The Red Bulletin Special - Pioneers Festival 2015 EN

INTERNATIONAL

BEYOND THE ORDINARY

Special

T HE PIONEdition OF 2015EERS

ROBOTS IN 2015

THE NEW LIFE

High-tech machines display a sense of humour and human emotions

FIRST OF THE MARTIANS How a NASA staffer became a worldwide star‌ thanks to his hair

THE FOOD OF THE FUTURE

Eggs without chickens, milk without cows and meat from a 3D printer

PLUS: 13 ideas that will change our future and the way we think

SWISS CHAMP

I.N.O.X.

FUNCTIONALITY IS PART OF OUR FAMILY Flagship Store Düsseldorf | Königsallee 88 Brand Store Köln | Wallrafplatz 2

MAKERS OF THE ORIGINAL SWISS ARMY KNIFE | VICTORINOX.COM

SPECTRA

EXPLORER JACKET

FRAGRANCE

RoboteR ARme. NAsA mARs RoveR. INtellIgeNte UNteRw채sche.

KUh-fReIe mIlch. bItcoIN. DeR beste ANgel INvestoR. gRApheN. hypeRloop. weltRAUm toURIstIN. fRog DesIgN. K체NstlIche INtellIgeNz. AUgmeNteD ReAlIty. leAp motIoN. 1600 stARtUps.

dON‘T MISS IT! wATCH THE lIVE STREAM MAY 28–29 OR ON dEMANd AFTERwARdS AT: pioneers.io/festival-online

IPHONE COVERS FOR PIONEERS! Red Bull MOBILE is about tariffs, smartphones and the World of Red Bull.

You get: Tickets to events, Apps & Games, Music & Radio, Red Bull TV, the unlimited music streaming service Rdio and much more.

Register now in our Red Bull MOBILE Zone win.gs/iPhonecover and take the chance to get an iPhone cover.

SIM-Fee â‚Ź 19,90/Year.

Offer valid until revoked. 24 month minimum duration. Clockrate 60/60. Packages valid within austria. For Rdio Music datavolume is charged according to tarifplan. For the service Rdio Music the respective terms apply. More information under www.redbullmobile.at. Prices inclusive VAT.

CONTENTS

22 THE FOOD OF THE FUTURE Eggs without chickens. Milk without cows. Meat from the 3D printer. TOMORROW’S CUISINE

38

IDEAS AND PIONEERS BULLEVARD 08 HOVERBOARD It’s flying. Again. It first flew in 2015, but that was really 1989.

The future is finally here!

42

09 HYPERLOOP Elon Musk wants to transpor­­t you by tube – at 1,000kph

10 GAMER GLASSES that fuse reality

THE SUPER CYBORG

THE SEXIEST MAN AT NASA

HUGH HERR lost his legs when he was 17. Now he makes new ones that do more than nature’s own

BOBAK FERDOWSI is known online as Mohawk Guy. The story of the brains behind the haircut

and virtual worlds

48

15 TEST Are you a potential startup millionaire?

16 SUCCESS Tips from great pioneers

INTERVIEW 30 VISHAL SHARMA The developer of Google Now says, “Machines which can teach themselves will change the world”

EXTRA: GO EAST THE PIONEERS OF THE BALKANS

34 THE SPECIAL GAME One of the world’s most successful football games is from Serbia. And JOSÉ MOURINHO advertises it

“ONLY DO WHAT YOU REALLY WANT TO” JÜRGEN FURIAN, an old-school pioneer, has a tip for all new startups: be passionate

32 BRA APPS AND SAVING FUEL Startups from a region which wants to be associated with creativity, not war

COVER PHOTOGRAPHY: CHRISTIAN GRUND/13PHOTO; PHOTOGRAPHY: CORBIS, GETTY IMAGES, PICTUREDESK.COM, KURT PRINZ

WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW 50 INTELLIGENT NERVES After artificial intelligence (AI) comes intelligent nerves (IN): nerve cells which will be able to do more than the latest machines

18

THE NEW HUMANS Will ROBOTS achieve global dominance?

Or will they just perform care roles? We interviewed them to find out

THE RED BULLETIN

7

Jill and Greg Henderson 10 units 15 mins.

Its magnetic field only works on copper or aluminium surfaces and not on water

AND LIFT-OFF! IN 2015, AT LONG LAST. What’s really happening with the space-time continuum, Doc? The only reason we wish we had the hoverboard is because we already know about it from the mystical year 2015 in Back to the Future Part II. So have Jill and Greg Henderson from the startup Arx Pax created an alternative reality with their prototype, which appeared this year, or is our universe about to collapse in on itself?

Whatever happens, real hoverboards are definitely worth the risk.

PHOTOGRAPHY: CORBIS, HENDO

“I don’t understand one damn thing that’s going on around here” Marty McFly in Back to the Future Part I

8

THE RED BULLETIN

FILM ME, DRONE! The thing that annoyed professional snowboarder and filmmaker Xavier de Le Rue about drone cameras was that there always had to be someone keeping an eye on the image via remote control. Surely it could be automatic too, the Frenchman thought – a drone that worked by itself and always had the right field of view.

After a winter of tests and an insanely successful Kickstarter campaign, it’s now a reality. The

fully automatic camera drone that de Le Rue and his friends at Squadrone System have developed is called the Hexo+. It follows your smartphone’s GPS signal. You choose the camera style (close-up, panorama, circling flight) using the app, and the drone will have you perfectly in shot throughout, whether you’re bombing down a glacier on a snowboard, walking along a beach or lying on the grass.

This drone won’t let you down.

Squadrone System this year about €1,100

TECHNOLOGY FOR YOUR RUNNING TECHNIQUE

SACRAMENTO

SAN FRANCISCO FRESNO LAS VEGAS

LOS ANGELES

PHOTOGRAPHY: HEXO+, HYPERLOOP, MOTICON

suggested main route suggested main stations proposed branches proposed branch stations

SAN DIEGO

MUSK PUTS HIS FAITH IN THE CROWD PNEUMATIC TUBE. We will fly through a system of tubes circling the globe in transport capsules the size of cars, propelled by compressed air at close to the speed of sound, and it will all be powered by solar energy. If we’re to believe Elon Musk – and why shouldn’t we? – this is what the transport of the future looks THE RED BULLETIN

Elon Musk 1,000kph 1/1,000 bar An initial 8km test track is due to be built in California in 2016

like. The good thing is that Musk is putting his faith in the crowd.

The billionaire inventor has made his baby an open source project.

Hyperloop promptly became the biggest project on jumpstartfund.com.

The platform takes crowdfunding to a whole new level by creating a community of entrepreneurs, experts and investors.

HOT INSOLES. Munich-based startup Moticon has been working for several years on the best sensor insoles the sporting world has to offer. And company founder Maximilian Müller seems to have made a breakthrough with his OpenGo science. The ultrathin insole, which monitors pressure distribution, acceleration and rate of flow, is aimed at professional sportsmen and women and physiotherapists, but one thing it won’t measure is how much you sweat.

Maximilian Müller since 2009 13 per insole €1,795

9

The ultimate in 3D headsets will make the real and virtual worlds fuse before our eyes. There just aren’t that many of them yet

Meron Gribetz $667 (developer kit) 2016 Development on the AR glasses began two years ago after they raised $200,000 on Kickstarter

ALL TO PLAY FOR. No-one has conquered the augmented and virtual reality market and there are still plenty of slices of the 3D pie left.

But young, ambitious entrepreneurs are pushing the boundaries of the technology ever further. People like Allan Evans, who says he plans to launch one of the most attractive virtual displays – the Avegant Glyph

10

– this year. The Glyph is designed mainly for entertainment; use it to watch movies or for gaming.

FUSION. The team at Meta are going down another path with their augmented reality (AR) kit, a sort of Iron Man display. If you look at the world through the Meta 1, you’ll be able to move digital 3D objects through space with your own hands or to anchor computerised surfaces in your real field of vision. And last but not least, the Sulon Cortex shows us where we’re probably heading: towards a hybrid technology where the real and virtual fields of vision constantly overlap.

Dhan Balachandreswaran $499 (developer kit) 2016 It scans the real world around it and can present it virtually in a different form

PHOTOGRAPHY: AVEGANT, META, SULON

Allan Evans $599 (beta) late 2015 A million micro-mirrors project the digital image directly onto the retina of each eye

HERE WE GO AGAIN. 3D glasses have had their ups and downs.

Whether for virtual or augmented reality, we’ve been reading excitedly about the development of all sorts of headsets for years. But none of us – okay, almost none of us – have ever worn a pair of the damned things.

THE RED BULLETIN

The Infiniti Q50

WHEN TECHNOLOGY FALLS INTO THE RIGHT HANDS. infiniti.co.uk

There’s you. Then there’s you with tech that helps make you a better you.

Like optional Direct Adaptive Steering that gives you steering precision and total exhilaration.

Official fuel economy figures for the Infiniti Q50 range in mpg (l/100 km): urban 29.4 to 50.4 (5.6 to 9.6), extra urban 53.3 to 76.3 (3.7 to 5.3), combined 41.5 to 64.2 (4.4 to 6.8). CO2 emission: 159 to 114 g/km.

WHAT BATMAN WEARS UNDER THAT SUIT. Dhananja Jayalath and Christopher Wiebe couldn’t afford personal trainers back when they were both students at the University of Waterloo in Canada in 2010 so they made their own by cramming a T-shirt and shorts full of some 30 (!) sensors.

Five years down the line, their baby, called Athos, is about to revolutionise our workouts. The ultra-sensitive sensors, developed especially for the purpose, record all muscle activity below the skin plus the respiratory and heart rate, and send their results to a smartphone app. The app compiles an individual training programme and tracks your progress. Come on! Come on! Just two more press-ups!

EMG (electromyography) measures muscle activity

Dhananja Jayalath and Christopher Wiebe wireless sensors woven into clothing material since 2014 $397

Six sensors focus solely on the heart rate

Special detectors record breathing patterns

Material expels sweat and heat

Integrated level 50 UV protection for the skin

FORMULA PLAYROOM FOR CHILDREN AGED 99 AND UNDER. We already know computer games that have made it to the big

Boris Sofman, Mark Palatucci, Hanns Tappeiner since 2013 Due out this autumn about €150

screen. But now – finally – video games are also going to come to life. Anki DRIVE is a sort of Carrera Race Track for the 21st century. It’s a real track with real cars, but you can knock out your opponents or use weapons against them via the smartphone app. STFUATMM!

HOME GAMES. A good idea and a bit of money... we know what happens next, we see it at the Pioneers Festival all the time. But what happens if you’ve got a good idea and $50 million start-up capital? Thanks to Nest, now we know: it’s a redefining of what we call home.

When Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers brought their idea of a smart, learning thermostat to fruition, the in-term the Internet of Things was only known to a few insiders. Now everyone knows it; future living will be about the smart interplay of the

objects we use on a daily basis. Or, in Nest’s case, the objects we’ll no longer have to use. The thing on the wall will look after us, or at least give us as the perfect ambient temperature. No wonder Google bought the company for $3.2 billion. The question is, what happens next?

Tony Fadell, Matt Rogers since 2013 they have also made smoke and carbonmonoxide detectors $249 Google for lost keys THE RED BULLETIN

PHOTOGRAPHY: ANKIDRIVE, ATHOS, NEST

THE THING ON THE WALL

why wait to get to the top?

PSSSSSSSSST!

Johann Hammerschmid 120kph 2 to 3.5 hours 2014

GIVE IT SOME, ER, ELECTRICITY! You can’t help feeling that most of the electric motorbikes on the market are not quite sure of themselves. They all want to look like traditional motorbikes and hide their true identity. But not the Johammer J1.

It’s not only the boldest and least conventional electric motorcycle out there; it is probably also the quietest and most innovative.

Austrian Johann Hammerschmid spawned this lovechild of the Batcycle and a Junkers Ju 52. The stroke of genius and its centrepiece is the lithium-ion battery, which, at 70kg, accounts for almost half its total weight. The Johammer J1 weighs in at just 178kg, generates 15bhp and can reach 120kph. But it’s not the engine limiting the top speed; on-board electronics artificially keep it down to maintain a range of over 200km when the battery is fully charged.

E-CCELERATION SUPER CAR. “I want to create the most powerful super-sportscar with an electric engine, not just the most

Mate Rimac 1,088bhp over 300kph in 2.8 seconds That’s faster than the Tesla Model X

powerful sportscar with an electric engine,” says Mate Rimac, an inventor and speed-freak from Croatia. Rimac isn’t keeping his know-how to himself. The battery from his Concept One car now also features in the Swedish Koenigsegg Regera, the world’s most powerful production car.

