represents two per cent of global GDP but has accounted for almost ten per cent of the is paying off in the 2010s,” Borgefalk said, adjusting world’s billion-dollar exits over the last decade, with his baseball cap as he leaned forward over a table in more than half of these coming from Sweden, accord- the Sqore office, which was originally built as the heading to a report published in March by the Stockholm- quarters of the Swedish company that invented the based investment firm Creandum. Last year marked safety match and where all the rooms are now named the best year ever in terms of exit value for Nordic after Star Wars characters.

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Three Swedish startups gaining attention

Not only did this investment equip Swedes with the physical tools and digital savvy to become a nation of disruptors and a country of ready consumers, but it nurtured a generation of people who grew up on the internet, creating a culture of open access and entrepreneurial collaboration.

It’s no coincidence that the free file-sharing websites The Pirate Bay, Kazaa and uTorrent were also founded in Sweden, the latter two created by Zennström and Ek respectively, who would go on to build Skype and Spotify.

“Sweden is a testbed for innovation,” said Marta Sjögren, an investor at Northzone, the venture capital fund that is Spotify’s largest shareholder after its founders. The Nordic countries excel at “the concept of problem-solving investments as opposed to purely money-making investments… we call them game changers and game winners. This is deeply rooted in the Swedish mentality”.

T

his mindset wasn’t built in the ’90s: it is an offshoot of the reigning axiom of Swedish culture, known as Jantelagen, or the law of Jante, a set of rules laid out in a 1933 novel that prioritise the collective over the individual and promote humility over hierarchy.

In a classic example of Jantelagen, Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of Ikea and one of the wealthiest people in the world, famously drove his 1993 Volvo until it was no longer roadworthy.

These ideals are also the driving force behind public policies that permit a high quality of life and allow entrepreneurship to thrive. Sweden has among the highest female and maternal employment rates in the EU because of generous paternity leave laws, equality incentives and readily available affordable childcare.

“The whole freezing your eggs thing” – the benefit that Apple and Facebook introduced to allow their female employees to focus on work – “would never happen in Sweden,” said Northzone’s Sjögren.

But these cultural factors are not new, nor is the legacy of global brands that have come out of Sweden over the last two centuries. So why is it only over the last couple of years that the funding pouring into Stockholm has picked up, reaching quarterly levels up to four times higher than previously?

CBInsights data show that $787.6 million of venture and growth capital was pumped into Swedish companies last year, excluding private equity deals, making 2014 “the best year for funding since the dotcom boom 15 years ago”, according to Torbjörn Bengtsson of Stockholm Business Region Development, the city’s 68 official investment promotion organisation.

He added that 2015 has “most likely” already surpassed the total for 2014, driven by Spotify’s $526 million funding round.

That has allowed the city to foster a growing tech scene, with shared working spaces such as Sup46, the portfolio.

The country’s tech scene has thrived because of, not in spite of, its small population

1. ShopJoy From: Stockholm

What: Proximity-based content delivery. Shops or businesses install the beacon and passing customers can be sent alerts for offers – two-for-one, happy hour, etc.

They say: “ShopJoy enables the possibility of communicating with a smartphone user at the right time, on the right place and with the right content. We believe that ‘the right time’ is when a consumer enters a store, a mall or a museum.

The active choice of entering a location triggers the interest in what a store can offer.”

Web: shopjoy.se

digital startups haven, and Things, Sweden’s first hub for hardware makers, launching in October 2013 and March 2015 respectively. But a decade ago that community did not exist.

“Attracting capital was very hard when we started,” said Sebastian Knutsson, co-founder and chief creative officer of King, the gaming studio behind Candy Crush that launched in 2003 and floated on the New York Stock Exchange at a valuation of $7.1 billion last year.

Speaking at the Brilliant Minds conference, he added: “That’s starting to change – it’s better to start a company now than it was ten years ago. Stockholm is in the limelight.”

So what’s different? As Zennström put it: “Success breeds success.” Newer companies are benefiting from the global attention drawn to Stockholm by King’s New York IPO, Microsoft’s $8.5 billion takeover of Skype (its largest ever acquisition) and its $2.5 billion purchase of Minecraft maker Mojang in September, as well as Spotify’s mammoth VC-backed valuation and warfare with the likes of Taylor Swift and Apple.

SWEDISH STARTUPS

2014: “the best year for funding since the dotcom boom 15 years ago”

2. CHARGE STORM

3. SPOTSCALE

What: Charge stations for electric vehicles. For both home, business and portable use.

What: Turning drone imagery into 3D buildings.

From: Norrköping

They say: “We build modern and easy to use charge stations with the latest technology. The charge stations are always accessible from our cloud based web service making it easy to retrieve statistics and detect alarms.”

From: Linköping

They say: “Interactive 3D based on real world scans of the environment enable a whole new level of understanding, dialogue and experimentation to occur in your projects.”

Web: spotscale.com

Web: chargestorm.se

“When we started, we couldn’t compete,” said Jonathan Forster, who runs Spotify’s Nordic operations. “Now, I’d be very worried for an investor if Sweden wasn’t on their road trip.”

Johan Attby, whose social network for anglers, FishBrain, recently reached a million users, tried unsuccessfully to raise capital in 2006 for another startup, Tific, and ended up having to leave Sweden for Silicon Valley.

“That was pre-Skype. Sweden wasn’t known for anything besides Abba,” he said. “It’s totally different today. There’s more capital and better investors. It’s now super credible being from Stockholm.”

