To live a mile high, you’ve got to be rich as a sheikh

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday December 23, 2001

How would you fancy living in the sky, a mile above the street? That's the plan for the Mile High Tower, due for completion in 2013. It will dwarf the current tallest world record holder, the kilometre-high Burj Khalifa opened in 2010.

Now that's an interesting building - it started life as the Grollo Tower, remember that? When the burghers of Melbourne decided that we don't really want the world's tallest building in our front yard, the concept moved north.

But this column is not about buildings. It's about money and power. You see both these buildings are in a place we know lots about, and nothing about. Arabia and the gulf states.

The mile-high Kingdom Tower (right)is being built just north of Jeddah, on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia. The Burj Khalifa is in Dubai, on the Persian Gulf. They are both reflections of the huge wealth and power of this region.

Who are the richest people in the world? Well at $80,000 a head the Qataris come out well ahead. And that's in a country one-sixth the size of Tasmania.

They could teach us a thing or two about sovereign wealth funds, too. Like us they have made vast incomes out of their resources. The Qatar Investment Authority fund is worth $70 billion. For a population of native citizens of 250,000. The other million and a half non-citizens do well, but they are essentially guest workers.

But what is the use of all this wealth if it does not buy you influence? Qatar showed the world how this is done when Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the Emir, set up Al Jazeera in 1996.

This Middle Eastern version of CNN has rapidly become a major news force world-wide, by maintaining high standards of journalism and relatively unbiased coverage of events. Qatar may be just a thumbnail on the world map, but it has a loud and insistent voice.

The lesson of the value of media - and opportunity of investment - has not been lost. Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal took his own plunge into social media this week by investing $300 million for a "strategic stake" in Twitter. That's an awful lot of tweets.

There's another major sale coming up next year that will have the sheikhs queuing down the corridors. Facebook is set to launch its initial public offering (IPO) and speculation on the funds gathered runs as high as $10 billion.

Remember that scene in the movie The Social Network, the story about the launch of Facebook? Mark Zuckerberg is telling his growing staff that part of their pay will be in share options, and that in time these will be worth a fortune.

Well that time has come, and the market is estimating the sale will create at least a thousand instant millionaires. The venerable founder and CEO will be all of 27 years of age.

Now don't you wish you studied harder in your computer classes?

Modern technology - the internet, smartphones, and social media that they carry - have made a profound difference to the rulers of the world, and we see its striking affects in the middle east. They have made life very hard for despots, always the world is watching, as they discovered in the Arab Spring.

Now the people and businesses of the Middle East have come to a fork in the road. Do they follow the mega-rich investors and ride sky-high into a prosperous future, facing the fact that social media will make them transparent? Or will they follow the road of the fundamentalists and lock themselves back in the middle ages?

ray@ebeatty.com

Think of those suffering Xmas Torture!

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday December 16, 2011

As I walk through our city’s department stores and shops this festive season, I can’t help feeling a pang of painful sympathy for all those brave folk who work in them.

You see, in my student Christmas holidays I worked as an assistant in a men’s clothing retailer. It was an old fashioned store with timber product drawers and mannequins that looked like they had been modelled on The Follies of '36.

But the owner did allow himself one touch of modernity. An eight-track audio system. No, not a multi-channel mixer, these were the bulky packs that preceded the cassette tape. They had a length of about an hour and automatically started again when set for “repeat”.

For Christmas he had two tapes, with carols and Christmas songs. And they played from opening time to final close, continuously.

After a while it became a version of the Chinese water torture. Drip drip drip - merry - drip - jingle - drip - shepherds - aargh!

So yes, my friends in the retail stores, I do know what you are going through right now, and you even have to pretend to be happy and festive in the process.

Obviously they have the same problem in Sweden. And a retailer has cleverly made a promotion out of it.

The electronics store Pause is running a promotion called “Xmas Carol Torture!” And the first prize is a stereo system. To win it, however, you have to face the music.

Their web site (xmascaroltorture.com) plays a jolly version of Jingle Bells, in English. Continuously. The winner will be the soul who lasts longest watching the screen and listening to the carol.

Oh you can’t skive off and leave the computer running. Every minute or so a santa head on the screen laughs “Ho ho ho!” and you have to quickly click it with your mouse. When I looked at the site someone had made it to over two hours. I lasted about four minutes.

This technique can be used with interactive TV, as Burger King did in the US recently, with a campaign called “Whopper Lust”.

You had to sit in front of a dedicated channel on Direct TV, which for a week showed only a flame-grilled burger slowly turning on screen. The challenge was, watch this burger for five minutes and get one free. Watch it for ten minutes and you get two.

Presumably they believe that the spinning stack of bun, meat and tomatoes will hypnotise you into an insatiable desire for the burger.

Maybe they were right - more than 50,000 burgers were won during 13,500 hours of TV advertising. Once again you had to click in response to prompts or else you would be returned to the start. Obviously some people have nothing better to do with their time.

In my supermarket the PA system continuously plays “Woolworths the fresh food people”. This is a rather lovely song. Until you have been in the store for the umpteenth time this month and you hear it wafting down the aisles even as you pick up a trolley.

My silent sympathy goes out to those poor souls who know that every morning of their working lives they will be greeted by that jolly voice - and that it won’t stop ‘till they have clocked off.

I have to plead guilty myself. One jingle I created long ago was “Food Plus your store with more”, and every time I visited one of the convenience stores it would be tinnily chirping from the ceiling. Even though it was my own baby, after a while I would have happily thrown a boot at the loudspeaker.

ray@ebeatty.com