NOT AN ALARM CLOCK. This white gnome was invented by Cynthia Breazeal and provides us with a pretty revealing perspective of the future of home robotics. The socially interactive robot Jibo was all the rage on Indiegogo last summer. The project pulled in an incredible $2.3 million, more than any other tech campaign. Jibo doesn’t just speak, listen, see, feel, light up and do everything every laptop already can; it can also learn and adapt to the needs of its owners… sorry, friends.

Cynthia Breazeal since 2012 spring 2016 approx $500 The robot that learns what you want.

THE RED BULLETIN

PHOTOGRAPHY: JIBO, JO HAMMER, RIMAC

MY PARENTS: HAL & K.I.T.T.

Y’S Y E S T E R DA R S

PIONEE

Do you have an idea?

NO

Then seek out inspiration! In this magazine, for example. Or perhaps you’ve got money?

YES

And does the world need your idea?

HMMM

Once more, let us think about it!

YES

How much money do you have?

OODLES!

Then become an investor.

Less work but just as much glory.

NONE

THE GEEK AND THE VOLCANO HISTORY. Technology doesn’t bring about disasters. Disasters bring about technology. And sticking with that theory, the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia on April 10, 1815 marks the start of the high-tech era. Dust, ash and sulphur darkened the skies over the northern hemisphere for several years thereafter, which had fatal consequences; in Europe, crops didn’t grow, fruit trees bore no fruit and people went hungry. Many thousands died. Transport also collapsed; no oats meant no horses, and that meant no getting about.

In their desperation, people began to understand that they needed machines that could work regardless of what nature threw at them.

Necessity inspired Karl Drais from Germany to create his best invention: the balance bicycle. It became a bestseller and the first “personal gadget” in history, and as such, the spiritual forerunner of the skateboard, iPhone and however many apps. Incidentally, once the smoke from the volcano had abated, Drais’s invention was banned in England and the US. The two countries weren’t always as startup-friendly as they are now.

THE RED BULLETIN

Are you religious?

NO

Then start a crowdfunding campaign

YES

How do you come across in front of a camera?

Wait for an angel

Relaxed, witty, charming, good-looking

Why do your staff want to work for you?

Tense, awkward, humourless, sweaty

Because I pay them well

Because they’re my friends

Party now, build later

Which of these guiding principles do you identify with?

Think, re-think, think again

Sell first, build second.

Can you say no at the right moment?

NO

We see what you did there

YES Then there’s only one question left: what are you going to do with your millions?

Try your luck at the EU Ministry of Innovation

15

START WITH THIS Creating something new is a very old art form. These pioneers – both past and present – show you the easiest way to do it “Everything will be OK!” Igor Pajed / 1987-2015

The founder of Media Apparat. Visionary and light art pioneer “ PS3 [or any other product] is probably too cheap. If you can have an amazing experience, we believe price is not a problem” Ken Kutaragi / 1950-

“ Nothing disappears. Even the invisible is visible” Mikhail Lomonosov / 1711-1765

Polymath (discovered the Law of Mass Conservation in chemical reactions), writer (reformed the Russian language) and inventor (of the night-vision tube, among other things)

“ Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes.

It is best to admit them quickly and get on with improving your other innovations”

Sony boss, PlayStation inventor and price philosopher

Steve Jobs / 1955-2011

Pioneer of the art of presentation, prophet of the religion of branding

“The progress of the world may […] demand a radical change in our chronometry; but the present method of computing time […] is so interwoven with human affairs” Sandford Fleming / 1827-1915

The man who invented time. Well… time zones anyway “ Take what I’ve done and […] do something more with it” Easton LaChappelle / 1995-

The founder of Unlimited Tomorrow. He made his first robotic hand out of Lego bricks aged 14.

And then shook hands with Barack Obama with his own. He gifted his inventio­n to humanity

“Pay it forward! I am a huge believer in that. You go out and you help people and it eventually comes back. It’s amazing the serendipity of it, because it never happens the way you predict” Gil Penchina / 1969-

One of the world’s most successful angel investors.

Has already organised more than $25 billion in capital

Catharina Paukner / 1984-

“The [space] experience exceeds all expectations. It sort of reduces all those things that may seem big and impossible…

We can do them. Peace on Earth? No problem” Anousheh Ansari / 1966-

Space pioneer and private astronaut

16

“ The component parts of all new machines may be said to be old. Therefore, a new arrangement transmits a new idea to the world”

Cambridge Nanosystems.

Modern alchemist who turns rubbish into miracle materials and water

Robert Fulton / 1765-1815

Inventor and steamboat pioneer. Built the world’s first functional submarine for Napoleon THE RED BULLETIN

PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGES (7), PRIVATE (3)

“ Landfill sites produce a lot of methane, which is a greenhouse gas. If we take that gas, we can make graphene, with water being the only waste product”

www.kiska.com

Photo: R.Schedl

EVOLUTION MASTER YOUR URBAN PLAYGROUND Rule your neighborhood with the stealth, light weight and instant electric power of the new KTM FREERIDE E-SM. KTM’s revolutionary 0% emissions motorcycle of the future is now available in an agile street-ready supermoto version – giving you the versatility to quickly, easily and effortlessly explore your urban domain. Qualifying for use with an A1 license, the KTM FREERIDE E-SM has a state-of-the-art 300 volt electric motor, unleashing an impressive 42 Nm of instantly usable torque and 16 kW (22 hp) of peak power. Lean, mean and environmentally-clean riding fun from KTM!

W W W. K T M . C O M / F R E E R I D E - E CLICK TO SEE THE DIGITAL FOLDER

KTM Group Partner

KTM wishes to make all motorcyclists aware that they need to wear the prescribed protective gear, only start the electric vehicle for the first time after receiving a high-voltage safety briefing from an authorised KTM dealer and always ride in a responsible manner in accordance with the relevant and applicable provisions of the road traffic regulations.

The illustrated vehicles may vary in selected details from the production models and some illustrations feature optional equipment available at additional cost.

PHOTOGRAPHY: SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/PICTUREDESK.COM

A look at the future.

Cable instead of nerves, computer instead of a brain, and all in an elastic skin. Hanson‘s Humanoids can interact, speak and laugh as humans do

THE NEW Will robots soon achieve global dominance? Or will they just perform care roles? David Hanson and his startup – Hanson Robotics – show just how human machines can be WORDS: MANON STEINER

C

Automata Hero of Alexandria describes automatic doors in his book, Automata

around 60 AD

20

Joey Chaos. The punk robot has the arrogance of a real rock star: “Do you feel drawn to me?”

ROBOT DADDY. There are several faces to David F Hanson. He’s made films for Walt Disney and has a doctorate in Engineering. In 2002, he brought his animations to life by creating his first robot.

In 2003 he established Hanson Robotics.

Hanson’s middle name is Franklin, in honour of one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and great inventor Benjamin Franklin. He would surely have found robots to his liking

Al-Jazari’s Elephant Clock, the world’s first humanoid automaton, strikes a cymbal on the hour 1206

Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report, have also served as models. Hanson has now developed close to 40 in all. A year and a half ago, the company moved its headquarters from Texas to Hong Kong, where David Hanson and CEO Jong Lee run the show. Things are often frantic, Lee explains. “It’s a startup, after all. We all have lots of crazy ideas – you never know what’s going to happen next.”

What they want to do is “…show how useful, co-operative and friendly service robots can be.”

Hanson Robotics is already the leader in creating anatomically correct faces. Hanson’s secret ingredient is called frubber, a portmanteau from the words fresh and rubber. It is an extremely elastic material which is so similar to human skin that it can imitate facial expressions and appear real because the technology behind it imitates human muscles and tendons. Added to that is a structure which consists of artificial intelligence, mechanical engineering and craftwork, plus some ingenious character and face recognition software. Hanson has an artistic background, so is concerned with how technology and aesthetics interact. “David is emulating Pixar, not General Motors. The thing he admires about Pixar is that it’s the creative types in control there, not the engineers,” Lee explains.

Psychology is also important. “A healthy relationship starts with a smile. It is the missing link in all the new forms of technology, without which there’s always this gap,” says Lee. And yet, or maybe for that reason, human robots remain a matter of great controversy. However Lee

Leonardo da Vinci designs a mechanical knight that can move

1495

The digesting duck

by Jacques de Vaucanson is the mother of all BABY Born dolls 1739 THE RED BULLETIN

PHOTOGRAPHY: SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/PICTUREDESK.COM

haos equals creation, so let chaos into your life,” punk-rocker Joey Chaos tells us. “If we give robots a human appearance, it makes you think about what the hell it means to be human,” Joey philosophises.

By the way, Joey is a robot himself, although admittedly one that looks pretty damned human.

He can answer questions, he looks you in the eye and he even gives you pearls of wisdom. He is the newest member of the Hanson Robotics family and probably the craziest. He has no fear of being a machine and comes across as self-confident, perhaps even too much so. “People are afraid of everything: pirates, rock and roll, robots. I mean, if I scare you, then it’s probably just because you secretly feel drawn to me.” Yes, he’s quite the rock star.

Jules, the androgynous robot from the University of Bristol, is completely different. “When will I have a consciousness? I already feel so much, but I know that they’re not human emotions. I find it incredibly unsettling that all my feelings, hopes and dreams could just be empty illusions.” These all too human fears have been created in both cases by David Hanson, a former designer at Walt Disney Imagineering. He dreams of creating robots which are more intelligent and at least as creative and compassionate as humans. And making them laugh.

On the outside, his robots look confusingly similar to us. And no wonder, as most are copies of real humans. Like Bina-48, a clone of Bina Rothblatt, a friend of David Hanson’s. Bina-48 is the real star of the Hanson family. She goes on tour, meets people, gives interviews.

But historical figures such as Albert Einstein and science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, whose books were the source material for the movies

PHOTOGRAPHY: ACTION PRESS/PICTUREDESK.COM

points out an important difference. “Artificial intelligence and robotics do overlap, but you can have artificial intelligence technology without the robots, like with cloud computing, for example.

Problems are only inevitable if we’re arrogant and think that we don’t always need to be on alert and can just work on autopilot.” Lee and Hanson are convinced that humanoid robots are better than regular machines. “For us, it’s about the relationship. Our robots treat you with respect.

We want to re-humanise technology.”

Hanson Robotics is currently concentrating its efforts in the social work area. There is currently a need, especially when it comes to care for the elderly, which can no longer be covered by humans alone. They would like to use robots round the clock as care-giving life companions. Lee explains, “A robot is infinitely patient and will laugh a million times at the same story from granny, but it will also notice the slightest change in her physical condition or behaviour. If that happens, it will automatically call a nurse or doctor. A carer will also keep an eye on the robot and, in an emergency situation, can take over the role from where they are and make the interaction person to person. Which sounds good, but expensive.

“What if you could hire one for US $3,000 a month? That’s 70 to 90 per cent cheaper than current care costs,” Lee points out. The robots are no longer made to look like real people so are now cheaper to produce, Lee explains. “They should have a multi-ethnic look which can be slightly moderated.”

They also want to use them with autistic children.

“Autistic children need anywhere from 25 to 40 hours of therapy a week with constant repetition for at least two years before they show any sign of improvement – 99.99 per cent of the world’s population can’t afford that,” he says, knowingly. Studies have already shown that autistic children often get along better with machines than they do with people. The New York Times, for example, reported on the relationship between an autistic boy, Gus, and Apple’s voice recognition software, Siri. But robots could also be used to perform maintenance roles in amusement parks or casinos or in customer service positions, such as the ever-smiling concierge on the front desk at the chain hotel who is trained to meet an individual’s needs immediately, using face and voice recognition.

Lee explains, “With our robots, it would be like withdrawing money at the bank. You can either go and stand in the queue and wait your turn or go to the cash dispenser and get your money in 60 seconds.”

Further into the future, Lee envisages a sort of chip that everyone will be able to buy. “You just slide

THE RED BULLETIN

“For us it’s about the relationship.

Our robots treat you with respect.

We want to re-humanise technology” JONG LEE

your card into the robot and instead of it being your hotel manager or personal trainer, it will become a carer or teacher. The user will buy a sort of training module.” A smaller and much cheaper mini-robot is due onto the market this year, “hopefully in time for Christmas”, adds Lee. The cheapest version will work with your smartphone and ought to work with personal assistants such as Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana as well as with motivational educational and fitness apps. Lee explains, “It creates a link between you and your technology.”

Joey Chaos is confident. “Progress in information technology hasn’t slowed down. It’s sped up. Think of the things we’ll develop together over the next 30 years. I’ll keep rocking, whatever happens.”

Asimov’s Laws of Robotics 1. Harm no one! 2. Obey! 3. Protect yourself as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law!