H CREATING A COMMUNITY Swedish Startup Space is a news site dedicated to technology and startups. It was created as a place to help promote Sweden to the world and a place for Swedish entrepreneurs to connect and inspire each other.

“Spotify, Klarna, Mojang and Wrapp are just a few examples of Swedish startups that have taken the world by storm,” says its editor and co-founder, James Pember. “Reuters, Entrepreneur and PandoDaily have all praised Swedish entrepreneurs and their knack for building global businesses. What struck us as odd, however, was that there didn’t appear to be anywhere for these great entrepreneurs to meet online – nowhere to chat, connect and discover new companies that seem to be popping up all the time.

“The initial idea was a very basic meeting place where people could browse jobs, events and office spaces. However, very quickly it became clear that news was the key – or more specifically, people wanted to read about the companies they hadn’t heard of yet.” swedishstartupspace.com

enrik Torstensson, founder and CEO of the health tracking app Lifesum, which raised $6.7 million in its first round of funding just over a year ago, added: “The last few years have been driven by the power of example: we’re in the third or fourth wave of internet companies.”

He said that Stockholm is now full of “familiar faces” who succeeded or failed in earlier generations of Sweden’s startup scene. Now that the world is paying attention, where does Sweden go from here? Spotify founder Daniel Ek wants the country to think even bigger – not just to make money but to create legacy.

“Whenever a European company has ever been on the brink of success, it’s sold,” he said to a small group of reporters at the Brilliant Minds conference. “I told [Skype founder] Niklas Zennström, you sold too early.... Skype could have been one of the big ones.

“The US has 320 million people and has produced Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft,” he said, adding that it is “insane” that Europe has a population almost twice as large and doesn’t have one 69 of these companies. “Statistically, that’s an anomaly.”

But Sweden could help to change that. “This small country is really punching above its weight in creativity… There’s a new wave of entrepreneurs, we’re at a breaking point,” he said. “Europe can do the same.”

PORTFOLIO.

digital music

O

nly the most obstinate, on-message, “my company, right or wrong” corporate spokesperson would try to claim that the record industry has not taken a pummelling in the last decade. In 2004, the global record industry was worth $21.9 billion, whereas last year it accounted for $15 billion, down around a third.

In the UK, the story is even worse, closer to a 50 per cent drop.

But rumours of the death of the music industry have been greatly exaggerated.

“Record companies, as they were then called – nowadays we use the term music companies 70 more accurately – were interested in selling physical copies of CDs, vinyl or cassettes,” says Miles Leonard, chairman of Parlophone Records UK and Warner Bros Records UK. There was little interest in any other part of the business such as live opportunities or working portfolio.

Words: Eugene Costello

Can the music industry be saved? Miles Leonard, chairman of Parlophone Records UK and Warner Bros Records UK, makes the case for a digital future based around access not ownership

with brands, and there was very little piracy. “The route to market was pretty straightforward – you had radio, TV and press and that was it,” Leonard continues. “It was straightforward and didn’t change for many years – the only change was really format, ie vinyl to cassette, cassette to CD.” What this meant was that the labels were the “gatekeepers of the market”, they would promote to a selected targeted audience through radio and TV, and could manipulate sales through press and granting or withholding access to artists, not to mention deciding when they would release singles from an album.

“Back in the day, 12”s were £3.99 or £4.99, the original 7” was about £1.99, so not to be sneezed at, though nowhere near as important as album sales, when you consider that in the ’90s, we could sell album CDs for £12 to £15 and upwards, especially for well-packaged special editions for collectors. But some acts have a lifetime of earnings off the back of one single – there can be a big market for one-hit wonders,” says Leonard.

digital music

A very well-known one-off hit can generate a living for a band if they use that hit to continue touring, while radio and advertising has to pay for the right to play or use that song to both the recording company and the publisher, so if the performer is also the writer, that is a second source of income.

The whole point about publishing rights, as opposed to recording rights, is an important one.

Leonard explains: “The record company has the right to the recording that they have of their artist that is signed to them, be it a live performance or one made in a studio. That is to say, they own the recording rights of their artist, live or studio. While publishing rights means the right to the use of that song – we pay a percentage of the money we receive to the publisher, which covers the right to use that song.”

To put it simply, if another artist records their version of, say, the Coldplay song Yellow and puts it out, releases it in the charts, then the publisher has the right to earn money from that song – the record company doesn’t (unless you happen to have the new recording artist on your label). “For example,” says Leonard, “the Take That track Relight My Fire was written by Dan Hartman originally. So a proportion will go to him and the rest to the recording company Take That is signed to.”

Adds Leonard: “Of course, you can be a writer and not an artist. Cathy Dennis is a hugely successful writer, she’s assigned to a publishing company and will have a deal with them. It can be a lucrative career, more even than a performing artist – sometimes you think I like this song and you’ll be asked who wrote it and you’ll have no idea.” Dennis was responsible for Kylie Minogue’s massive global hit, I Can’t GetYou Out of My Head, Katy Perry’s I Kissed a Girl and Britney Spears’ Toxic, and is estimated to have a net worth of £9 million.

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DIGITAL MUSIC

TRYING TO SHUT DOWN PIRATE SITES IS COSTLY, EXHAUSTING AND PROBABLY IMPOSSIBLE IN THE LONG RUN

But those days are gone, so what of the future for the music industry?

