It has all the makings of a classic Californian business tale. A square-jawed ex-fighter pilot and an investment banker turned skateboard design guru meet in class at Stanford and – with the help of some of Palo Alto’s most celebrated venture capitalists and a team of space-shuttle designers – come up with a light aircraft that does for flying what Apple did for portable music players.

Sounds far-fetched? Well the happy ending may yet be a year or two away but otherwise that is the story of Icon Aircraft and the A5, a plane that looks set to revolutionise recreational flying. The project is the brainchild of Kirk Hawkins, aerospace engineer and pilot of everything from F16s to kit planes, and was inspired by a US regulation change in 2004 that dramatically reduced the restrictions and costs of recreational flying with the creation of a new category of plane, the light sports aircraft (LSA).

Of course, Hawkins wasn’t the only one to spot the potential of this ruling.

US light-aircraft stalwarts Cessna and Piper have both rushed to enter the new market, as have a slew of smaller manufacturers from across the US and Europe. But while Cessna’s Skycatcher and Piper’s Sport are a huge step up from their two-seater predecessors, they are still recognisably cut from the same cloth – solid little metal planes that are destined to become the mainstay of flying schools for a generation to come.

The A5 is something else altogether. Constructed using the very latest carbon- fibre technology, it is as light as a feather, can land and take off on water and has wings that fold up neatly for ease of storage or trailering. What’s really set tongues wagging in the industry and beyond, though, is not the A5’s hi-tech specs but its unabashed sexiness – the

sleek, space-age exterior, the minimalist chic of the cockpit and the sheer, undiluted fun of flying the thing.

This is exactly in line with Hawkins’ vision. As he saw back in 2004, the FSA’s rule change had implications far beyond cost-reduction and ease of access – it offered the opportunity to create an entirely new type of plane, modelled not on traditional lumbering light aircraft but on the ultra-desirable designer vehicles that had long since taken over every other type of motorsport.

“If you look at the number of jet skis, snowmobiles, motorcycles and sports bikes that are sold, these are tiny numbers compared with cars but they’re gigantic numbers compared with planes,” says Hawkins. “There is a large market for people who want to expand their life, to have a lifestyle product that is an expression of their identity and that gives them more freedom, more adventure on their weekends.”

He wanted to design a plane that would tap into a pent-up demand for fun, intuitive consumer flying, and above all a plane that consumers could fall in love with. “You look at what great car companies like BMW do, look at what Oakley does, what Apple does, what Bugatti does. These are companies that at their fundamental DNA level are very in tune to what the user experience is,” he says. “It’s not about utility, it’s about the human emotional experience.”

To achieve his vision, Hawkins needed a partner whose expertise in high-end consumer products matched his own aviation-industry nous. A chance meeting put him back in touch with former classmate Steen Strand, now teaching product design back at Stanford and famous as the founder of cult skateboard manufacturer Freebord. Hawkins explained his business plan and asked Strand to come on board, and Strand said he’d think it over.

First thing next morning, he rang Hawkins back. “He said: ‘Dude, I could not sleep last night. I so see this, I’m in, I’m all in. But I don’t know anything about planes.’ I said: ‘Look, I have my whole life in planes.

I’ll bring the plane, you bring something to this process that the plane world doesn’t know. What you know is consumer product design and development. In fact, it’s a benefit to you to come into this project with no preconceived ideas about what a plane should be.’”

Strand was the first to be inspired by Hawkins’ vision but by no means the last. Possibly the duo’s biggest coup was recruiting from Scaled Composites, the engineers behind projects such as Virgin

Galactic 2 and Global Flyer, but they have been equally successful in attracting a stellar roll call of investors, from the former head of

Boeing and the chairman of JetBlue to the usual Silicon Valley suspects from Google, Flickr, LinkedIn and Facebook. Buyers have been similarly enthused. More than 400 have already signed up for the A5 and the names in the order book reflect the company’s unique DNA – nearly two-thirds are experienced pilots with an average of 2,000 hours’ flying time, but the remaining 35% have never flown before. What’s more, says Hawkins, it’s not the concept of flying that’s got them excited, it’s the A5 itself. “A lot of our customers look at the existing LSAs and say: ‘You couldn’t give that airplane to me, the vehicle doesn’t inspire me. If it’s not an A5 there’s not a plane that I want.’”

So will Icon live up to its name, and become the company that took flying into the consumer mainstream? The jury is out until the first A5s start arriving on customers’ doorsteps later this year, but the advance buzz has been ecstatic from pilots and techies alike. Hawkins won’t be drawn on his long-term projections for the company – “partly because we don’t want to clue people in on just how big we think this market is” – but he will admit that he’s looking to ramp up production to 500 planes a year in the near term and that there are several more Icons on the drawing board.