ˇ apek Robot Karel C coins the term robot to mean an artificial worker with no rights 1920

Albert Hubo. The first untethered, walking robot that has human facial features. It runs on AA batteries

1942

AIBO Sony creates the first AI pet. Woof!

1999

Sexy lady bots Tobit’s female robots, Lexy and Tess, can pole dance 2014

21

GUESS WHAT’S COMING FOR DINNER Meat from the lab. Eggs without chickens. And milk that’s not from an udder. Isha Datar knows the people inventing the food of the future. And so she should – she’s one of them WO R D S: M AG DA L E N A M I E D L I L L U S T R AT I O N S: M A R T I N U DOV I Č I Ć

A 22

of the future too: exclusively vegetable proteins. “I love meat, but I barely eat it – or any other animal products – any more. They aren’t entirely eliminated from my diet, though. I think even if these cultured products succeed, we should all consider reducing our intake.”

Artificial milk It is Datar’s job to know the right people and ISHA DATAR (27) Biotech pioneer, meat scientist and the Executive Director of New Harvest. She wants to produce meat, milk and eggs more efficiently than Mother Nature herself is able to

introduce them to each other: people with a vision who want to use technology to make industrial farming obsolete. In April 2014 she heard that a new biotechnology accelerator in Ireland was seeking applicants for that summer, and winners would have access to laboratory space, mentorship and $30,000 in initial funding. In the months prior to that, two New Harvest volunteers had told Datar separately of their plans for artificial milk. Datar got in touch with both of them: Ryan Pandya in the US and Perumal Gandhi in India. Both of them loved the idea and the three of them got down to work. Four days later, they sent off their joint application.

THE RED BULLETIN

PHOTOGRAPHY: PRIVATE

cow is an uneconomical animal. It eats, drinks and shits. It has horns, a hide, four stomachs and a tail – all of which are of no use to us humans. All we want to do is milk it. But a cow will only produce milk after having a calf, and bull calves are useless and have to be slaughtered. An unpleasant side effect.

Couldn’t it all somehow be more efficient?

We asked Isha Datar. For two years now, the 27-year-old has been the head of the small, wellconnected New York non-profit organisation New Harvest, which brings together biotech scientists, young entrepreneurs and investors. If you ring Datar with a couple of urgent questions about the future of the food industry, you might just catch her on a sunny spring morning at her home office in Brooklyn. She and her New Harvest colleague still work from home, but will soon rent an office in a co-working space. “We care about what we do, rather than whether we grow.”

When we speak via Skype, Datar prefers to leave the camera off as she happens to be eating an Ethiopian dish of rice and beans. And this is part

Animal feed: antibiotics We can’t get away with this for much longer; in 2050

the world’s population will number nine billion. If we carry on eating the way we have been, we’ll need twice as much livestock as we currently have to sate our appetites. But large farms and their constant surpluses are on the way out; they are dependent on mineral fertilisers, which will only be available for another few decades and whose production requires huge energy expenditure. Organic farming may be more efficient in the long term, but it currently accounts for just 2 per cent of global production.

The low meat price is already only possible because feed is subsidised. American cows, pigs and chickens are given over 80 per cent of the antibiotics prescribed in the country. The staff in large European and American abattoirs work in inhumane conditions. And our appetite for meat also threatens other areas; the over-fertilisation of feed crops poisons natural drinking water resources. It destroys fishing grounds and in many areas makes fishing near the coast unviable. And it is fatal for 24

“It’s shocking! 15,000 litres of water and 15kg of feed for a single kilo of meat” I S H A DATA R

tourism if beaches contaminated with algae from fertilisers keep the visitors away. The soil suffers massively from intensive farming, particularly in South America, but also increasingly in African soy-growing regions. If the damage that agriculture causes to water, air and the land was factored in, meat would long since have become prohibitively expensive and the system would fall apart. It is high time to come up with alternatives. But Datar thinks it is unrealistic for everyone to go vegan tomorrow in view of the risks. We all like our burgers and milkshakes too much. And it would take someone of at least a Bond super-villain’s calibre to get the population explosion down to a manageable level.

MILK WITHOUT COWS – THE CHEAPEST METHOD Depending on its composition, Muufri could replace more than just cow’s, buffalo’s or goat’s milk – it also has the potential to replace a mother’s breast milk. Producing dairy products such as yoghurt and cheese is a long-term goal.

Muufri aren’t working on imitation food.

This is real

Insect cookies Hanni Rützler, an Austrian nutrition and trend

researcher, has the required vision. In her 2015 food report, she outlines four alternative scenarios to industrial meat production: soy instead of meat, ie plant-based replacements such as tofu, wheat gluten or the like for those who no longer want animal products. Organic meat instead of factory farming for those who can afford pork tenderloin from a pig that has been stroked. Insect protein instead of meat, which only meets serious resistance in Europe and North America. And test-tube meat from the laboratory. Science fiction incarnate.

When one of Isha Datar’s university professors in Toronto mentioned the concept of lab-made meat, she was fascinated. She wrote a paper on the subject and got in touch with Jason Matheny, the founder of New Harvest. She was soon swapping ideas with biotechnologists from all over the world and speaking about the subject in public. Then, in 2013, aged just 25, she became the executive director of New Harvest.

This company is where the people who have identified certain problems that we face come together. Such as young Californian entrepreneur Josh Tetrick, who is developing a plant-based substitute for hens’ eggs, and professor Mark Post from Maastricht University, the first man to publicly eat a hamburger made of lab-grown meat. Also, Gabor Forgacs of Modern Meadow, who has developed a second type of in vitro meat. Even the New York startup Exo is in New Harvest’s circle of acquaintances. Exo makes protein bars and cookies from cricket flour; the products are aimed at office-workers and athletes. This is because THE RED BULLETIN

PHOTOGRAPHY: MUUFRI

The startup programme accepted them and they spent that summer in the lab in Ireland, developing a method for producing milk using modified yeast from raw vegetable materials. They called their startup Muufri. Six months later, Horizon Ventures, Asia’s largest capital investor, came knocking and gave them $2 million.

“The idea [of Muufri] is simple: figure out what cow udder cells are doing to make milk, and replicate it – without the rest of the cow,” Datar explains. If the concept works, it will be more efficient, cleaner and cheaper than any other known form of milk production to date. Such ideas are in no way just entertaining gimmicks, they are desperately necessary for the future of our diet. This is because agriculture is a dirty business; a third of the world’s ice-free land is currently used to raise cattle. It is where 18 per cent of greenhouse gases originate, which is more than from all the transportation in the world combined. And germs, which are now resistant to all antibiotics, develop in crowded factory farm barns.

Datar knows what the inside of a standard cowshed looks like. She grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, right in the heart of Canada’s main cattle-raising area. Her father is a doctor and her mother a landscape architect. The family has close friends who are milk farmers. “Meat used to be part of every meal,” says Datar. After school, she began studying Cell and Molecular Biology in Alberta and then Biotechnology in Toronto. Out of interest, she decided to take a course in Meat Science. The facts are unequivocal – a kilo of beef requires 15,000 litres of water and 15kg of feed. In industrial livestock production, the cattle are fed with corn and soy, which could feed a significantly greater number of people if they didn’t have to pass through a cow’s four stomachs. But looking to the future, things will be different. “I was shocked to see how resource-intensive and how inefficient livestock production was.”

1 10 0

00

001

100

Meat from the 3D printer Between spoonfuls of bean stew, Isha highlights the

differences between the various approaches to creating meat in the lab. The first belongs to professor Mark Post, who, in 2013, to much media acclaim, presented the world’s first in vitro burger: beef fibres cultured solely in the lab which grow in a ring shape around a gelatinous, plant-based nutrient. Post’s Cultured Beef project attracted global interest; Hanni Rützler attended the hamburger tasting. The in vitro meat is based on muscle and stem cells taken from a living cow, and, in theory, can divide endlessly in a nutrient solution. Lab-produced meat is currently similar to mincemeat. It could be used in hamburgers or sausages. Something like a marbled steak is still a long way off, but Post is continuing his research.

“We are working with Mark – we just provided him with $50K in funding a few weeks ago,” says Datar.

The startup, Modern Meadows, founded by Gabor Forgacs and his son Andras, pursues another approach. They started out developing real leather from raw vegetable materials. Then they moved on to lab-produced meat which grows in layers of fat and muscle cells. The cells are arranged in a procedure similar to 3D printing. Modern Meadows is being supported by the Google think-tank project

Solve for X. The idea for meat from a retort is not new. In a 1932 essay, Winston Churchill laid out his vision of how the world might look 50 years’ hence.

“We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” This is the favourite quote of everyone in the industry, even if Churchill was too optimistic, time-wise.

An end to slaughtering animals So is it really true that in 20 years’ time, meat will

IN VITRO BURGER The lab-produced meat is based on muscle and stem cells taken from a living cow, and, in theory, can divide endlessly in a nutrient solution. The current cost: €250,000

3D FOOD PRINTERS … should one day churn out our favourite foods at the push of a button, putting together proteins, carbohydrates and minerals as if they were pieces of Lego.

Early attempts taste like Lego, too

“We shall grow chicken parts – wings and breasts – separately”

WINSTON CHURCHILL, 1931

26

grow in refrigerated polystyrene trays? An in vitro burger still costs €250,000 for now, which is normal for a prototype. According to Andras Forgacs, those first, expensive years after market maturity will belong to the production of luxury goods, such as, in leather’s case, special orders from haute couture houses or made-to-order, lab-produced treats for haute cuisine, such as meat from rare animals. After that, the price should come down radically and adapt to the mass market. And when it comes to sustainability, the meat-lab workers already have all the trump cards: producing beef in a retort requires 99per cent less water, 96 per cent less land, 96 per cent fewer greenhouse gases and at least 45 per cent less energy, according to Forgacs’s calculations. The meat can be produced close to where it is to be eaten: in cities, where the majority of people are living.

And no more animals will have to be slaughtered.

Self-aware meat-eaters are increasingly setting themselves the challenge of going and sharpening their knives and killing the animal themselves.

It’s an honourable gesture, but it misses the problem because it’s not just the animals we eat that die. Animals that we don’t need die even more senselessly, such as bull calves, which have no use in milk production, and male chicks, which can’t be sold as roosters. A total of 10 million freshly hatched chicks are killed each year in Germany alone; globally the figure is more than 200 million.

Idealists are addressing the question of how chicken-farming can be made more humane by using dual-purpose breeds, by which they mean breeds of hen which aren’t optimised either for laying eggs or providing meat, but are good for both. The norm is still factory buildings full of laying hens that are packed five to a cage the size of a sheet of paper for the two years of their lives. But these factories have no future, and not just because of animal rights; they are uneconomical in the long term.

Major corporations are nervous Isha Datar has someone in her portfolio who knows

even more ABOUT the matter. If Josh Tetrick was an animal rights campaigner, he might break into egg factories like those and set free a couple of hens.

0But that’s not his concern. Silicon Valley is Tetrick’s spiritual home, and there they think in solutions, not problems. Tetrick’s approach is simple; what if we THE RED BULLETIN

PHOTOGRAPHY: POOL NEW/REUTERS

insects are fantastically good at recycling food and produce only a fraction of the greenhouse gases for the same amount of protein. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations predicts that in 20 years’ time, at least 10 per cent of global protein supply will come from insects.

There is potentially a lot of money to be made in this area; synthetic biology is currently a hot topic with investors. Some very large players want to get involved – the super-wealthy entrepreneur Li Ka-shing, the Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and cloud computing pioneer Marc Benioff. All are names that make eyes light up in Silicon Valley.

Datar spends a lot of time on the road these days; she’s just been to San Francisco, in March she was at the SXSW Conference in Austin and soon she’ll be at the Expo 2015 in Milan. But she mainly communicates online. For a long time she only knew her two Muufri partners via the internet; they drew up their joint application using online tools.

How else! “This is the best way to keep overhead costs low,” she explains, as we chat over Skype.

R

-do

D

g -do

g

“We could replace more than just cow’s milk. We could replace a mother’s breast milk too”

R YA N P A N D YA , M U U F R I

didn’t need hens’ eggs any more? Not because we’re willing to do without them, but because we can produce better eggs than hens can. The energy input to output ratio for hens’ eggs is 39:1; only beef is worse. Tetrick wants to improve things; his company, Hampton Creek, is developing plantbased products that are traditionally made with eggs. You can now buy Just Mayo, an egg-free mayonnaise, in US and Hong Kong supermarkets.