For Leonard, it is clear: the future is digital, and it is one based on the individual who proactively seeks out music, rather than passively buying what the labels offer up. “We of a certain age can all remember recording the Top 40 on BBC Radio One on a Sunday night, say, 30 years ago, finger hovering over the pause button to try to weed out the DJs waffle between songs, and it was the case that you were served up whatever you were served up,” he says. “Now the consumer has the most powerful voice, now there is access to almost anything, whether signed and even not signed. The individual can seek out whatever they want to listen to, and they choose what music they listen to, rather than being influenced or manipulated by record companies and the press. Or to a far, far lesser extent, anyway. So that is good news for the consumer – the market now is a better place where the consumers and fans have a voice in the industry.”

Of course, it has meant a huge bloodletting in the marketplace and a massive restructuring for labels. Many independents have gone to the wall, and the huge labels that have survived have had to trim a lot of fat and look at new revenue streams.

Chief among these is the subscription-based digital streaming model.

“Over the past five to ten years, the digital age 72 in all creative industries has forced an exciting change,” says Leonard. “Access to all music is easier, the touchpoint for a fan to see and hear music at the same time is phenomenal. The speed at which you can access music is great, it has burst open the industry to the consumer in a huge way.”

PORTFOLIO.

Business models, he says, have had to change to be able to compete. “Online is free, so how do you compete with free?” Leonard asks rhetorically. “The consumer has to have a very easy experience, for example trawling through pirate sites can be difficult, but the genuine sites like Apple, Spotify and Deezer are great digital platforms laid out in such a way that it offers a great consumer experience.

“Trying to shut down pirate sites is costly, exhausting and actually probably impossible in the long run – they simply shift to other servers in other jurisdictions. And we are up against evermore sophisticated methods by the pirates. For instance, there are third-party apps that allow you to import music from sites such as YouTube. It’s called skimming or swiping, and just shows that as soon as we shut down one area of piracy, another will crop up, so it’s better to put our energy into offering a quality consumer experience so fewer people will use pirate sites and apps.”

O

n the quality of the streaming platforms, Leonard is impressed with what Spotify has achieved: “Spotify competes by offering a free platform funded through playing advertising every 20 minutes (we call this freemium), and then there’s premium where you pay around £10 a month and you have a premium platform minus the ads.” So rather than pay lawyers to litigate against the ever-mushrooming pirate sites, you make it easy for the consumer: “You can create your own playlists, there’s no difference between freemium or premium, it’s just that premium loses the ads, which are every six tracks or so.

Some don’t mind, which is fine, and some find them

WHERE THE MONEY CAME FROM

From 1973 to 2009, these figures from the Recording Industry Association Of America show how important album sales were to revenue and how the industry is diversifying.

digital music

annoying and are happy to pay the relatively modest monthly subscription.

“It’s all about access, not ownership; people pay several times that amount for Sky TV to access content, so I would say this is perfectly reasonable in terms of having unlimited access to music.”

And those acts that are unconvinced about putting all their work on streaming sites? He is quite clear that it is the future. “We’d rather the music was available where you can earn money even in small amounts as opposed to not being paid at all by a pirate site,” he says, adding that consumers often go to a pirate site to find something that’s not on a streaming site, so paradoxically not being on a streaming site can feed piracy.

Of the various streaming sites, Leonard has a great deal of respect for Spotify. “Spotify were the future of streaming when they launched, around seven years ago; they have had to build it up from scratch, they know what their core business is and they continue to build upon consumer experience,” he says. “The product is right, they’re innovators and they became the ones to go to for streaming. Apple has only just launched.”

He points out that Apple came to the table very late because, unlike Spotify, they didn’t grasp that the future was about access, not ownership.

“They were blinded by their iPods for a while, as iPods were still about ownership of music for the consumer, the only difference being that you downloaded the song that you paid for and then owned, rather than bought it on CD. As an industry, we are excited that Apple have done it, it already has a consumer base worldwide of some 400 milion who have signed up with their credit card details.”

As well as streaming the industry has been forced to look to new revenue streams, such as licensing music for use on TV and film and working with brands to help get their message across by associating with the right artists for their product. “Brands recognise that music is a direct way of connecting with an audience – music is about emotion,” Leonard says. “It can be happy, sad, melancholy, aggressive, and so on. Artists still connect, and can have an affinity, with an audience that brands don’t have, but want. They can reach these groups through an artist across social platforms. It’s more about engaging with the groups, not flogging products.”

And it can be a mutually beneficial process, he points out: “These companies have a lot to spend on marketing. So if you’re putting your track into a global marketing campaign for, say, a new product, they will spend a fortune on advertising so there will be people who wouldn’t necessarily have heard your music. They’ll see an advert for a car and will wonder who the artist is. It works for the artist, you know you’ll get revenue from letting them use

Spotify’S uSer growth

active uSerS paying SubScriberS

iS Spotify fair?

In 2013 Thom Yorke called it “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse” but Spotify now has 60 million users, of which around a quarter are paying. Those who pay don’t get intrusive adverts after every third of fourth song. Spotify announced that they took $1.03 billion in revenue for 2013 and say they pay 70 per cent of that to record companies and music publishers.

Not all are happy though.

All About That Bass by Meghan Trainor was one of the biggestselling digital singles of all time.

Kevin Kadish, who wrote the song, says he made just $5,679 from 178 million streams of the song. He told the US House Judiciary Committee during their investigation into copyright laws: “That’s as big a song

as a songwriter can have in a career and No 1 in 78 countries. But you’re making $5,600. How do you feed your family?”

