alfredo sahagun: April 2016

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Coupang Korea - the biggest and fastest growing Company - by @alfredosahagun for @3nglishOnline content writers

Company: COUPANG (Korea) www.coupang.com Color Your Life. The start/history of the company Coupang was founded in 2010 by Bomseok Kim, a graduate of Harvard Business School, is the world's fastest growing e-commerce company. Coupang e-commerce company is based out of South Korea. Coupang has achieved its growth by consistently innovating new services that benefit the customer experience, such as a compelling mobile shopping platform, same-day delivery and personalized recommendations Founder As said, Coupang was founded in 2010 by Bomseok Kim, he was born in Seoul, and left Korea at the early age of 7 with his father who worked abroad for Hyundai. At the age of 13 Kim went to a boarding school in Massachusetts, where he became fanatic of the New England Patriots and Red Sox Teams. He cultivated himself at university in and track and field and varsity wrestling. And was good enough students to have grades to allow him get into Harvard. Harvard graduate Bomseok Kim is an academic, or tried to be, but his business drive and his eagerness to get practical hands-on in the business world. After Harvard, Kim at first enrolled in the media business. His professional practices were at the New Republic and he then started a “the Current” student magazine. Newsweek bought his initiative a year after Kim graduated in 2000. In year 2006 Kim raised $4 million for “02138” a Vanity Fair inspired Harvard alumni magazine which didn´t make it through the 2008 world economic crisis. Then, Kim attempted Harvard Business School in 2010 but lasted only a year. Having studying at Seoul National University prior to his M.B.A. attempt. At that point he knew he “wanted to start something in commerce in Korea”. Groupon’s daily-deal model was the trend and the easiest way to get funded. Kim immediately back in Seoul dedicated to create a Groupon clone to raise money from American investors more easily. Kim registered Coupang in USA as a ltd. (limited liability corporation) and soon spent almost $1 million on ads. Coupang was Facebook’s top advertiser in South Korea. The distinction is that he is almost always occupied round the clock as the CEO of Coupang, South Korea’s fastest-growing e-commerce site of all time. Kim’s estimated 19% stake in Coupang is worth $950 million. He’ll be a billionaire soon, barring disaster or recession. Scoring that well is a rare feat in a country where wealth is concentrated in the hands of chaebol family conglomerates. Kim’s story is like others. He was uncertain of having a successful career in the U.S. History The company´s history is extremely brief, shorter than 6 years long. It started in 2010 offering daily deals on services, but soon started partnering with dealers, wholesalers and selling physical goods. Coupang now offers a large selection of merchandise including consumables, home goods and decor, books and toys, sporting goods, electronics, baby goods, fashion, beauty products, and even travel and cultural events tickets. Main milestones in Coupan´s bullish-development have been: • Coupang was founded in 2010 by Bomseok Kim, with the mission of offering good, products and services. • The company became cash flow positive already at the end of 2011. Also, in the same year Coupang released an app for Android and for iPhone. • The company achieved monthly net profit as of May 2012. For that time, Coupang had already 700 employees, with 25,000 signed up merchants selling goods and services on its marketplace and roughly 12 million subscribers. • Coupang achieved in the Business Insider's list "THE DIGITAL 100: The World's Most Valuable Private Tech Companies" in October 2012. • As of August 2013, mobile sales accounted for more than half of the company's sales and 70% of its web traffic. • By May 2014 a total of $160 million raised Coupang from U.S. Venture Capitalists Investors: Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Greenoaks Capital Management, Sequoia Heritage, Altos Ventures, Rose Park Advisors, Maverick Capital, Clay Christensen, LaunchTime, Bill Ackman, etc. • In June 2015, Coupang received an investment of $1 billion from Japan’s Softbank. This $5 Billion Startup Is Filling Amazon's Void In South Korea • In 2016, its fifth year of full operation, Coupang exceeded $1 billion USD in annual sales. Coupang Becomes Nation’s First E-commerce Firm to Break 1 Trillion Mark in