And even Oprah Winfrey was thrilled with Just Cookies, praising them as a “smarter cookie”. There is also vegetable cookie dough, which you can bake yourself or eat raw. It has all sold out since John Legend raved about it on Twitter. There will soon be a ranch dressing containing neither egg nor milk, but which will be “10 times more delicious than leading brands,” Hampton Creek promises. By the end of this year, Just Scramble – the first purely vegetable scrambled egg product in the world – should also be on sale. These are simple, familiar American products and mainstream comfort foods made from various types of split pea. “A mom living out of a white envelope, shopping at the Dollar Tree doesn’t care if the mayo she is buying is vegan or not – she cares that she’s buying a product that has slightly better ingredients, better cost, and tastes great,” according to Hampton Creek. It has all been so well received that even the food giant Unilever was unsettled; in a David versus Goliath case, Unilever sued Tetrick’s company for misleading customers by calling their product “mayo” when it contained no egg. Unilever eventually abandoned the lawsuit after months of bad press. And for Hampton Creek, it turned out to be the best publicity campaign they could possibly have imagined.

THE FUTURE OF FOOD Trends researcher Hanni Rützler outlines four alternatives to meat factories and animal prison camps in her 2015 food report

1. ORGANIC EVERYTHING This will only work if people are willing to eat less meat and are ready to pay more for it

2. SOYA INSTEAD OF MEAT This would help reduce factory farming, but lead to monocultures, the greenhouse effect and destruction of the rainforest

3. INSECTS INSTEAD OF MEAT This really could work.

And everyone – bar Americans and Europeans – likes them

Eggs without chickens Whereas industrial food producers defend

themselves with good, old-fashioned shark tactics, food pioneers are on friendly terms with each other.

Everyone knows each other and values each other.

When Tetrick was asked by his investor, Horizon Ventures, which other startups were worth supporting, he generously named his colleagues from Modern Meadows.

Datar also has great faith in the Hampton Creek idea. “It’s going great for Josh. Now we’re more fans than supporters,” she says. In egg matters, she’s already taken a mental step further; 28

4. LAB-PRODUCED MEAT Clone, copy, 3D print.

It should all work, in theory. But what will it taste like? The only thing we can be sure of is that it’s still much too expensive

she and two New Harvest volunteers – Arturo Elizondo and David Anchel – set up Clara Foods in early March. The very young startup is working on actually producing hens’ eggs from vegetable proteins. Their first goal is to create albumen which can be beaten and which thickens when heated. In other words, all the qualities that make egg whites so indispensable for us in the kitchen. The young company’s website is still very sparse but the Clara Foods trio hope to have developed lab-produced edible albumen by the end of summer.

Clara Foods is still in its very early days. Muufri has only existed for a year more and has already expanded; the old laboratory had become too small and there are now five members of staff.

Ryan Pandya wants to have a marketable product by the end of 2016. Depending on its composition, Muufri could replace more than just cow’s, buffalo’s or goat’s milk. It could replace a mother’s breast milk too. Producing dairy products such as yoghurt and cheese is a long-term goal. “Yes, we’re hiring” it says on the Muufri website, and so is almost every other biotech startup. This isn’t where the big money is to be made yet, but it can only be another few years away.

More futuristic than science fiction If anyone can recommend strategies to help deal with pending food crises, then it’s future trends researcher Hanni Rützler. She explains, “There will be lots of varying concepts alongside each other which will also reflect the particularities and needs of different food cultures.” The inventors of milk and in vitro meat are important in that process. “Small startups are currently more flexible and ready for the future.

They can take the first step quickly by fundraising.

And if they’re successful because they pick up precisely on their customers’ needs, desires and wishes, then people will also happily snap them up.”

That is to say, precisely the people who come together at New Harvest, the organisation with a sect-like name and a mission to change the future.

They don’t foresee any dystopian scenarios of cows dying and babies going hungry; they see a better reality, like those days when science fiction was still optimistic and healthy. When Star Trek was the futuristic ideal of the United Nations and the replicator on the USS Enterprise could synthesise any meal in the galaxy on demand.

Muufri, Modern Meadows and Hampton Creek aren’t working on imitation food. This is real. It may still be considered unusual now, but it has a brighter future than the practices of the meat industry. Old-fashioned cows with their horns, ears, hides and udders might only be good as museum-piece animals for petting zoos. And if someone does treat themselves to a luxury real steak, then the cow might actually have stood in a meadow before it died, an existence that for most cows is now just a utopian memory.

It will take many small steps to get there.

“We can all make environmentally considerate

THE RED BULLETIN

Daniel Ricciardo for Pepe Jeans London

I don’t know what I’m looking for. But I’ll know when you find it.

Web

Images

Maps

Videos

News

more

Preferences

Vishal Sharma was the vice-president of Google for seven years, the head developer behind Android and Google Now, and responsible for strategic search technologies and advertising revenue and review systems. He has been working on his own, secret startup since 2014

Vishal Sharma built one of the most advanced virtua­­l assistants of our time: Google Now. But the revolution is yet to come, says Sharma. Self-learning machines will change the game completely INTERVIEW: GEORG ECKELSBERGER

“THE ROBOTS WILL KNOW WHO THEY ARE” 30

THE RED BULLETIN

THE RED BULLETIN: You’re a busy man Vishal Sharma, and you are building virtual assistants. How do I know whether I’m talking to a real person right now?

Vishal Sharma: That’s the holy grail, isn’t it? The famous Turing Test: can a machine be so intelligent that we can’t distinguish it from a human being?

So, can it?

Could there be a secret technology in existence right now, which is somehow constructing my face and voice? It’s conceivable, I guess. But it’s very unlikely, given the state of the art. There is definitely some way to go. We will know that we’ve crossed over another boundary when we actually pass the Turing Test.

But how could I identify a virtual assistant?

As a virtual assistant, you only have two choices when you don’t understand something: do you want to sound comedic or stupid? You can either make a joke out of it and engage in some sort of distracting conversation, or you come forward and say: I’m sorry, I did not understand what you just said.

So the problem is speech recognition?

Human language is an enormously flexible and expressive thing. Our intelligence and our consciousness express themselves in our language, so there is enormous variation, there are millions of expressions and millions of emotions.

Virtual assistants try to break down the input and match it with what works best, but you can identify them pretty quickly, just by varying the question. It doesn’t take a lot, but I believe that interacting with speech and gestures will play a significant part in interacting with machines in the future. Some people say speech recognition is a technology that’s always five years away. I’m not that pessimistic. Over time, systems will comprehend more and more.

PHOTOGRAPHY: WEINBERG-CLARK PHOTOGRAPHY

But how can machines learn?

There are two different models in machine learning. Let’s say you want to teach a robot how to move. On the one hand, you can create some elements of movement in the robot and embed algorithms that tell it how to use them. On the other hand, there are self-learning robots: the robot is given abilities, but it doesn’t know what those abilities are. So for example you give him a limb, which has three degrees of movement, and you give it the task to move a ball closer to a goal. The robot doesn’t know how to solve this, so it has to figure it out. Over time, the robot is building a model of his limb and what he can do. The algorithms are emerging from that. A lot of what we consider to be awareness and consciousness comes from that form of physicality. In some ways, the robot is becoming conscious of what it is.

So feedback is the key to intelligent machines?

Yes, but in speech the feedback loop is broken. You say something and the virtual assistant has very little choice.

It comes back and says: “I think you mean this. Do you mean this?” But the systems need constant feedback by humans and the pace of evolution will be determined by how effective that feedback mechanism is. I feel that at some point in time, a group of people will round the corner on providing that feedback and then we will see a sudden unexpected lurch forward. At that stage, we will see many more systems emerge. They will feel far more intelligent – and become more so every day. We are approaching that threshold.

THE RED BULLETIN

There is also concern regarding this future breakthrough.

Have you ever felt scared of artificial intelligence?

AI will be a very powerful technology in the future, so it does make sense to have some sort of vision. This technology will determine big areas of our life. How we do conferencing, how we open doors, how we obtain information relating to our own body, will all be governed by some elements of AI. So there should be a debate at the time you introduce automated evolution in systems that determine so much about your life. We should make sure that malignant things do not happen. It’s a legitimate area of concern and now would be a good point in history to be discussing this.

Another concern is privacy. Where do you draw the red line?

I like systems that know a lot about me: I click on this and that and in the end I get a recommendation for a book on Amazon, that’s valid. But that information being traceable back to me in a way that is going to stay static in perpetuity is not a good thing. I want to be able to make the system forget me. It’s very important to have that under my control.

Privacy is a concern for me, it’s a concern for everybody, I think. Still, I believe that big data has a democratising effect – if the systems become widely available. If everybody in the world is able to spy on everybody else at the same time at an equivalent level, that helps work against centralisation of power. Most technologies that allow individual participation have been extremely corrosive to authoritarianism.

What was the last technology that really amazed you?

It happens constantly. When I’m late for a meeting and my phone tells me about the traffic, it somehow predicts my future and that’s astounding. Sometimes I say something to Siri and I fully expect it to not understand me – but it does. That is kind of astounding to me. Sometimes its amazing and spooky at the same time. Often it’s the simple things that I find amazing, for example, to turn down my thermostat from far away. If you only think about the energy value of that. How much energy is wasted worldwide because the lights are left on? Technology is magical.

What role can small startups play in innovation of virtual assistants, compared to the big players?

The space is so new and there is a lot of creativity and creative destruction. You come up with an idea, let’s call it an avenue of research, and you start building it. But because there is so much building to be done, even as a big company you can’t have people running around doing everything they want – you have focus on a specific avenue. But because there are so many avenues opening up all the time, it is impossible for a big company to dominate this completely.

So there is a big role for startups to play. Pick one topic: deep learning. There are so many different sectors and each has its own characteristics. No large company can dominate it all. The space is so rich for startups, it’s second to none.

The Turing Test. British computer scientist Alan Turing invented the test which bears his name back in 1950. It was designed to assess a machine’s ability to think. During the test, a person converses exclusively by text shown on a screen with two unknown interlocutors – one human and one computer.

Both try to convince him that they are the human interlocutor and not a machine. If the person performing the test is unable to identify the machine at the end of their conversation, the Turing Test has succeeded. To date, though, no machine has passed. As an opener for the test we recommend to begin with a very simple question: “How do you feel today?”

31

THE

OF THE

The economic situation is dismal. But necessity is the mother of invention. Hence the abundance of startups from a region that once produced geniuses like Nikola Tesla and which today wants to be associate­­d with creativity, not war W O R D S : T E R E S A R E I T E R

ou’ve got to be crazy to go into business with your own startup here,” says Darko Ðurić, a young computer programmer from Niš in Serbia, who is just about to start his first company. He enumerates the most common obstacles on his fingers. “Firstly, the bureaucracy is totally unreasonable. You spend hours filling in funding applications which might then end up in the trash,” the 26-year-old explains. “Secondly, there are almost no angel investors. Thirdly, the economic situation isn’t exactly a springboard for startups and fourthly, there’s a lack of infrastructure.”

“Loans come with the kind of interest rates that you wouldn’t wish on your worst competitor,” says Daniel Rössler from the Austrian Development Agency (ADA), which establishes business partnerships between Austrian and south-eastern European firms with the aim of supporting startups.

And then there’s the image problem.

32

The Balkans or Kosovo? “Potential partners furrow their brows at first,” says Rössler. Jurica Magoći from the Macedonian-Croatian company Fueloyal agrees it is the key issue. “Startups from south-eastern Europe have to be a whole lot better than US or western European firms if they want to achieve success internationally.” But that works, “if you’re madly determined”, Magoći says.

For against all the odds, there has been a very lively startup scene in the Balkans in recent years.

Bulgaria is the clear forerunner. But as a member of the EU, it starts from a more favourable position than its neighbours to the west.

And there are many advantages to the Balkans, says Rössler: a population which is younger than average, and is creative and willing to take risks.

Paradoxically, Rössler quotes another advantage: all the problems. “For us as a development agency, that’s very exciting, because we can solve social problems in a completely new and innovative way with young entrepreneurs. And, sadly, there are still plenty of social problems in the Balkans,” says Rössler.

Like we said, necessity is the mother of invention.

THE RED BULLETIN

STRAWBERRY TREE SERBIA Strawberries aren’t the only thing that don’t grow on trees.

Electricity doesn’t either. Which is just fine as far as the Serbian solar energy company Strawberry Tree is concerned. While still at school, electrical engineer Miloš Milisavljević was already dreaming of making green energy as accessible to as many people as possible. He set up his firm with classmates while still at university. His tree-like arrangements of solar panels are to be found in parks and public places, so you can sit on a bench, plug in your smartphone and use free Wi-Fi. The trees use built-in batteries and smart technology that was patented by the founder specifically for the purpose, all of which makes sure that the energy is harvested and used as efficiently as possible. These trees can go 20 days without sunshine: the period they can store and provide energy for. These smartphone charging points are also designed to contribute towards the development of smart cities. Strawberry Tree wants to create public places that are used sustainably, and to make use of unused street furnishings.