Similarly, YouTube pays for plays but Ellen Shipley, co-writer of Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven Is A Place On Earth (with a 50 per cent share) reported receiving $38.49 for 2,118,200 streams the track had accumulated on YouTube during one quarter.

Yorke, meanwhile, gave away his latest album via a BitTorrent feature called Bundles, which allows artists to both sell and give away their material.

Some was free but the whole album cost $6. It was downloaded over 4.4 million times with Yorke retaining 90 per cent of the money. No record label needed, potentially more than $20 million received.

your song in an ad but also it’s about reach, about finding a new audience.” UK online advertising industry magazine The Drum, for instance, for instance, has a weekly ‘Shazam’ chart, based on the number of times each ad has been ‘Shazamed’ over the past week using the popular music identification app.

L

abels are even getting involved in the revenue from live ticket sales, something they had no part of before.

“Music companies do make money through artists’ live music whereas they didn’t ten years ago,” he says.

“That’s because of the huge investment that music companies are still having to make into marketing artists – the cost of mar- 73 keting artists has gone up, not down, because there are so many places and platforms where you have to do it. And the cost of making records hasn’t really changed a great deal either. The deals we cut with artists are because we’re making such huge investments into building and marketing their brand, which portfolio.

DIGITAL MUSIC

OWNERSHIP IS FOR THE OLDER GENERATION, IT’S NOT JUST A CULTURE, IT’S A MINDSET. THE FUTURE IS ONE OF ACCESSS in turn helps them to sell tickets to live gigs, so there’s an absolute correlation between having hit records and selling tickets.”

There was a point where record companies had enough revenue from music alone that they didn’t need to look at other revenue streams to keep the industry buoyant, he points out. “But as I read those stats [see above], the revenue from simply recording music has taken such a dive over the past ten years that investing as much as they have to not only new artists but artists already signed, the cost hasn’t changed even though the income revenue has gone down, so you have to get it from somewhere.”

The amount of investment a label has made into a band has a direct effect on the band’s ticket sales, he says. “So if we stop spending thousands on your videos, and marketing you, your tickets won’t sell. So we’re saying, let’s work together — and that means sharing in live sales where appropriate. And this will only apply to artists we have signed in the past ten years, because older artists will have been on different contracts. So we think it’s transparent, and we think it’s fair.”

The record/music industry can learn lessons from the fragmentation of the TV and radio sectors. “Radio has adapted and understood. Kids never have radios in their bedrooms anymore.

Apple’s Beats 1 is a new global radio station, broadcasting live from LA 24/7. How are kids listening to music? On smartphones and on tablets via iPlayers, Spotify, YouTube and online radio stations – it’s a very fragmented way. You used to just have terrestrial TV with four channels, the channel Dad watched was the one everyone watched. Now you have Jimmy upstairs watching NetFlix, Dad watching Sky sports, Mum on ITV… family time in front of the TV doesn’t really 74 happen anymore,” says Leonard.

So despite the drop in revenue figures, Leonard sees a healthy future for the industry, especially as streaming will be second nature to today’s youngsters. “Younger consumers pay for access rather than ownership, nobody these days needs to clog PORTFOLIO.

FROM EIGHT-TRACKS TO DIGITAL – THE RISE AND FALL OF MUSICAL FORMATS

Digital Downloads

Discs

Vinyl

Cassettes

8-tracks

their phone memory with songs,” he says. Memory on a phone or laptop is precious – the more memory we can free up by using the Cloud, the better. The more you can pull down from streaming, the more you’re not using up your device’s memory.

“Ownership for the younger audience is going to become quite alien to them. We used to buy a song and own it, you used to only be able to listen to a song if you went out and bought the CD. Now you can listen to whatever you want. You can store them in your playlist or whatever and it becomes a much more valuable experience. Ownership is for the older generation who feel that they need something more tactile, where ownership is key, it’s not just a culture, it’s a mindset. The future is one of access.”

We are poised on a transformative paradigm shift both within the industry and in wider society as we move fully into the digital age.

What the industry has to do is to educate the consumer and invest in doing so, to move from ownership to access. The experience with streaming is great, he says, and there is a low barrier to entry.

In the days when the labels simply sold records, the artist would get one payment and that was it. “Now,” Leonard points out, “if a record is played a million times, the artist gets a million payments.

Yes, they are small, but every time a consumer listens to that track you will get a payment, and artists are waking up to that. We just need to build on that.”

Your air ticket gives you a 10% discount on the rental of any vehicle in Luxe&Speed

GENERATION Z

Move over Millennials,

Here Comes Generation Z

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PORTFOLIO.

GENERATION Z

Words: Alex Williams ear the word “millennial”, and plenty of images spring to mind. There’s Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, earning his first billion by the age of 23.

There’s Miley Cyrus, preening for the cameras in a flesh-baring act. There’s Lena Dunham, TV’s queen of overshare, spiralling into navel-gazing soliloquies that seem scripted from the therapist’s couch. They’re brash, they’re narcissistic, they’re entitled. Or so the cliché goes.

But what about “Generation Z”, the generation born after millennials that is emerging as the next big thing for market researchers, cultural observers and trend forecasters?

With the oldest members of this cohort barely out of high school, these “tweens” and teens of today are primed to become the dominant youth influencers of tomorrow. Flush with billions in spending power, they promise untold riches to marketers who can find the master key to their psyche.