Sales. According to Forbes interview of Bomseon Kim, his $5 billion e-commerce firm Coupang employs 3,600 drivers for its Rocket Delivery service, which tries to deliver products to their customers in 24 hours across South Korea. Kim’s estimated 20% ownership share in Coupang is estimated already in almost $1 billion as of 2015. Coupang has achieved its growth by consistently innovating new services that benefit the customer experience, such as a compelling mobile shopping platform, same-day delivery and personalized recommendations Investment rounds (investors and financials) Last May 2014 Coupang raised a total of $160 million from U.S. Venture Capitalists Investors: Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Greenoaks Capital Management, Sequoia Heritage, Altos Ventures, Rose Park Advisors, Maverick Capital, Clay Christensen, LaunchTime, Bill Ackman, etc. Early thaat year Coupang launched his gold-product the ultra-fast delivery service called "Rocket Delivery". Last June 2014 Coupang raised $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation in a round led by Japanese telecom firm SoftBank. SoftBank thinks it can do it again with Coupang. From it´s SoftBank money, the company commited $1.3 billion to enhance its logistics infrastructure, already consisting of 21 warehouses, a fleet of trucks and an army of excellent service Coupang-men. The six-year-old startup grossed about $300million in 2015, a figure that will likely quadruple for 2016. Coupang CEO Kim Beom-seok believes the company has enough funds from the attracted investments and now his investors have a firm belief in his Coupang. Years later Coupang had changed again. It had raised $400 million from investor similar to Sequoia Capital and BlackRock to double their inventory. This time with the intention of selling fast compsumption goods or high frequency products like bottle wated, rice, and diapers to customers as cheap and quick as possible. The investment, Kim says, will pay off when customers, accustomed to fast delivery speed, order more over time. “We can’t bend the customers to what we want,” says Kim, “but we can bend ourselves to what the customers want.” Competitors It’s the closest thing the South Korea has to Amazon.com and in several key ways it’s better. Coupang and its founder, Kim, are the big reason Jeff Bezos will continue to avoid the country and its 51 million potential costumers, to avoid repeating the China failure. Kim has alimented an competition mentality that leads to workers dedicate more than the usual, something they work for more than 80 hours a week in a relentless drive to provide better service and products than its competitors. Compared to Amazon which is trying to achieve fastest delivery by application of ideas as the use of outside contractors, the experimenting with Uber-like driver networks and even dreaming the idea of using flying drones to improve delivery times to hours. In truth, for Amazon same-day shipments are only available in only 27 metropolitan areas. Coupang manages to do so country-wide. Bom Kim argues Koreans were unfamiliar with startups. Kim saysifhis company is built correctly and keeps doing week it could quickly surpass Gmarket and Auction Co., both owned by eBay EBAY as the nation’s largest shopping site. This south east Asia market is a huge market opportunity, and it’s completely overlooked. Amazon isn’t even doing what we’re doing now. How Coupang works What makes Coupang ideal for South Korea, and some countries developing in Asia, is that it does better what Amazon has lingered to achieve. Basically, the On-demand commerce, same-day delivery, instant gratification are the key-features of their thriving business. Coupang is already making same-day delivery the industry standard! Coupang already has built a large fleet of customized trucks, algorithm-controlled warehouses and more than 3,600 quality service employees who deliver goods and serve customers. Another key element which Coupang is doing better service is that you can cancel an order that’s already on its way! or even change a package’s destination at the last minute. Services still unavailable in 99% of other competitors, as Amazon. Where Amazon has lingered, Kim has been decisive. Amazon isn´t elsewhere the giant it´s in America. It actually just operates in only 13 countries of over 180. It´s truly interesting how settled Coupang is in these countries of Asia that famous renowned IT entrepreneur Jeff Bezos from Amazon hasn´t turned his attention to South Korea. Instead, Amazon has focused on