When Milisavljević founded his company in 2011, the European Commission recognised his invention as the first urban solar device of its kind in the world. If you go to Tašmajdan Park in Belgrade today, you’ll see law students, nannies, mothers and tourists clustered around the charging point, chatting merrily with each other. There are now 13 Strawberry Trees in three European countries being used by 400,000 people. And naturally the company hopes to continue to grow. “We hope that our Strawberry Trees will give everyone in society a chance to realise how important renewable energies are.

Environmental awareness is increasing and we are already seeing improvements in people’s everyday behaviour,” says Milisavljević.

Sun dial It might look like a late-communist monument to waiters, but it is in fact an urban solar device which provides free Wi-Fi and free electricity for you to charge your smartphone

PHOTOGRAPHY: FUELOYAL, STRAWBERRY TREE

FUELOYAL MACEDONIA/CROATIA

The smart truck It knows how much fuel it has received and lets headquarters know.

It saves companies up to $2,000 per truck per month. And all thanks to a simple counter in the fuel cap, developed by Jurica Magoc´ a nd Igor Hristov (right)

THE RED BULLETIN

During times like these, we all need to pay attention to how much fuel we’re using. Which is why the joint Macedonian-Croatian firm Fueloyal has come up with a smart fuel cap that contains a sort of counter. It helps measure the amount of fuel which has actually made it into the tank, to prevent theft by staff or external crooks.

Trucks in the US and Canada can leave their depots for up to 50 days at a stretch. When the drivers fill up with petrol, they pay with the company credit card. Until now, truck owners had never had a way of checking whether anything had been siphoned off in the process. But there is speculation that theft costs companies anywhere from 15 to 20 per cent, which amounts to a loss of about US $2,000 per truck per month. Just under a year ago, a Croatian, Jurica Magoći, the developer of a management system for just such fleets of trucks and a Macedonian, Igor Hristov, came up with a solution that far outshone any competitors’ products. Whereas those products had always required adjustments being made to the truck’s fuel tank, Fueloyal’s product could simply be incorporated into the existing fuel tank. The counter measures and records the amount of fuel in the tank and automatically transmits the information to company headquarters. Furthermore, a special valve stops fuel being siphoned off. In this way, truck owners can be sure that the petrol actually makes it into the tank and stays there. Magoći and Hristov, who now have their headquarters in the US state of Illinois, want to introduce their product to the market this summer. The team are to produce more than 10 million units for Canada, the US market and the EU and they already have $350,000 worth of pre-orders. The two co-founders also recently signed a distributor agreement which should make the cash tills ring to the tune of another $3 million.

33

NORDEUS SERBIA

The special game “Almost five million users play Top Eleven every day on their Androi­­d and Apple devices,” says Nicola Cavic (above). It is advertised by Chelsea manager and Champions League winner José Mourinho (top)

Those people from the Balkans? They’re good at football at best. But it’s not as simple as that. In 2009, three football-mad Serbs got together and laid the foundations for one of the most successful football manager games in the world: Top Eleven by Nordeus. It’s about profitable transfers, the right line-up, the best training methods, the ideal tactics, the biggest possible stadium – and, of course, good league games, Champions League games or just games you play with your friends. “Our idea was, at long last, to give social network users a challenging and complicated video game. That was still a rarity in 2009,” explains Nikola Čavić of Nordeus. The company now has more than 150 employees and offices in five cities: London, San Francisco, Dublin, Skopje and their original home, Belgrade. Approximately 100 million registered gamers around the world try their luck as Top Eleven football managers. “We’re proud that we can say we financed it all ourselves,” says Čavić. They are also “extremely happy” at the way the video game scene is developing so actively in Serbia. Things may have begun rather modestly, but now there are more than 30 large game-developer studios in the country. Nordeus doesn’t see them as competition and not just because they are a giant compared to the others. “In a region like ours where development is only just beginning, every new company helps to move the industry forward. So we see them not as competitors, but partners – as other teams working towards a common goal,” Čavić reveals.

Elections in south-eastern Europe have been the butt of bad joke­s from time immemorial. And yet one of the smaller former Yugoslav republics has produced an electronic voting system which is now used worldwide. The software package Demokra is one of the few products which make it possible to organise the complete cycle of a political election, from voter registration to the count. To date, the system has chiefly been used in young democracie­s, and international experts have declared it to be particularl­y quick, reliable and transparent. A total of 116 million voters in the EU, south-eastern Europe, the US and Africa have already cast their votes using Macedonia’s own Demokra. iVote also comes with the Epistum e-Learning Management System, which is chiefly used by large organisations with staff spread out over a wide area for mass training programmes.

The company was founded by Ljupcho Antovski and Goce Armenski, two professors of computer science at the University of Skopje. “There are lots of companies offering similar software systems, but we’re way ahead of them. We’re very fast and flexible and extremely competitive, especially when it comes to cost. There are a lot of companies who simply claim to offer everything, but we are one of the few that have a functioning platform which is easy to customis­e and can therefore be used anywhere in the world at short notice,” Armenski explains. The company is currently generatin­g a profit which is half a million above the regional industr­y average. The total value of iVote is estimated at approximatel­y € 2 million.

34

Voting for democracy More than 100 million people in Africa, Europe and the US have already voted using Demokra, the democracy software created by Ljupcho Antovski (left) and Goce Armenski (right), two computer science professors from Skopje

THE RED BULLETIN

PHOTOGRAPHY: IVOTE, NORDEUS

IVOTE MACEDONIA

PHOTOGRAPHY: KUSHTRIM XHAKLI

“CORRUPTION? NOT A PROBLEM. BECAUSE THERE ISN’T THE MONEY FOR IT”

Kushtrim Xhakli is, at 32, one of Kosovo’s most successful tech entrepreneurs. His story begins like so many heroic tales from Silicon Valley – with him leaving education early. When the University of Prishtina failed to introduce reforms like other European establishments of higher education, Xhakli opted out in disappointment and went to Hyper Island in Sweden to study instead. In the early dotcom years, he created websites as a freelancer and quickly became successful; the Kosovan government took over Trajnimi, an online education platform that he had developed, and made it an official national platform for digital learning. Xhakli took advantage of the publicity to establish his first company, Fast Europe Ventures, which offered mobile payment and bank consultancy services. He then acted as the cofounder of changers.com, based in Berlin, a company which produces solar-powered devices. Then he ended up where he is now at the Digital Banking Index. Using the Net Promoter Score system, it compares various financial institutions’ mobile and digital banking terms of service.

“As a strife-torn country, Kosovo deserves a chance to get involved in the European startup scene on an equal footing,” Xhakli opines. For that same reason, he wants to offer the next generation of entrepreneurs the support that he could never rely on.

THE RED BULLETIN

Give them a chance Kushtrim Xhakli supports young Kosovan tech entrepreneurs. He now lives in Berlin and Vilnius, but with the IPKO Foundation (IF) he organises events in Prishtina, which bring together young startups and experts, financiers and businesses from the EU

THE RED BULLETIN: Does Kosovo have advantages as a location?

Kushtrim Xhakli: Kosovo has a very advantageous geographical position. It shares common values with all the large countries close by and if a product works in Kosovo, you can replicate it in bigger markets like Italy or Turkey. Another advantage is that the country is small; from day one, you have to think and act internationally. Take Estonia. It’s the same size as Kosovo, but very influential.

What are the main complications that startups in south-eastern Europe have to fight against?

We lack experience and finance in this part of Europe. But the main obstacles are the ways we think and work because we don’t meet international standards – and the fear of failure. You could be forgiven for thinking there’s a lack of infrastructure, but that’s no longer the case. There’s broadband internet everywhere now; Romania and Bulgaria actually have the cheapest and fastest broadband in the world. There’s also movement in the public sector. Montenegro, Macedonia and Romania all have ministries which deal exclusively with information technology and telecommunications.

One of the world’s most advanced SAP Labs is in Sofia, Bulgaria. And if you look at the level of education, south-eastern Europe is producing 6,000 IT graduates a year and many of them are multilingual, speaking German and English too.

Are things more difficult for Kosovo because it isn’t recognised as a sovereign state?

Kosovo has the greatest number of problems. It is the only country in the Balkans whose citizens aren’t allowed to travel around the Schengen Area without a visa. Entrepreneurs can’t just jump on a plane and take part in a conference in Berlin.

Kosovo isn’t fully recognised on the internet either – a lot of internet sites don’t give Kosovo as an option in their drop-down menus. I set up the e-government platform Digital Kosovo in order to change that. Everyone can go on and lobby for the digital inclusion of Kosovo.

How are things looking with financing and assistance?

Companies spend hours filling out application forms to get money. But most initiatives have no evaluation of how effective a company has been in achieving its goals. So whether or not you get financing depends as much on how good you are at filling out forms as it does on the quality of your product. From the donor’s point of view, it’s often not about sustainable entrepreneurship or how many jobs are going to be created.

Is corruption also a problem?

To date there have been no headlines regarding corruption when it comes to funding applications.

But as I said earlier, when it comes to startups, the administrative structures are very underdeveloped.

You could also say there is no public funding, therefore there isn’t any corruption either.

35

SOLABORATE KOSOVO Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing and all the others weren’t good enough for the Kosovo brother and sister team Labinot and Mimoza Bytyqi. He was an electrical engineering and IT graduate and she a former JP Morgan financial consultant – together they wanted to plug the gap between social and professional networks, so they created a sort of hybrid called Solaborate. Their goal was to create a central portal to make various tools and services available to tech entrepreneurs, while also making it possible for them to network and work on joint projects in real time – and thus build an ecosystem around their products and services. While Solaborate has some basic functions in common with traditional platforms, namely chat, status updates, document sharing and job searches, its developers have placed great emphasis on a userfriendly infrastructure to enable the sharing and editing of software demo versions. The company was launched in Prishtina in 2012, but now has fully relocated to Los Angeles. The first complete version for Windows has been available since 2014.

The 35 members of Solaborate staff are working on mobile apps for iOS and Android as well as other functions. And the Bytyqi siblings are making mysterious allusions to an initial hardware product which will “shake up” the traditional online realtime collaboration landscape.

Facebook for companies Labinot Bytyqi and his sister Mimoza have developed a platform that combines the requirements of company intranets with the joys of social networking. Now they’re working on the hardware to go with it

Sizem loves breasts… and the truth. Ana Kolarević from Croatia has created an app that tells women their ‘true cup size’. The problem is that different manufacturers use different sizes which then vary from continent to continent. which is confusing and leads to people buying the wrong size. So to avoid that happening, Sizem tells every woman the size she needs for every type of bra. This is done on the one hand via a special measuring system and on the other through close cooperation with the manufacturers.

Ana Kolarević is proud that her brasize calculator is the only one of its kind, “which takes into account the most obvious things, like breathing”. The tool then gives its result: the maximum and minimum size you can wear of that specific bra type.

The perfect size Studies indicate that 90 per cent of women wear the wrong bra. Ana Kolarevic´ wants to change that

36

THE RED BULLETIN

PHOTOGRAPHY: DAVOR VISNJIC/PIXSELL, SOLABORATE

SIZEM CROATIA

DISASTER APP MACEDONIA When Vasko Popovski, the Disaster and Climate Risks project manager at the UN, was confronted with the catastrophic effects of the 2013 floods in Macedonia, the first thing that gave him a headache was the lack of opportunity to communicate with the local population in real time. So the man who describes himself as an “information freak”, designed a smartphone app which makes it easy to quickly spread news about floods, earthquakes and severe storms. Using detailed maps, users can retrieve precise information on the intensity of the disaster in a given location and at the same time get tips on escape routes, the emergency services and the level of danger.

Thanks to an additional early-warning system, users can alert others to danger too.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) thought it was a wonderful idea and gave Popovski $10,000 start-up capital. His idea was then brought to life by a team of IT professors and students from the University of Skopje and is currently undergoing tests. The UN website calls the app “revolutionary” and says that it will make an important contribution to public safety.

Lifesaver: mobile phone Earthquakes, floods, storms – Vasko Popovski’s app warns people of natural disasters and dangers in real time.

But the greatest danger is the app running out of money

AVANTGARDE BIKES SERBIA

PHOTOGRAPHY: AVANTGARDE BIKES

Reinventing the wheel Avantgardist Jaser Badawi’s (left) minimalist design fixie bikes built in Vojvodina cost 25,000 Dinar, or €200. The bikes come in colours including neon yellow and copper.

Wooden handlebars are available on request

THE RED BULLETIN

In some cities in the Balkans, venturing out on a bike in the hellish traffic is bordering on an extreme sport experience. And yet ever more valiant heroes and heroines are giving it a shot. Their wheels may well come from Avantgarde Bikes in Subotica. This town on the Hungarian border was already the epicentre of Yugoslav bicycle production back in the 1960s. And no wonder, for its flat streets and general lack of inclines make it something of a Dutch-style cycling paradise. Cyclists now account for a third of its traffic.