No wonder the race to define, and market to, this demographic juggernaut is on. They are “the next big retail disrupter”, according to Women’s Wear Daily, the fashion industry trade journal. They have “the weight of saving the world and fixing our past mistakes on their small shoulders”, according to an article on Fast Company’s Co.Exist site by Jeremy Finch, an innovation consultant. Lucie Greene, the worldwide director of the Innovation Group at J Walter Thompson, calls them “millennials on steroids”.

While it is easy to mock the efforts of marketers to shoehorn tens of millions of adolescents into a generational archetype, à la baby boomers, it is also clear that a 14-year-old in 2015 really does inhabit a substantially different world than one of 2005.

“If Hannah Horvath from (the TV show) Girls is the typical millennial – self-involved, dependent, flailing financially in the real world as her expectations of a dream job and life collide with reality – then Alex Dunphy from Modern Family represents the Gen Z antidote,” Greene said. “Alex is a true Gen Z: conscienAnthony Richard, a tious, hard-working, somewhat anxious and 17-year-old high school mindful of the future.” senior with a passion for editing video. Marketers So, who are they? To answer that question, and trend-watchers you have to take a deeper look at the world in have been hard at which they are coming of age. work trying to get a “When I think of Generation Z, technology is read on Generation Z. “America becomes more the first thing that comes to mind,” said Emily multicultural on a daily Citarella, a 16-year-old high school student in basis,” said Richard. “It’s Atlanta, Georgia. “I know people who have exponential compared to made their closest relationships from Tumblr, previous generations.”

PORTFOLIO.

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generation z

Millne19n80n-1ia995)ls (bor Music: lady GaGa cebook social Media: Fa: iPod et dG Ga First

Gener19a96t-2io010)n Z

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Instagram and Facebook.”

Sure, millennials were digital; their teenage years were defined by iPods and MySpace. But Generation Z is the first generation to be raised in the era of smartphones. Many do not remember a time before social media.

“We are the first true digital natives,” said Hannah Payne, an 18-year-old UCLA student and lifestyle blogger. “I can almost simultaneously create a document, edit it, post a photo on Instagram and talk on the phone, all from the user-friendly interface of my iPhone.”

“Generation Z takes in information instantaneously,” she said, “and loses interest just as fast.”

That point is not lost on marketers. In an era of emoji and six-second Vine videos, “we tell our advertising partners that if they don’t communicate in five words and a big picture, they will not reach this generation”, said Dan Schawbel, the managing partner of Millennial Branding, a New York consultancy.

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Hannah Payne, an 18-year-old UCLA student and lifestyle blogger. Born after the millennials, Generation Z is emerging as the next big thing for marketers. “Generation Z takes in information instantaneously, and loses interest just as fast,” Payne said.

S

o far, they sound pretty much like millennials. But those who study youth trends are starting to discern big differences in how the two generations view their online personas, starting with privacy.

While the millennial generation infamously pioneered the Facebook selfie, many in Generation Z have embraced later, anonymous social media platforms like Secret or Whisper, as well as Snapchat, where any incriminating images disappear almost instantly, said Dan Gould, a trend consultant for Sparks & Honey, an advertising agency in New York.

The parents of Generation Z teenagers play a powerful role in shaping their collective outlook.

Millennials, who are often painted, however unfairly, as narcissistic brats who expect the boss to fetch them coffee, were largely raised by baby boomers, who, according to many, are the most iconoclastic, self-absorbed and grandiose generation in history.

By contrast, Generation Z tends to be the product of Generation X, a relatively small, jaded generation that came of age in the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam funk of the 1970s, when horizons seemed limited. Generation X, which grew up on Nirvana records and horror movies, has tried to give their children the safe, secure childhood that they never had, said Neil Howe, an economist.

“You see the mummy blogs by Generation X-ers, and safety is a huge concern: the stainless-steel sippy cups that are BPA-free, the side-impact baby carriages, the home preparation of baby food,” said Howe, who runs Saeculum Research, a Virginia-based social trends consultancy.

Part of that obsession with safety is likely due to the hard times that both Generation Z members and their parents experienced during their formative years.

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generation z

“I definitely think growing up in a time of hardship, global conflict and economic troubles has affected my future,” said Seimi Park, a 17-year-old high school senior who always dreamed of a career in fashion but has recently shifted her sights to law because it seems safer.

“This applies to all my friends,” she said. “I think I can speak for my generation when I say that our optimism has long ago been replaced with pragmatism.”

Put it all together – the privacy, the caution, the focus on sensible careers – and Generation Z starts to look less like the brash millennials and more like their grandparents (or in some cases great-grandparents), Howe said.

Those children of the late 1920s through the early ’40s, members of the so-called Silent Generation, were shaped by war and the Depression and grew up to be the diligent, go-along-to-get-along careerists of the ’50s and ’60s. “The parallels with the Silent Generation are obvious,” Howe said. “There has been a recession, jobs are hard to get, you can’t take risks. You’ve got to be careful what you put on Facebook. You don’t want to taint your record.”

Those children of the New Deal, epitomised by the low-key Warren Buffett, “didn’t want to change the system, they wanted to work within the

C

M

Y

CM

MY

“We do not want to work at a local fast-food joint for a summer job. We want to make our own business”

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CMY

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system,” Howe said. “They were the men in the gray flannel suits. They got married early, had kids early. Their first question in job interviews was about pension plans.”