One of his proudest boasts, though, is that so far he has barely had to spend a cent on marketing, so compelling is his story, and that of Icon and the A5. If he succeeds in realising his vision, that story could well become a legend.

CLOUD HAILER
Eucalyptus CEO Mårten Mickos is spreading the word about cloud computing, helped by open-source software evangelists across the globe, writes Pia Heikkila

To its enthusiasts, cloud computing is a revolutionary concept. It’s also a very simple one: why should companies have to buy and maintain servers when it’s cheaper and less time-consuming just to rent applications from someone else?

Mårten Mickos’s enthusiasm borders on the evangelical. The 49-year-old Finnish serial entrepreneur is CEO of Eucalyptus, purveyor of open-source software and one of Silicon Valley’s most talked-about start- ups. He is convinced that cloud software will enable faster, better, cheaper data handling for corporations.

“We have to reorganise the way computers interact witheach other,” he says. “In a few years there will be over a trillion connected devices that all will require compute capacity. Companies need to be able to serve this massive demand at any given time and cloud computing is the answer.”

Mickos is not alone in saying this, of course. In December, analysts Gartner predicted that 20% of non-IT Global 500 companies will be cloud-service users by 2015. Another pundit, TechMarketView, asserts that cloud and hosted applications will make up 25% of software and IT services spending in 2014.

Eucalyptus itself makes heavyweight cloud software for organisations with huge compute loads such as web applications, mobile applications and anything that involves handling large amounts of data. It provides a layer of software that improves the operation of infrastructure software and allocates compute and storage resources on demand. Eucalyptus says its key clients are organisations that deal with large amounts of data and unpredictable user demands, such as the F5 Networks, Trend Micro, the US National Security Agency and NASA, which were among Eucalyptus’s first clients.

Companies building next-generation application technologies often need the flexibility of a cloud to support their infrastructure. Banks and other large corporations that run their own data

centres need help to allocate vast amounts of data in a seamless manner. “For them it’s a matter of streamlining operations and the ability to create their own cloud-computing environments,” Mickos says. The company follows the open-source software model, which means that the Eucalyptus software platform is freely available for download and use. The base of the business model is a paid-for version supported by Eucalyptus.

Mickos is an eager proponent of this concept and used to be CEO of MySQL, one of the earliest open-source companies to figure out how to make money from it. He worked for the group until in 2008 it was sold for $1bn to Sun Microsystems, where he took up a post as a senior vice president.

“The success of open-source software is based on having millions of evangelists around the world,” he says. “They help us to fix bugs – and the few times that they said that they hated MySQL, that helped us too, because complaints usually contain some good suggestions for improvement.”

The open-core principle allows companies such as Eucalyptus to reveal chunks of their code while keeping other bits closer to their chest. The vast community of users and developers is at the heart of the concept. Managing the open-source community, which is known for its effective grapevine and sharp views, is a skill Mickos has honed. “It’s a specific challenge and task. It’s important to have a thick skin, to be a good listener and not let it bring you down.”

Eucalyptus has been making the right noises for the venture capital community’s ears too. In July it landed $20m in a

second round of funding led by New Enterprise Associates. “This money will last us a good few years and it will be used to grow the company faster. We are developing a very advanced technology and need to hire the best people to do it,” says Mickos. Prior to this, Benchmark Capital and BV Capital jointly invested $5.5m. Mickos won’t reveal company financials but says Eucalyptus is “making real money right now and has massive potential”. His words are backed up by industry research. A report by the 451 Group already values the cloud- computing market at around $500m (€380m) and predicts it will be worth $4bn in 2013.

The challenge for early adopters, however, is that whenever a new technology is introduced, it’s likely that existing products will be incompatible. “It’s in the common interest that early in an industry or a new market, you have products that represent different standards. Too much standardisation too early can hamper evolution,” says Mickos. “Developing new technologies is a kind of Darwinism – it relies on survival of the fittest. In the end, the most appropriate solution emerges as the winner.”

The company certainly doesn’t lack ambition and is hoping to dominate the cloud space in the next few years, ahead of its California-based rival VMware.

Eucalyptus started as a University of California, Santa Barbara project in 2006 and soon grew into a fully fledged enterprise. But building a commercial company from academic foundations presents its own set of challenges. “When I joined, the Eucalyptus staff were, and still are, a very passionate, serious, academic group,” Mickos explains. “My priority was to listen and make sure I understood what mattered to them.” The result, he adds, is a team that makes good business sense.