Luxury garments
GOLDEN FLEECES

Blessed with an undercoat of downy fluff, Canada's Arctic Muskox has conquered some of the most extreme conditions on earth, including the last ice age. So warm and fine is its qiviuk fibre, gathered by Inuit people, that it was traditionally reserved for royalty. Indeed, it is used for an exclusive clothing line by Christina Oxenberg, daughter of Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia.

Such rare, natural fabrics are now increasingly trendy on the catwalk. Take Oscar de la Renta's ramie tops, made from a sturdy plant fibre once used on mummies, or Michael Kors' cashgora capes and jackets, with fabric from a crossbred goat that combines cashmere's softness with the resilience of mohair.

For an even more exclusive experience, there are the collections of Loro Piana, an Italian textile and clothing brand that - after supplying fashion houses with luxury fabrics for the past two centuries - has branched out to sell its own collections. The fine garments are made of ethically harvested fibres, obtained by shearing or combing the animals instead of killing them.

Brothers Pier Luigi and Sergio Loro Piana form relationships with local breeders worldwide and personally inspect their precious source materials. New Zealand and Australia have yielded fine wools, China and Mongolia cashmere and baby cashmere, Peru vicuña (wild South American camelids) and Burma has proffered the lotus flower fibre.

Quantities are extremely limited; to make a baby cashmere pullover requires the fleece of 19 goat kids, while an overcoat is painstakingly assembled from 58. "Surprisingly enough, during these years of financial crisis, more people have started longing for better quality, turning to products which could last longer, being maybe more expensive, but a good investment over time," says Pier Luigi Loro Piana. Moth repellant would be a good investment, too.

Cloud-based communications
TALKING TELEPHONE NUMBERS

About a billion people who use telephones don't actually own one, relying instead on payphones or shared mobiles. Until recently, the best option they had was to own a SIM, which forced them to swap cards every time they wanted to make a call. Worse still, these could easily be lost or stolen.

Now a British company, Movirtu, has harnessed cloud technology to give those who can't afford a handset their own phone number.

Founder Nigel Waller, who has spent more than two decades developing telecoms software, had the idea in 2008. "We can access email and cloud computing services from any PC in the world, so why can we not do the same with a phone?" he says. "Why does a phone number have to be tied to a phone?"

In May 2009, Movirtu raised its first round of financing with Gray Ghost DOEN Social Ventures Coöperatief, closely followed by the Grassroots Business Fund in September of that year. In November 2010, it secured a further $5.5m from TLcom Capital.

Movirtu has already built up a customer base in Africa and South Asia. "We have a significant pipeline working with both mobile operators and NGOs, who are a critical part of our ecosystem," says Waller. But it is not limiting itself to developing markets. Offering what Waller calls "mobile identity management", the company plans to expand into the developed world with a service that enables individuals to have multiple phone numbers on the same handset.

Such an app would, for instance, offer separate numbers for home and business calls, texts and data plans, leading to one segmented bill. "This model gives consumers the ability to carry one device and enables enterprises the ability to allow employees to bring their own device to work," says Waller.

Energy bonanza
RACE TO THE BOTTOM

Drawn by what could well be the biggest reserves of their kind - more than 31.6 trillion cubic metres, according to the US Energy Information Agency's estimates - foreign and domestic oil and gas companies are queuing up to tap into China's shale gas.

The stakes are high for both the Chinese, who depend on oil and gas imports to fuel economic growth, and foreign companies, eager for a stake in a market that might be worth billions.

Aware that boosting its gas production could change the game both internationally and nationally, the Chinese government has granted the industry permission to expand rapidly. And on the ground, things have been moving fast.

China plans to produce 6.5 billion cubic metres by 2015 and 80 billion by 2020. A first round of bidding for four exploration blocks was launched in June and a second round is due in early 2012.

Foreign firms have been approached for their know-how and technology; it still takes PetroChina, listed arm of the state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation, nine months to drill a well that Shell could drill in a month.

Since the Obama administration signed an energy deal in 2009 paving the way for US oil and gas companies to collaborate with their Chinese counterparts, Chevron and ExxonMobil have signed joint study agreements with Sinopec, and Royal Dutch Shell is exploring a block with PetroChina. The last of these has plans to invest $1bn a year in the sector for the next five years. Meanwhile Eni, BP, Statoil and Total are all negotiating deals.

But will the market live up to its goldmine potential? Although a nationwide survey is due out in 2013, for the time being no one really knows how much of the reserves are commercially viable and forecasters don't expect significant production to start until 2020.

Tom Greider, an analyst at IHS Global Insight, says: "China has very large gas reserves, but how much of that is recoverable is a big question. The technological conditions are challenging and there are questions on the actual gas content [quality]."

E-vehicles
ELETRIC DREAM MACHINES

BMW claims that its i3 and i8 electric vehicles represent not just its most gamechanging models yet but the future of the car business.

With metropolises such as London imposing a congestion charge on city-centre vehicles, "It's entirely possible that we could see certain cities blocked for cars with internal combustion engines," says Ludwig Willisch, the newly appointed chief executive of BMW North America. "You can only go there with an electric car."

Which is why BMW is spending more than €1bn on super-sexy, premium e-vehicles that it hopes will turn urbanite heads more than, say, Nissan's Leaf or Toyota's Prius. The i3, a tiny electric car for urban commuters, will retail at around €40,000 when it hits showrooms in late 2013. The likely price of the i8 (a plug-in hybrid sports car, due in 2014) will be €110,000.

Both are manufactured with recyclable materials and renewable energy. Rather than use welded steel, BMW's body structure glues and screws a high-strength, lightweight passenger compartment made from carbon fibre-reinforced plastic to an aluminium chassis module incorporating the car's suspension, battery and drive system. Inside are natural fibres, including anthracite accents made from compressed plants.

Manufacturing starts in Japan, where SGL, BMW's German partner, makes a nylon-like, synthetic thread used in textiles and furniture. This is shipped to BMW-SGL's factory in Moses Lake, Washington, where it is blasted into carbon fibre using cheap hydropower from the Columbia River. Final assembly will occur at BMW's expanded plant in Leipzig. A lithium battery provides 80 to 100-mile driving range and recharges in six hours. Indeed, the cars are so green that BMW is encouraging people not to buy them. In June 2011, it launched DriveNow, a premium car-sharing service with Germany's Sixt AG. Customers access cars using a computer chip in their driving licence and can hire and leave them wherever they wish. The service started in Munich and there are plans to expand it. BMW also created a $100m venture-capital fund, BMW i Ventures, to invest in start-ups such as MyCityWay and ParkatmyHouse, which offer mobility in crowded cities.