That analogy only goes so far for a generation predisposed to making Vine videos of themselves doing cartwheels over their cats. As for the gray flannel suits, parents may not want to send their teenagers off to the tailor just yet. The Sparks & Honey report argued that “entrepreneurship is in their DNA”.

“Kids are witnessing startup companies make it big instantly via social media,” said Andrew Schoonover, a 15-year-old in Olathe, Kansas. “We do not want to work at a local fast-food joint for a summer job. We want to make our own business because we see the lucky few who make it big.”

Which leads to a final point worth mentioning about the Silent Generation. As Howe pointed out, it was not just the most career-focused generation in history. It was also, he said, the richest.

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Amangiri living

portfolio.

Luxury resort in the heart of the Wild West

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NOVEMBER ISSUE 119

FEATURING...

Swimming pool moulded into the natural rocks

Utah, USA

PRICE From $1,250 per night

ROOMS 34 suites

aman.com

 LAX

B

uilt into the landscape on a 600-acre site, the all-suite resort is fast becoming one of the must-stay places.

With views over the Grand Staircase-Escalante it’s located in a prime spot for visits to the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Zion National Park and Monument Valley. Tours of the area can also be taken directly from Amangiri via early-hours hot air balloon flights.

Amenities onsite include a floatation therapy pavilion, a sauna, steam room, cold plunge and step pool, a fitness centre and yoga pavilion. The airport transfers, yoga and guided hikes are all included, while a communal living room, library, art gallery, dining room and wine cellar all create a serene atmosphere The creators says they want to reflect the “holistic principles and healing traditions of the Navajo so the spa aims to restore inner equilibrium through the four elements of life and destruction – earth, wind, fire and water". Spread across 2,322 square metres, the pavilions, treatments rooms and terraces host a variety of options including massages, scrubs, wraps and flotation therapy.

And don’t worry, despite the location, there’s free Wi-Fi… it’s a resort, not a bootcamp.

Lounge overlooking the desert

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Spa treatment rooms with open views

PORTFOLIO.

living / style

what to pack ...for crisp weather in Madrid, and beyond

W Average temp

10°c

11 °C 12 °C 11 °C 10 °C Rome Tokyo Lisbon London

also wear in...

madrid november

Chance of rain: 22%

additional info Real madRid v BaRcelona November 22 will see the first El Classico of this season as Barcelona travel to the Santiago Bernebau stadium to face Real Madrid. It’s arguably the biggest league match in football, and if you can get a ticket then it really is one to watch. While

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most of the tickets will go to the season-ticket holders and sponsors, you can pay up for a corporate package if you really want to see it in style. Your best bet, however, is to go to a site like viagogo.com and pay around $500 for a seat.

november issue 119

city look

2

3

1

4

5 6

accessories

1. Moncler Martinville jacket $1,506 2. Fred Perry Marshall shoes $100 3. Incotex slim-fit cotton corduroy trousers $300 4. Pal Zileri long-sleeve mercerised cotton T-shirt $158 5. Orlebar Brown sweater $230 6. Thom Browne beanie $390

Vianel suede and leather card holder $225

83 Coach fury stripe skinny scarf $436

Fear And Loathing In La Liga: Barcelona vs Real Madrid by Sid Lowe $17

Salvatore Ferragamo money clip $268

Portfolio.

living / style

W

what to pack ...for rainy weather in New York, and beyond

Average temp

9°c

10 °C 7 °C 9 °C 9 °C London Paris Venice Frankfurt

also wear in...

new york november

Rain: 102mm

additional info

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Three independent clothes shops in Manhattan worth seeking out

Portfolio.

Patron of the new Luxury lifestyle shop on a quiet stretch of Franklin Street in Tribeca that has built up a cultlike reverence by fans.

They stock more than 60 brands, many of which you won’t find elsewhere. patronofthenew.us

BaBel fair An excletic little store in Nolita that claims to be “showcasing talent from around the world… from Korean denim to Aussie street style”. It’s a really well-curated collection of desirable items. babelfair.com

Cloak & Dagger A brilliant store at 334 East 9th Street that mostly specilises in 1960s vintage and stylish-butquirky items, like they’d just raided the wadrobe on the set of a Wes Anderson film. cloakanddaggerny.com

november issue 119

city look

accessories 2

3

1

Meteo By Yves salomon grey rabbit fur earmuffs $60

Tods fox key chain $375 6

4

5

Kate Spade handbag raincoat $30

85 1. Moncler quilted herringbone puffer coat $1,720 2. Alexander McQueen skull umbrella $390 3. Saint Laurent houndstooth dress $2,250 4. Burberry London check scarf $375 5. Alexander McQueen patent leather boots $1,360 6. Sophie Hulme buckle tote $1,000

Bottega Veneta Eau de Parfum $108

Portfolio.

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NOVEMBER LIVING / ADVICE

TIPS FROM THE TOP

ISSUE 119

Giuseppe Santoni CEO of Italian shoemaker Santoni

Hotel Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Milan. I love the Mandarin hotel chain all over the world and I was waiting for the new one in Milan for a long time.

It’s an ideal place for business lunches, but also somewhere you’d want to spend your free time.

App Intelligent Life, the culture and lifestyle magazine from The Economist. It covers arts, style, food, wine, cars, travel. I’m a big fan of it. But of course just until when the App Santoni is ready...

Aftershave Creed Royal Exclusives.

I still remember smelling this for the first time, in the Creed store in Madison, very close to our Boutique. It amazing, I recommend this.