Founded in 2013 by a Serbian dentist called Jaser Badawi, Avantgarde Bikes was the first company in Serbia to specialise in single-speed and fixie bikes. With simple designs and prices that are still affordable in acknowledgement of the country’s low average wages, Avantgarde Bikes has racked up early success and hopes that its jaunty Serbian bikes will catch on elsewhere in Europe too.

37

THE FIRST OF THE MARTIANS WORDS: MUHAMED BEGANOVIC P H O T O G R A P H Y: A N D Y S C O T T

A

ugust 6, 2012

A white probe with grey pads rotates clockwise around its own axis, heading for Mars, the red planet. On board is the Mars rover, Curiosity, which has now been travelling for 10 months.

Things are tense at NASA’s Mission Control Center.

Men wearing headsets and the iconic blue shirts with the NASA logo stare at their screens. The camera pans and there it is: the mohawk.

Bobak Ferdowsi, then aged 32, becomes an instant internet sensation.

For one short moment, the success of the Curiosity mission becomes of secondary importance.

It’s almost as if it doesn’t matter that the probe

38

Moon 0.03 AU

Mars 1.5 AU Asteroids 1.2-5.6 AU

Europa (Moon of Jupiter) 5.2 AU

Enceladus (Moon of Saturn) 9.5 AU

New Worlds Looking for water and space for human colonies, researchers now focus on the moons of the largest planets in the Solar System.

1 AU = distance between the Earth and the Sun

has landed in one piece, in spite of difficult conditions. And when American President Barack Obama calls NASA to congratulate them on their success, he says, with reference to Ferdowsi’s haircut, “You guys are a little cooler than you used to be.”

Obama notes that he once toyed with the idea of growing a mohawk himself. The media and the internet can’t get enough of Ferdowsi, who henceforth is known as Mohawk Guy. “Sexiest Man at NASA” is another epithet he earns.

Bobak Ferdowsi is level-headed about it all.

“I don’t think my haircut would have stood out if it hadn’t been for the context [the Mars probe landing].”

Nor is he particularly bothered that the majority of people don’t know exactly what he does, talking instead about superficial things like his hair. “I think the only thing people now know is that you don’t have to look like a cliché if you work in this or that scientific field.” Ferdowsi is suddenly an important personality in the science world. He sits next to First Lady Michelle Obama at an event and receives proposals of marriage from complete strangers. He has 73,000 followers on Twitter. For the sake of comparison, Stephen Hawking, the most famous scientist of our day, has a mere 34,000. But it would be unfair if Bobak Ferdowsi were only known for his haircut, because the man who helped put a billiondollar probe on Mars is more than just a cool hairstyle.

Ending up at NASA thanks to Lego Every child dreams of outer space and Ferdowsi was no different. The idea of space travel was alluring to him from an early age. But he didn’t necessarily want to be an astronaut. Bobak Ferdowsi was born in 1979 in Philadelphia, in the US state of Pennsylvania, the son of an Iranian immigrant father and an American mother. The 1980s and early ’90s were seminal;

THE RED BULLETIN

PHOTOGRAPHY: ANDY J. SCOTT

The internet knows Bobak Ferdowsi as Mohawk Guy. And as “Sexiest Man” at NASA. A story about the brain behind the haircut

The Mars Mohawk Bobak Ferdowsi’s career took off in 2004, just as the Mars Science Laboratory mission began flying high. He started out as a simple mission planner, but by 2012 was Activity Lead for the Curiosity landing, meaning he was virtually the chief co-ordinator of the Mars mission on Earth

“…the search for life is the great quest of our time” BOBAK FERDOWSI

Life on Mars For 30 months now, the Curiosity rover, which bears

an uncanny resemblance to the cute, animated robot Wall-E, has diligently been doing research work on Mars. It turns over stones, explores the locality, measures the atmosphere and makes constant calculations. The rover’s aims include studying the atmosphere, climate and geology to see whether the red planet could be habitable for humans. Curiosity also makes very significant scientific discoveries, such as the fact that on Mars there is nitrogen, a gas which is just as crucial for life to exist as oxygen. Bobak’s rover is answering one question science is asking in the affirmative: Mars has the potential to be colonised.

We know the red planet from movies and TV series. Almost every relevant work of fiction has aliens living on Mars who are determined to wipe out humanity and destroy planet Earth. And yet it is Mars that has suffered that fate. “There was almost 40

The Journey to Europa But it doesn’t stop at Mars. NASA, and therefore

Ferdowsi, are involved in other new projects too.

Work is underway on the OSIRIS-REx probe, which is due to explore asteroids close to Earth. The probe launch is scheduled for 2016. Plans are also afoot for missions to Jupiter’s far-off moon, Europa, and to the even more distant Saturn moon of Enceladus. Europa might have salt seas below ground. “I believe science has reached a point where it needs to explore these icy moons. There are places which have enough water and heat,” says Ferdowsi, before adding, “the search for life is one of the great quests of our time.”

THE RED BULLETIN

PHOTOGRAPHY: ROBYN BECK/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

every year, at least one manned or unmanned spacecraft was sent into space. Star Trek also played an important role, as Ferdowsi explains. “There’s no doubt that Star Trek had a huge influence on me.

It was this vision of a better future that I fell in love with.” But of all things, it was one specific Danish toy that set him on the path to his current career.

“My love of science and engineering is largely down to playing with Lego and reading science fiction.”

In 1991, his parents moved to Japan. Bobak attended the American School in Tokyo, graduating in 1997, and then moved back to the US for college.

That same year, the Pathfinder probe landed on Mars. “It was the first time I could see what was happening on another planet, live. That was when I knew I definitely wanted to be part of it,” Ferdowsi reveals. In order to pursue his childhood dream, he began studying Aerospace Engineering at the University of Washington before switching to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2001 and two years later, having just turned 24, he started working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at NASA. He has been part of the Mars Science Laboratory from the outset.

Everyone stares at his hair, it’s what has made him famous.

But what Ferdowsi has contributed to missions to Mars is far more important

certainly a time when Mars was habitable, but there’s still a lot more exploration and research to carry out,” says Ferdowsi. To date, there have been almost two dozen orbiters and unmanned landings dedicated to exploring the planet. Only the Moon has received greater attention with 39 missions. The first Mars mission was now more than 50 years ago, on November 5, 1964. The Mariner 3 space probe should have taken photographs as it flew past Mars, but never completed the task. Mars remains a truculent planet; in 50 years and 21 Mars missions in all, NASA has had to deal with a number of setbacks. Five missions have been classified as complete failures. The Mars Science Laboratory mission, which was initiated in 2004 and has cost $2.5 billion, is not one of them.

The landing, Ferdowsi explains, was difficult.

The atmosphere at Mission Control could very well be described as dramatic. The probe had been through a number of tests, but this was its first time in space. Ferdowsi remembers one of the most complicated aspects of the project’s development phase. “Simulating on Earth what needs to work on Mars.” In actual fact, this was almost impossible.

Will a man land on Mars within the next 10 years? Ferdowsi can easily imagine such a scenario.

“There are still a lot of unresolved challenges for a manned mission. But if the world decided that it is worth doing within the next 10 years, then it would totally be put into action.”

Mars is important in any case, and worth the effort, says Ferdowsi. Not just because the planet has fired our imaginations from time immemorial, but because “…in many ways, it is Earth’s sister planet”.

For example, Ferdowsi points out that there is also gravity on Mars, even if it is not as strong as on Earth.

And there are signs of life. “It is a fact that four billion years ago, there was water in abundance on Mars. It might not look like it now, but it’s a place where we could gain a foothold and that we could eventually colonise.” Ferdowsi stresses the word could, because in his view, we don’t necessarily have to colonise Mars, although he readily agrees that there could be advantages. Personally he isn’t drawn to Mars.

Earth is still the best planet as far as he is concerned.

“Earth is beautiful and all my friends live here,” says Ferdowsi. The ambitious and controversial Dutch project, Mars One, aims to colonise Mars by 2027, but he doesn’t think it’s a match for NASA. But he is, as ever, level-headed on the subject. “Anything that gets people interested in space travel is a good thing.”

RAY OF LIGHT Recycling meets township tech in the world’s most inventive school bag

It’s impressive enough to find a solution to one social problem.

South Africans Thato Kgatlhanye and Rea Ngwane have gone a step further by transforming two problems into one school bag which acts as panacea for both township pollution and educational underachievement.

Repurpose Schoolbags are made from 20 recycled plastic bags and contain a small solar panel. This is charged up by the sun whilst children are walking to school, providing power for a light that allows them to study after dark in homes that lack electricity.

“We came up with the idea after looking at the problems facing school kids; a lack of dignity, basic school materials and not having a source of light to study at night,” says 22 year old co-founder Thato.

“On the other hand, there’s a huge problem with plastic pollution in our communities. So we brought the problems together to become a solution.”

The bags contain a reflective strip to make students safer – an important consideration as children in rural areas or informal settlements often walk many miles along busy roads to reach their schools. It’s a piece of township tech creativity that impressed Bill Gates who tweeted about the project late last year.

The pioneering project recently moved into a new 200sqm factory in a manufacturing park in the north west of the country, with three sewing machines and one overlock that turns the cleaned plastic bags into workable fabric. They’ve trained and employed eight THE RED BULLETIN

full-time staff and run a rolling project where unskilled locals can volunteer for four weeks, with the hardest workers getting jobs. They’ve employed another seven staff this way and plan to be up to 20 employees by the summer.

Recently a production manager from dog collar company Rogz came to the factory as part of a skill-swap organised by Red Bull Amaphiko, to help them streamline their production. Their 18 bag a day production line shot up to 30 bags a day as soon as they put Rogz’ suggestions in place. “Now, we’re aiming for 10,000 bags this year alone,” says Thato.

As well as taking orders from corporate CSR departments, who hand out the bags to schools and communities they’re affiliated with, Repurpose have a new line – conference bags.

Corporates including PricewaterhouseCoopers and Red Bull have hired the pair to make conference bags, paying for one school bag at the same time.

Thato and Rea are planning to expand the model continent-wide, and they’re developing ambitious plans to make their own solar panels, something they currently outsource.

“Repurpose schoolbags are applicable anywhere that doesn’t have electricity,” says Thato. “And apart from anything else, they give children something to carry their school books in.”

“I don't even see plastic as waste any more. I see it as colour – and opportunity.”

Engage with Thato’s project and check out other social start-ups at amaphiko.redbull.com 41

Yes, it’s real! Aimee Mullins was born with misshapen legs that she would never have been able to walk on. When she was one year old, her lower legs were amputated and replaced with prosthetic limbs. Now she is a model and track and field athlete. Hugh Herr is creating special hightech prostheses for Mullins. He thinks she’s the bee’s knees

PHOTOGRAPHY: JILL GREENBERG/CORBIS OUTLINE

SUPER HERR Climber Hugh Herr lost his legs after getting caught in a snowstorm.

Now he’s a medical technology pioneer and cyborg who wants to optimise humanity W O R D S : T E R E S A R E I T E R

THE RED BULLETIN

43

W

henever Hugh Herr enters the stage, the audience lowers its gaze, but it’s his feet they want to look at, not their own. The charismatic 50-year-old has deliberately rolled up his trousers to reveal two metal, bionic legs starting at the knee where his lower legs ought to be. These high-tech prostheses, Herr explains, are the first step towards a future in which physical disabilities like his will be completely eliminated. Plus, he jokes, they are very useful because, depending on his self-esteem at any given time, he can adjust his height. This often comes in extremely handy, especially in his professional life. The audience laughs uneasily, unsure whether to believe that he “considers himself lucky” to be reliant on these prosthetic legs rather than the once healthy, strong legs of his own.

Herr, who scaled the 3,547m Mount Temple in the Canadian Rockies aged just eight, was already considered one of the most talented competitive climbers on the East Coast of the US, if not the whole world, while still a teenager. He risked dizzying heights that had never previously been reached by experienced climbers, and all without a rope. It was unthinkable that anything could ever stop him. And then he had the accident.

In 1982, Herr and a friend were climbing Mount Washington, unaware that his life was about to be turned completely upside down. The two of them got caught in an almighty blizzard and lost their way on the snow-covered peak. They dug a hole in temperatures plummeting below -20°C and huddled together to keep warm for almost four days before being discovered and rescued.

The climbing expedition cost Herr dearly.

He lost both his legs to frostbite. In spite of the specialists’ best efforts to save the limbs, both legs had to be amputated. And it almost felt as if he was being condemned to death when the doctor announced: “You’ll never be able to climb again.”

