44 THE NEXT... TREEHOUSE
YOUR HOME

A NEW generation of builders are turning their backs on bricks and mortar, returning to timber but with a twist. And supplying them are a new breed of industrial alchemists, who have developed treatments that give soft woods some of the properties of hardwoods, offering an alternative to unsustainable logging of rainforests.

Newest kid on the block is Norwegian Kebony, whose CEO Christian Jebsen (pictured) claims to have perfected a process whereby softwoods such as pine or other ‘northern species’ such as beech and maple are soaked in furfural alcohol, a byproduct of sugar cane, and then cured and dried to produce timber as hard as teak and mahogany. Finnish competitor Finnforest’s ThermoWood uses heat treatment to achieve a comparable effect, while Netherlands-based Titan Wood produces Accoya, a wood subjected to acetylation (a vinegar solution).

The arrival of alternatives to threatened tropical hardwoods could not have come sooner to a construction industry that gobbles up vast quantities of wood every year, over €5bn-worth in the EU alone. In fact, demand from the industry is actually rising due to the low carbon footprint of timber versus bricks and mortar.

In Turku, Finland’s original capital and European Capital of Culture in 2011, a whole neigh-bourhood is being rebuilt with timber houses; while Austria’s Rhomberg Bau is offering the Lifecycle Tower, a 20-storey block of flats made entirely from timber. Not only does the design slash the CO2 footprint of the building, but its modular make-up allows it to be constructed in half the time of a conventional building, greatly reducing the on-site costs. Kebony claims its pine cladding is cost-effective too: although almost four times the price of untreated regular pine, it costs 60% less over its lifespan because it never needs to be painted or creosoted.

Timber-like alternatives are not new of course, but until now they’ve tended to be mostly limited to specialist sectors such as boating, where durability is more important than price. From Minnesota-based Titandeck’s aluminium-injected plastic (that looks like wood) to UK-based Dura Composites’ polyurethane resins, there is no shortage of ingenuity out there. However, oil-derived plastics are not viewed with much favour by envrionmentalists, even if they are better than using rainforest hardwood.

The curious conclusion is that logging is actually good for the environment, as long as it’s northern pine rather than Burmese teak, and felled trees are replaced by saplings in managed forests. Withemerging countries now asserting their right to chop down their forest, Europe and North America may soon have to replant much of theirs — and, with it, forestry could well become the next boom industry of this century.

45 THE NEXT... MONEY-SPINNER
BLOGS

A FEW years ago it would have been too good to be true. Like the Nigerian billion-aire offering to pay a fortune just to borrow your bank account. But the days of making real money from tapping away at a keyboard about whatever subject you choose are almost with us. Almost.

There are roughly 150 million blogs being written worldwide, and the blog search engine Technorati estimates the number of readers at more than 300 million people. In the US, three-quarters of internet users read blogs. Granted, many blogs will be of little interest to anyone but the blogger themselves and only the most loyal of friends. But with such a vast array of blogs, there are certain to be a few gems among them, and the best of them are drawing in readers in numbers most traditional publishers would kill for. In the US, four of the top 10 sites for entertainment news are now blogs.

Where eyeballs go, advertisers follow. So, while magazine ad revenue has been falling – by 21% in the first half of the year in the US alone, according to the Publishers Information Bureau — blog heavyweights are reporting huge growth in ad revenue: 45% this year in the case of Gawker Media, a network of blogs founded by a former Financial Times reporter in 2002. Sugar Inc, another group of blogs, aimed at young women, counts Sony, L’Oréal and Chanel among its ad clients.

Technorati says bloggers with advertising on their blogs are, on average, bringing in revenue of €4,000 on an annual investment of €1,200; those with 100,000 or more unique visitors a month are raking in over €50,000.

A chunk of the blogosphere will follow the revenue models used in the television world; like terrestrial TV, access to some blogs will remain free, and will rely on ads to turn a profit. Bundles of blogs, blogpiles perhaps, could be sold to advertisers in the same way as a print publisher has a stable of titles and sells ads in them all from a centralised point. Others might take the HBO route, that is make a virtue of there being no ads, but subscribers will pay to tune in. As with pay TV, a fixed monthly fee would allow unlimited access to a smorgasbord of quality material.

This may be new media, but when it comes to blogging for profit, certain rules of the old world still apply. Anyone can put pen to paper; not everyone can write a bestseller.

46 THE NEXT... BITTORRENT
SPOTIFY

SHARING MUSIC online is still common – and still illegal. But Spotify – which works on the iPhone in the UK but is still in closed beta for computer use in the US – lets you access the entire discography of just about any artist you can imagine, play all of their music, anytime you want, without paying a dime.

Taking the business models used by Real (for Rhapsody.com) and Microsoft (for its Zune service), flipping them on their heads and shaking out all of the bad parts, the ad-supported music playback model is becoming more common with services such as Last.fm and Pandora.com. But Spotify is unique: it is on-demand, so you can select any artist you want and choose specific albums and songs, and the quality – for web playback – is superior to most of the free services. One question still lingers: the music labels killed Napster, will Spotify be next?