Book

Reality Is Not As It Appears by Carlo Rovelli. It’s about the research in quantum gravity, the contemporary science challenge and where all our knowledge about the universe has come from.

Thrilling!

Restaurant Queen Of The Night, New York. It’s a fantastic place to go for dinner and entertainment.

You eat while being entertained by beautiful variety shows and performances. It really is a special place with a singular atmosphere.

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PORTFOLIO.

NEARLY 100 YEARS OF HEALTHCARE AND INNOVATION, NOW IN ABU DHABI Cleveland Clinic, consistently recognized as one of America’s best hospitals, is now available in Abu Dhabi, reducing the need to travel abroad for acute medical care.

Specializing in the treatment of Heart & Vascular, Neurological, Digestive Disease, Eye and Respiratory & Critical Care conditions.

TO BOOK AN APPOINTMENT, PLEASE CALL 800 8 CCAD (800 8 2223) FROM OUTSIDE THE UAE +971 2 659 0200 www.clevelandclinicabudhabi.ae MOH-RD10952-13/01/2016

november living / investment

investment piece

issue 119

Globe-Trotter safari luggage The luggage used by royalty, prime ministers and explorers

1

Vanity case (13”) with combination lock, mounted internal mirror and upper tray compartment. $815

2

Leather darkens with age, developing a rich honey colour over time.

3

Suitcase (21”) $1,621

4

Suitcase (26”) $1,800

5

Natural leather corners, handles and straps.

6

Suitcase (28”) $1,947

7

Suitcase (30”) $2,010

8

Handmade using the same Victorian machinery as it was 113 years ago

89 Established in 1897, the style of Globe-Trotter luggage has barely changed and still evokes that old era of adventure and luxury travel.

Owners of Globe-Trotter luggage include Captain Robert Falcon Scott on the Antarctic expedition in 1912. Winston Churchill used their dispatch case whilst chancellor of the exchequer in 1924, while it’s the luggage Queen Elizabeth II has been using since her honeymoon in 1947. Even Edmund Hilary ascended to base camp of Everest with a set in 1953. If the idea of steam trains, long cruises and looking elegant as you collect your luggage from the carousel at an airport appeals, then this could well be the brand to invest in.

Portfolio.

november living / food

issue 119

Top Table Grand New York dining with a modernist touch

D

aniel Humm joined Eleven Madison Park in 2006, bought the place five years later and now both he and the restaurant are among the best things about eating in New York. His multi-awardwinning establishment was the highest-placed American restaurant in the latest San Pellegrino Top 50 list. The multi-course tasting menu focuses on the “agricultural bounty of New York and on the centuries-old culinary traditions.” At $225 per person it’s not cheap, but the in the world of tasting menus it’s a comparable price for a near-incomparable meal.

ElEvEn Madison Park, new york

1

11 Madison Ave, New York

Nettles creamed with fiNgerliNg potato aNd goats' cheese Confit peanut potatoes glazed with smoked butter Chevre rolled into small balls

Sautéed Nettles, cooled down and mixed with garlic confit, milk and mascarpone.

Chive blossoms

Green garlic foam made with green garlic, goat milk and sheep’s milk yogurt

Olive oil potato purée

2 elevenmadisonpark. com

tomato coNfit oN lobster salad



Basil

JFK

Meyer lemon gel Blanched Roma tomatoes on bed of lobster salad mixed with bonito mayonnaise, fish sauce, tabasco and lemon juice

Torn French-bread croutons

Chervil Bonito mayonnaise

Fennel

Chives

chef’s recommeNdatioN | Daniel Humm’s pick of tHree restaurants to try 1. l’ ambrosia (Pezens, France) A classic, elegant example of cuisine that always inspires me and has remained dedicated to preserving a style of cooking that many have moved away from.

2. michel bras (Langoile, France) One of the most influential meals of my life and the cookbook is one that will stand the test of time, remaining relevant and forward thinking no matter where the culinary world goes next.

3. fäviken (Järpen, Sweden) Wholly unique and an experience unlike anything else I’ve ever had.

Remarkable food, setting, and Magnus shows a true commitment to his land. The restaurant has a real sense of place.

Portfolio.

91

living / staying in

T

he big news for the Alpine set is that the famous Eagle’s Nest chalet is reopening after a big refurbishment. Something of an icon, it upped the ski-holiday stakes in 2002 when it first opened, offering the first indoor swimming pool in a private chalet.

Having undergone an $800,000 overhaul, the owners are now confident that it will once again set the standard by which other chalets are measured. And the type of person who comes to Val d’Isère for the winter is often someone with pretty high standards.

The famous La Face piste is at the end of the road, making Eagle’s Nest accessible on skis, and

chaleT eagle’s NesT

Where to stay

Val d’Isère, France

Price

$2,550 based on full occupancy

scottdunn.com

 GVA

it’s a ten minute walk from the village centre. Inside is a high-tech property boasting a steam room, sauna, jetstream, Sonos integrated music system, flat screens and games consoles in the bedrooms.

New additions include a brand new cantilevered deck complete with a hot tub with a view from

which to enjoy après ski, a bar with spectacular views over the resort and a games room including foosball and pool table.

On the lower ground floor is a wellness area where you can swim against the jetstream in the swimming pool and the sauna and steam room to ease aching legs

places of interest in the area eat

party

relax

see

If the hot tub and sauna in the chalet don’t fix the post-piste aches then the Savoie Hotel spa should see you right with beauty treatments, massage and general wellbeing from 10am until 8pm

You can see the area from above with microlight trips leaving from the top of the Olympique bubble.