Just as he was recovering from that first shock, Herr also discovered that a volunteer involved in his rescue had died. Herr, who was just 17 at the time, was devastated by the news.

When doctors showed him the standard prosthetics of the day, their hope was simply that he would be able to get around a bit on them. But “getting around a bit” was far removed from how

44

Herr envisioned the life he had ahead of him. He found it hard to disguise his disappointment at the shortcomings of the technology of the day. The reluctance, common to so many extreme sportsmen and women, to accept the limits the rest of us might, would lay the foundations for a career as a bionics pioneer. Driven on by the idea of fully recovering his ability to climb, Herr began working on his musculoskeletal system. The once work-shy schoolboy who preferred to spend his time hanging off cliffs rather than reading, went on to study physics and mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and then earned his doctorate in biophysics at Harvard. In the meantime, he fine-tuned his inventions. To this day, one of his favourite jokes is to say that once his prostheses are perfected and attached to his nervous system, he hopes he won’t ever again be the “pre-amputation idiot” he once was. This is because Herr suspects that the accident also caused a change in his brain and, to a certain extent, freed up capacity, since it no longer had to operate his feet, or at least not in the same way.

The First Step into the Future The legs Herr has on now, or, rather, the legs which

Half brain, half hightech Herr, now 50, was one of the best climbers in the US when, aged just 17, he almost froze to death on Mount Washington and lost his legs. Now he is a Professor of Biophysics at MIT and creates prostheses which can do more than the equivalent human limb

Herr is on, are completely artificial. They are made of carbon, titanium and silicone plus a handful of screws and springs. He can put them on and take them off again at the push of a button. It is incredibly straightforward, like putting on or taking off ski boots. His deportment also changes when he takes them off. He looks like a completely different person.

Each prosthesis contains five mini-computers and 12 sensors, which make sure that the bionic limbs move as if they were made of flesh and blood.

The robotic legs’ rigidity and strength settings can be programmed with greater precision via a smartphone app. Like the cyborg detective Inspector Gadget from the 1980s series, Herr can extend or draw in his legs and thus radically change his height.

That gives him an advantage, especially while climbing, because now he can reach handholds that no climber with normal human abilities can and can stand on promontories that are narrower than his human feet ever were. And just like Inspector Gadget, Herr now also has a whole host of other useful tools in his box of tricks. For example, there are attachments for his prostheses with spikes on them which allow him to climb vertical ice walls.

It is a hobby Herr hasn’t given up on, in spite of his traumatic encounter with the icy Mount Washington.

And Herr points out that it is no longer his aim to build himself legs that would be able to do exactly the same things as his human limbs. Now he wants legs that will improve his climbing to an even greater capacity, give him superhuman physical abilities and allow him to do things which weren’t possible.

But can such a miracle man-machine still compete in the same league as us mere mortals? That very THE RED BULLETIN

PHOTOGRAPHY: CORBIS

same question was the downfall of a much more infamous wearer of bionic legs. South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius, known as the Blade Runner and who in 2014 was convicted of the culpable homicide of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, had to go to court on charges of fraud. Pistorius’s rivals on the track believed that his prosthetic legs gave him an unfair competitive edge. The court invited an expert to decide where the limit lay between what was still human and what was robotic, and that expert was Hugh Herr. It was Herr who was able to bring about a verdict that was favourable for Pistorius and which enabled him to continue running on his blades until his arrest in 2013.

Herr is happy to quote Pistorius as a fine example of the perfect interplay between man and machine. He raves about fusing with technology and of fluid transitions between natural and synthetic body parts. Within the next couple of years, he will get small implants in his remaining leg muscles to improve the link-up between himself and his bionic legs. And 10 years down the line, Herr is convinced that his robotic legs will be connected directly to his nerve endings. He won’t just be able to walk, he’ll be able to feel the ground beneath his feet.

In other words, he will regain all the sensation in his legs. The metallic legs ought to become “organic extensions” to his own body “in a wholly natural way”, says the evolving cyborg, clearly driven by a desire to fully reverse the effects of that horrific climbing trip so many years ago.

Herr’s work is well received, especially by sportsmen and women, but also by other people whose lives depend on their mobility. Another famous example is professional dancer Adrianne Haslet-Davis, who lost her left foot in the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013. At the peak of her career, she suddenly found herself in a situation where she could no longer use her work tool, her foot. She met Hugh Herr at a rehabilitation clinic treating victims of the attacks. When Herr heard her story, he recognised himself in her. Like him, she too had been cut off from her greatest passion in life by the loss of her leg. And just like him, she found it hard to come to terms with. Herr decided on the spot that he would create a robotic leg for her too. It would prove a whole new challenge for the bionics technicians, for dancers move in a completely different way to climbers. It would take 200 days of precise research into the dynamics of her movements to establish that Herr could give her a leg that would do everything she had been used to it doing. “In 3.5 seconds, the criminals and cowards took Adrianne off the dancefloor,” Herr said as he unveiled the prosthesis. “In 200 days, we put her back.” Indeed, the Haslet-Davis prosthetic model is a special rumba leg, fine-tuned for the movements of that particular dance.

Hugh Herr imagines that in the not too distant future, no one should have to suffer physical THE RED BULLETIN

handicap were they to, for instance, lose an arm or a leg. It should be no different from wearing glasses.

People with bad eyes have a visual impairment, but thanks to glasses, which are also a prosthetic, they are not restricted by it in their daily lives. One day, if Hugh Herr’s plan comes to fruition, his prostheses will be as normal and accessible to everyone as a pair of reading glasses. He wants to completely obliterate physical handicap from the world and make total rehabilitation the minimum achievement.

Connecting Nerves to Machines Bionics and electrical engineering, at the interface

Don’t imitate nature “To start with, I used to put climbing shoes on over my prosthetic foot, but then I said to myself, ‘That’s crazy!’ and threw the shoes away,” Herr explains.

“I’d realised that the prosthesis didn’t need to look like a human foot to climb a steep rock face. My climbing feet are now the size of baby feet. They really are very small and I can get anywhere on them”

between biology and design, are to make Herr’s medical technology science-fiction dream come true. It is an interdisciplinary field in which the neurosciences play an important role alongside electronics, mechanics and biology. Yet the difficulty persists in how to connect man and machine; it is a problem that gave his namesake, Hugh Jackman, many a sleepless night as Wolverine in X-Men. To create a technical device that reacts so hypersensitively to the impulses of the human muscles, skeleton and nervous system that it could actually replace lost limbs will require technology of a level that we are still a long way from achieving. After all, it is rare, even when creating less complex technical devices, for them to be designed that intuitively. The user still requires a five-page instruction manual on how to use them.

Hugh Herr’s research group at MIT is currently working on developing special electrodes. This involves connecting two nerve stumps to a small conduit so that the nerve endings are close together.

This duct contains a sort of sieve, every hole in which is connected to an electrode. Then the nerve fibres grow through the holes and can make direct contact with the electrodes, thus forming a functional interface between man and machine that allows for a “close to optimal” exchange of information.

Herr has also invented a special prosthetic knee.

The artificial knee joint can ‘sense’ a movement’s strength and torque and can adapt to the individual user. The knee contains oil that is diluted with tiny iron particles. An electromagnetic field interacts with these tiny iron particles and this keeps the knee fine-tuned.

Herr is also working on so-called exoskeletons.

These are devices which wrap around the outside of the human body and can help stroke patients to move a limb which has lost all sensation, and assist with re-establishing the symmetry of their bodies.

And that is just the start, Herr explains. Once this development reaches its conclusion, there will be devices that will make it possible for people to get up out of their wheelchairs and walk.

Yet at the same time, the American tech mastermind reserves sharp criticism for everything that came before him. Even the basic shoe is a thorn 45

Life Without Disability Herr appears to wave aside any question of when

his futuristic prostheses will actually be available.

He speaks of a future in which they are affordable and available to everyone, as if that future might be tomorrow. This advance would also be good for the economy, he predicts, because physical disabilities are said to cost humanity more than a trillion dollars in healthcare services. If he had his way, a body with basic physiological functionality would be a human right, for almost half the world’s population suffers from some form of cognitive, emotional, sensory or motor bodily dysfunction. “Everyone should have the right to live without disability if they so wish,” says Herr. Given that there are currently almost a billion people in the world who don’t even have access to clean drinking water, Herr’s dream seems all the more utopian. Even what he calls “everyday prosthetics that everyone has already”, such as glasses, are by no means as commonplace as many people may think. The WHO estimates that there are between 500 million and one billion people worldwide who need glasses but simply can’t afford them. So for now, the slogan “prosthetics for all” is likely to remain reserved for a future which is as far off as limbs which renew themselves.

Yet in Hugh Herr’s eyes, nothing is impossible.

“There are no limits” is one of his favourite sayings about the fusion of man and machine. One day, he hopes to recover not only the sensation in his nonexistent feet but also his balance, which might be even better than it once was. Whereas he can already walk, climb stairs and jump as normal, he hopes that at some point in the future he will live without ever feeling pain, while also being able to run extremely fast and jump extremely high. His hopes are the same for the other 20 million people worldwide who are dependent on prosthetics to help them cope with daily life and achieve their goals.

There is cautious reflection in what he says, and yet it is still clear that Hugh Herr really does dream of a mankind that has ultimately been enhanced by technology. The idea behind his prosthetics isn’t just to give people who have lost limbs control over their lives once more. He has bigger goals: instead, even those who find themselves in the unfortunate position of possessing 46

Better than the original Hugh Herr’s prostheses work at temperatures of -40°C and can change length at the push of a button.

Herr uses these bionic prostheses to climb routes that even sportsmen and women with their legs intact can’t manage

healthy, natural bodily functions ought to be given the chance to possess superhuman physical abilities.

Herr’s laboratory is developing a range of exoskeletons which aim to strengthen the body.

Say you are wearing one and want to lift something very heavy – it will transfer the majority of the weight onto the artificial legs. In this way, people would be able to carry much heavier loads than previously and protect their body at the same time.

Military purposes, fire departments, hiking… just a few of the potential uses that come to Herr’s mind.

He predicts a future in which everyone will wear these exoskeletons simply to protect their legs and hips while running or doing strenuous work. “This will make us stronger and more efficient,” he explains. It should be wonderful. Never again will you be out of breath after great exertion.

The military application of such prosthetics and exoskeletons is a very hot topic. The American military, in particular, has for decades now been working with its private partners on soldier 2.0.

He should need less sleep, be less sensitive to pain, be stronger and be able to cover greater distances.

On that subject, a US Air Force General once said that the individual soldier should be endowed with the same capabilities as a fighter jet and that the soldier should be seen as a “system”. And the US Navy is currently testing exoskeletons which look like robot suits. The “Iron Man” suit, as it is being called, could be used in military operations as early as 2018. The problem to date is that in many of the Navy’s areas of operation, there is no functioning electricity grid. Yet many of these suits can be worn even without a power source and soldiers can easily carry 90-100kg over long distances without feeling the full weight of the load.

From Soldier 2.0 to Cyborg Hugh Herr covers a wide range of activities when

it comes to the military application of his robotic body parts. He points out that the prosthetics business has boomed after every new war. The War on Terror that began after the attacks of 9/11 is no different in this regard. The events of that day have made “huge sums of money” available for the purpose, according to Herr. Which is why he advises veterans who have lost limbs in war and who have been told by their doctors that they will never be able to move again, to seek a second opinion.

Herr, the first cyborg professor at MIT, is sure of one thing: that his research is going to change the world. He believes he can plug the gap between ability and inability, between a healthy body and disability. He speaks of neural implants that will help the blind to see and of mechanical body parts that will offer full rehabilitation from every kind of physical impairment. “Nature drives design forward, but design drives nature forward, too.”

THE RED BULLETIN

PHOTOGRAPHY: CORBIS

in his side because it can give us blisters, which in his eyes, is a prime example of mankind not knowing how to attach synthetic items to our bodies.

The prostheses that he is working on are to be the “most comfortable limbs that anyone will have ever worn”. If his ambitions weren’t all about improving people’s lives, you could be forgiven for drawing parallels with the evil geniuses we know from cartoons. The way he talks about his scientific mind and “unusual body” is sometimes reminiscent of wicked superheroes like Magneto.

Anti-Parkinson’s chips Nerve implants attempt to control the shaking caused by epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease.

Cyborg Medicine

MAKING HUMANS Bionics can repair broken bodies, restore lost

The bionic eye optic nerve optic chip Chips in the retina transmit images to the brain from a camera worn like glasses. prosthesis signal

senses and will eventually change our lives The bionic ear The cochlear implant was invented 30 years ago; it’s now smaller and better than it used to be and even babies can have one fitted.