Available daily (weather permitting, of course) from 10.30am until 4pm. val.co.uk

92 La Table de l’Ours is one of the best places for Alpine food and the restaurant has a Michelin star for its efforts. They do a $187 degustation menu if you really want to try mountain cooking in grand style.

Portfolio.

Dick’s Tea Bar has been the go-to place for nightlife since it opened in 1979 and became the winter jet set and celeb hangout. Après-ski from 4.30pm until 10pm, live music until 1am, then it’s a nightclub until 5am.

november issue 119

The newly refurbed Eagle’s Nest chalet

after skiing and for all manner of delightful chalet-based capers.

The place accommodates 12 people and is spread over four floors. On the first floor is a double room and master suite, which has views on two sides, and a dressing room. Descend another level and there are four double bedrooms, all of which qualify as suites, as well as a single bedroom. All are beautifully furnished and en suite.

At the top is a large living room big enough to entertain all dozen guests. Perhaps the most lavish touch, however, is the fact you’ll have your meals prepared for you by your own private chef and served in a dining room in front of a crackling log fire.

The organisers have assured us that “champagne is always on ice, cocktails are mixed, skis and lift passes arrive without you noticing and your driver is waiting for you as you finish your last run”. This might well be the finest way to enjoy a ski-resort.

in the chalet

pool

Even in a chalet, there's an indoor swimming pool with jet stream, steam room and sauna.

rooms

There are seven bedrooms over two floors that can accommodate up to 12 people.

staff

Occupancy here includes your own private chef, a host and an in-resort driver service.

Extra touch

For those travelling with children they can provide a nanny or access to Explorers kids' club.

Portfolio.

93

living / book

Riding the big waves suRfIng

by Jim Heimann

I

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t’s almost certainly the most comprehensive visual history of surfing ever compiled and a stunning collection of images – even to someone who has never picked up a surfboard.

The 592-page hardcover book is the result of two-and-a-half years of research with institutions, collections, and photographic archives around the world to trace the visual history of surfing from its first description by Captain Cook in 1778 when he “discovered” Hawaii to today’s global industry.

The images, however, are the big draw - the image opposite being one. It’s of American surfer Garrett McNamara riding a huge wave in Nazaré, Portugal, in 2013 and this book has over 500 surfing images throughout. Not only big-wave riders but also photos that chart surfing’s migration from the shores of Hawaii to fashion, film, music and even car design.

Divided into five chronological chapters, with essays by top surfing journalists, the book examines and celebrates the evolution of surfing both on and off the water, as a sport, a lifestyle, a philosophy.

Surfing by Jim Heimann, published by Taschen, is out now for $207

november issue 119

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NOVEMBER ISSUE 119

LIVING / COLUMN

If public libraries didn’t exist could you start one today?

By Stephen J Dubner Raise your hand if you hate libraries.

Yeah, I didn’t think so. Who could possibly hate libraries?

Here’s one suggestion: book publishers.

I am probably wrong on this, but if you care about books, hear me out.

I had lunch recently with a few publishing folks. One of them had just returned from a national librarians’ conference, where it was her job to sell her line of books to as many librarians as possible. She said that there were as many as 20,000 librarians in attendance; she also said that if she got one big library system, like Chicago’s or New York’s, to buy a book, that could mean a sale of as many as a few hundred copies, since many library branches carry several copies of each book.

That sounds great, doesn’t it? Well… maybe not. Among writers, there is a very common lament: someone comes up to you at a book signing and says, “Oh, I loved your book so much, I got it from the library and then told all my friends to go to the library too!” And the writer thinks, “Gee, thanks, but why didn’t you buy it?”

The library bought its copy, of course.

But let’s say 50 people will read that copy over the life of the book. If the library copy hadn’t existed, surely not all 50 of those people would have bought the book. But imagine that even 10 people would have. That’s nine additional book sales lost by the writer and the publisher.

There’s another way to look at it, of course. Beyond the copies that libraries themselves buy, you could argue that, in the long run, libraries augment overall

book sales along at least a few channels: 1. Libraries help train young people to be readers; when those readers are older, they buy books.

2. Libraries expose readers to works by authors they wouldn’t have otherwise read; readers may then buy other works by the same author, or even the same book to have in their collection.

3. Libraries help foster a general culture of reading; without it, there would be less discussion, criticism, and coverage of books in general, which would result in fewer book sales.

But here’s the point I’m getting to: if there was no such thing today as the public library and someone like Bill Gates proposed to establish them in cities and towns across the US (much like Andrew Carnegie once did), what would happen?

I am guessing there would be a huge pushback from book publishers. Given the current state of debate about intellectual property, can you imagine modern publishers being willing to sell one copy of a book and then have the owner let an unlimited number of strangers borrow it?

I don’t think so. Perhaps they’d come up with a licensing agreement: the book costs $20 to own, with an additional $2 per year for every year beyond Year 1 it’s in circulation. I’m sure there would be a lot of other potential arrangements.

And I am just as sure that, like a lot of systems that evolve over time, the library system is one that, if it were being built from scratch today, would have a very different set of dynamics and economics.

“There would be a huge pushback from book publishers, given the current state of debate about intellectual property”

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Stephen J Dubner is the co-author of Freakanomics. His new book When To Rob A Bank is out now.

PORTFOLIO.