1 2 3

Titanium and plastic heart The AbioCor artificial heart is already available in the US for $250,000. It just doesn’t work that well yet.

Microphone picks up noise Implant converts that into electric signals Electrode sends the signal on to the cochlear nerve

transmitter

2

1

external wireless driver

receiver cochlea

microphone

Mechanical hand with 360° rotation The i-limb from Scotland has chips, sensors and motors, which means the wearer can turn their wrist and control the movement in each finger.

cochlear nerve

prosthetic arm can literally mind-read

external battery

monitoringsystem implant

3

The electric arm Electrodes fitted to the amputation stump pick up nerve signals from the brain and translate them into orders for the prosthesis.

hydraulic system pumps blood through the artificial heart

wireless energy transmitter

artificial skin, in a number of colours, covers the prosthesis

signal

control unit (for software, sensors and the hand’s drive motor)

silicone cover

battery

Parts of the hand where you can use the prosthesis:

The smart prosthetic leg The computerised C-Leg made by German company Ottobock is the Mercedes of prostheses.

A new kidney A light and portable artificial kidney would spare dialysis patients constant hospital visits.

INFOGRAPHIC: MARCO VERGOTTI, ILLUSTRATION: KAKO E NILSON CARDOSO

artificial kidney catheters deliver fluid to the abdominal cavity and ureters

carbon-fibre prosthetic stem Cheetah legs The Cheetah prosthesis costs $50,000. The sprinter Oscar Pistorius used it at the Olympics.

The mobile pancreas Smart biotechnology spares diabetics the constant blood level checks and insulin injections. sensor monitors blood-sugar level chip-controlled insulin pump

A grown bladder Endogenous cells are planted on a biodegradable organ scaffold.

The scaffold disintegrates but the bladder remains. kidney urethra new bladder (not rejected by the body) THE RED BULLETIN

microchips to control bend and stretch function

valves which adapt to body weight and bend angle give the knee-joint stability stress sensors on the shin provide data to help control movements

The autodidactic knee The RHEO knee from the AI lab at MIT learns how the individual user walks by himself.

The $10-million foot Hugh Herr’s PowerFoot One has three chips and 12 sensors. The angle of the heel automatically adapts to the walking speed. For climbing, Herr adds mini-soles to the high-tech flat feet.

Metal muscle Mind-reading brain implants control these robot suits which will allow paraplegics to walk again.

47

Jürgen Furian is the co-founder of Pioneers, the company behind the annual Pioneers Festival. His main responsibility is in corporate development and product development. Before Pioneers, Jürgen was the co-founder of STARTeurope, organising weekend events for local startup communities throughout Europe

Jürgen Furian has been a pioneer from the outset.

Once he gets talking about startups, it’s hard to stop him. His advice to young entrepreneurs: be resilient and passionate INTERVIEW: ANDREAS ROTTENSCHLAGER

“ONLY DO IT IF YOU REALLY WANT TO” 48

THE RED BULLETIN

THE RED BULLETIN: A total of 1,600 startups from 96 countries applied for the 2015 Pioneers Festival. How do you choose who gets to present themselves?

Jürgen Furian: They have to deal with ideas that will define our futures within the next five years. At the Pioneers Festival, all we talk about is the future. We’ve given ourselves a broad range of topics: aerospace, biotechnology, energy, robots. That’s what the industry appreciates about us.

What qualities does a good speaker need to have?

They can’t be all talk. That’s the first point. We want people who go after something, achieve something, fail and then start again. Then they can talk about it. We look at what young startups need and which experts they can learn from. It’s like in a classroom; you learn most from teachers who are committed.

Which startup teacher impresses you most?

Steli Efti, the founder of ElasticSales. He is a master of live presentations. We normally never invite anyone twice, but Steli will be appearing for the third time this year because we constantly get emails asking him to present. Steli’s specialist area is bone dry: turnover. Yet people love his talks. Look at our YouTube channel if you want proof. Steli is bursting with energy. And he always gives precise feedback.

What’s his core message?

“Sell first. Build second,” which refers to the fear within the industry that you have to develop a product to perfection before you can sell it. Steli thinks that is a huge mistake.

He says sell first, even if it isn’t perfect. And see if there’s any demand for it. Give the customer 20 per cent off the incomplete product. At least they’ll be the first person to have got their hands on it.

Which industry currently has the most exciting startups?

Biotechnology. It’s small startups achieving incredible things with not much money. Processors and servers were prohibitively expensive for the computer industry in the past – no one could afford them. Now everyone has a laptop and a smartphone; the technology has been democratised. The same thing is happening right now in the biotech industry.

The huge pharmaceutical giants used to invest billions in research to produce a pill 10 years down the line. Now small startups are bringing good ideas to fruition themselves.

PHOTOGRAPHY: KURT PRINZ

For example?

Hampton Creek from San Francisco – they make eggs out of bean proteins. No chickens, no factory farming. I had breakfast with them recently and their fried eggs are great.

Let’s say I’ve got an idea for an app. How do I make sure it’s a success?

You should answer a couple of questions first, the most important one is: do I really, really care? Not everyone has to become an entrepreneur, after all, because it’s a brutal rollercoaster ride. And if you’re not really passionate about it, you’ll give up when the going gets really tough.

How do I come through the rollercoaster ride unscathed?

By believing in yourself. It’s the single most important quality if you want to make an idea happen. Tim Westergren is my favourite example. In the late 1990s, he came up with THE RED BULLETIN

the idea of internet radio that adapted to the user’s taste. He submitted the concept to 300 investors and got 300 rejections. But he didn’t give up. Now his internet radio has 80 million listeners.

Not many people would have that much stamina.

Because people are afraid of failure. But on the startup scene, failure is a positive, provided you learn something from it. There are separate conferences where company founders talk exclusively about failure.

What’s good about my project going pear-shaped?

The fact that you’re taken out of your comfort zone and learn something new. Every innovation comes with risk.

The racing driver Mario Andretti once said, “If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”

There’s an attitude you can learn from.

Risk is a great buzzword. You held one of your very first startup conferences in 2009 in Prishtina, Kosovo. A war zone.

Exactly. My business partner had travelled around Kosovo and noticed that there were an awful lot of young people who had little faith in the state and wanted to do things for themselves, which made it a great place for startups.

What sort of ideas are the young entrepreneurs in Prishtina coming up with?

Things like milk delivery startups, for example. They want a better logistical approach. It might sound banal to our ears but there aren’t supermarkets on every corner with 10 different brands of milk in every country. We don’t live in a uniform world, remember. So it’s really exciting to see what’s required in different ecosystems. And what solutions there are.

Startup founders are professional idea-sellers. You know hundreds of them. Can you give us a tip? Like for the idea of how to ask our boss for more money.

If you have a minute, then prepare for that minute.

Argue from your boss’s point of view. And most important of all: be passionate!

Not everyone can be.

Watch presentation coach Nancy Duarte’s videos. Nancy has worked on Al Gore and Steve Jobs’ presentations and she spoke here last year. Her core message is to sell everything with a story. Think of mentoring along the lines of Luke Skywalker and Yoda.

Let’s say I’m well-prepared but terribly nervous.

Doesn’t matter. I used to be an introvert myself.

I gave one presentation at university and successfully avoided any others.

How did you conquer your fear?

I said to myself, “It’s not so bad. People have come to listen to you.”

That makes it sound too easy.

But it’s true. Even the biggest stars in the music world get stage fright, it comes with the job. We’ve already spoken about the positive aspects of failure; even if you screw up your presentation, at least there are more people who know about you now than did before.

49

INTELLIGENT NERVES WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW After artificial intelligence (AI) come intelligent nerves (IN).

These are nerve cells which will be able to do more than the latest machine­­s. This is biological high-tech

SPECIAL EDITION THE PIONEERS OF 2015 Editor-in-Chief Boro Petric Editorial Director Robert Sperl Art Director Dominik Uhl Photo Director Markus Kucˇera Chief Copy Editor Clemens Stachel Managing Editor Lisa Blazek Editors Muhamed Beganovic, Georg Eckelsberge­r, Judith Mutici, Magdalen­a Miedl, Teresa Reiter, Andrea­s Rottenschlage­r, Manon Steiner Chief Sub-Editor Nancy James Sub-Editor Olivia Rosen Design & Infographics Paul Stuefer, Birgit Lohmann Illustrations Martin Udovicic, Marco Vergotti Web Kurt Vierthaler (manager), Andrew Swann Translations Desmond Tumulty, Dmitri Mikhalitsyn Publisher Franz Renkin Sales Alfred Vrej Minassian (manager), Thomas Hutterer, Corinna Laure anzeigen@at.redbulletin.com Advertising Placement Sabrina Schneider Marketing & Project Management Lukas Scharmbacher Marketing Design Peter Knehtl (manager), Karoline Anna Eisl, Simone Fischer, Julia Schweikhardt Head of Production Michael Bergmeister Production Wolfgang Stecher (manager), Matthias Zimmermann Repro Clemens Ragotzky (manager), Claudia Heis, Maximilian Kment, Karsten Lehman­n IT Engineer Michael Thaler Subscriptions Peter Schiffer Distribution Klaus Pleninger Global Editorial Office Heinrich-Collin-Strasse 1, A-1140 Vienna Phone +43 1 90221-28800 Fax +43 1 90221-28809 Web www.redbulletin.com Headquarters Red Bull Media House GmbH Oberst-Lepperdinger-Strasse 11–15, A-5071 Wals/Salzburg, FN 297115i, Landesgericht Salzburg, ATU63611700 General Manager Wolfgang Winter Presidents Christopher Reindl, Andreas Gall

IN FUTURE Tracking bracelets first turn electromagnetic waves into nerve impulses. The nerves then transmit the radio and mobile telephone signals direct to the brain

50

THE RED BULLETIN

ILLUSTRATION: BIRGIT LOHMANN

Smartphones are actually pretty dumb.

They turn electromagnetic waves into nerve impulse­­s which are then turned into acoustic or optical impressions in the brain. A smart brain doesn’t really need such a smart phone.

For millions of years now, the human brain and its approximately 20 billion nerve cells have been capable of picking up, decodin­­g and translating electromagnetic waves into meaningful information without technical assistance.

The brain can process electromagnetic waves between 380 and 780 nanometres in length and with a frequency of between 384 and 789 terahertz, ie light, without the need for any sort of gadgetry.

Mobile telephone and radio waves and satellite and TV signals may all have other wavelengths and frequencies, but they are still electromagnetic waves.

The brain can learn. In the same way that it can learn a new language, it can also learn to decode new frequency ranges.

A nervous twitch that sometimes appears if you’ve been on your mobile for hours is proof of the fact that the brain is already registering them. The sensitivity that amputees have to the weather is also proof that people can receive a completely different set of signals which even the most modern equipment doesn’t have access to.

One day in the not-too-distant future, peopl­­e will be able to make calls, listen to music and watch films wherever they are and whenever they want without the need for a mobile telephone, radio or TV. And it will all be thanks to one of nature’s oldest and smartest inventions: the nerve cell. Humans have invented artificial intelligence. Maybe it’s finally time to exploi­­t natural intelligence too.

/redbulletin

Visual Storytelling

© John Wellburn/Red Bull Content Pool

Beyond the ordinary

UK EDITION

BEYOND THE ORDINARY

DRAGONS & CYBORGS

PEP GUARDIOLA “It’s irrelevant if my way is best.

But it is mine“

Emilia Clarke: from Game Of Thrones to Terminator Genisys

THE CAPTAIN OF ADVENTURE

IBIZA

ALL-ROUND ACTION HERO WILL GADD IS A LIVING LEGEND IN THE TRUEST SENSE.

Is it still the world party capital?

UK EDITION

FOOTBALL GENIUS REVEALED PEP GUARDIOLA’S

BEYOND THE ORDINARY

19 WORLD

AWESOME

SHOT!

Action photo special

CLASS WATCHES

UNDEAD FUNNY

QUEEN OF THE BEACH

2014’s most hilarious movie

Dave Grohl

PEAK FREEFALL

Adventure’s toughest task

EXCLUSIVE: the legend reaches into your mind and music’s future

RULES OF SUCCESS RULES

OF

SUCCESS

PEP G U A R D I O L A’ S R EV EA LED GENIUS FOOTBALL

c a p i t a l? world pa r t y Is i t still the

IBIZA

Te r m i n a t o r G e n i s y s G a m e O f T h r o n e s t o E m i l i a C l a r ke : f r o m

B u t i t i s m i n e “ m y w a y i s b e s t . “ I t ’ s i r r e l e v a n t i f P E P G U A R D I O L A

& CY B ORG S DR AGON S B E YO N D

TH E

O R D I N A RY

U K

PRINT

ED ITI O N

|

WEB

|

APP

|

SOCIAL

redbulletin.com