more populous nations like Japan, with success, China, without success against Alibaba and Alibabaexpress, and in India where Jeff is still working his business progress from his 2$ billion investmente. “When I was at Amazon we talked constantly about (going to compete into) Korea” says Henry Low now leads global operations for Coupang, and Amazon’s former vice president of operations in China “But we were having such a challenge trying to grow in China and the lack of resources, that the answer was alreays Not yet, not now.’” Why was South Korea a good place for Kim to start his Coupang business? Besides the fact of having lived and studied in Seoul, Think of it, if you could invent the ideal country for online trade and commerce, it would be very much similar to South Korea, full of wealthy citizens, ego-driven competitive people, always updated and wired online, and beside a very heavily dense population with over 50 million potential customers. In SouthKorea almost everyone has a both a high speed network and a smartphone. Also half the population lives in the greater Seoul making delivery logistics lots simpler logistics. Revenue Sales for Coupan have seven-fold up to 1.5 US$ billions. Coupangs marketplace business might be overrun by its retail division in the following years. According to Kim he wanted to point in the direction of the Amazon model, but he´s isn´t fixed to any business plan. According to Euromonito, sales information measurer, of every dollar spent online in USA a little more than 9 cents are spent online, whereas take South Korea, it´s up to 15 cents of every retail dollar spent was online. Every new hired by Couplan is given a copy of the Amazon book The Everything Store. Also the company is constantly compared to the Ancient Mongol Empire within closed doors company meetings. Kim seems to be a true fan of the Great Ghenghis Khan, in meetings he constantly reminds employees how Khan conquered lands East and into Europe, and points out that his most special power was adaptably of how his armies fought. In the Online world Kim, he is willing to do whatever it takes to win battles to win the customers´ hearts. Kim is a fan of the New England Patriot, and has in his office a Bill Belichick ball. He says he likes him since he´s a man of “few words” and that he “just wins”. References: www.coupang.com Coupang Faces off against Retail Giant Shinsegae | Korea IT Times. www.koreaittimes.com Coupang logs 3-fold jump in 2015 sales. english.yonhapnews.co.kr This $5 Billion Startup Is Filling Amazon's Void In South Korea - Forbes. www.forbes.com Coupang (company) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org Landmark Sales: Coupang Becomes Nation’s First E-commerce Firm to Break 1 Trillion Mark in Sales. www.businesskorea.co.kr http://www.businesskorea.co.kr/english/news/industry/14416-landmark-sales-coupang-becomes-nation%E2%80%99s-first-e-commerce-firm-break-1-trillion#sthash.qcQuSRf8.dpuf - www.businesskorea.co.kr

Big Data Books 2016 by @alfredosahagun for @3ngllishOnline

Best Big Data Books of 2016 What´s the best way to get a head start and stay on top of your game than to be better informed. Reading has been one best activity for us to learn (and be informed), as well as traveling and meeting directly other cultures. Some of us have even learnt more books than any other activity. Books on Data Science and Big Data Analytics are now many and more every day. They are ideal to first begin exploring, and some more technical to deepen your knowledge on this topic. From these must are shallow and illustrative but don´t go in-depth. They sell the motivation to get into it but don´t make the knowledge fully available. These upcoming books are either the most recent ones or the most highly recognized books that will give you the extra info you need to win in Big Data. If we look for the word “Big Data” in the Amazon books we will find up to 18.200 different titles. Just in 2016 we already have up to 417 titles being currently sold on the Amazon. I will first attempt to make a summarized list of the newest arrivals on Big Data on this first article. And on the continued second article I will list the most famous, important and relevant of all big data books. Let´s have a look at the most recent 2016 published books with high ratings: Big Data in Practice: How 45 Successful Companies Used Big Data Analytics to Deliver Extraordinary Results Hardcover by Bernard Marr May, 2016 The best-selling author of Big Data is back, this time with a unique and in-depth insight into how specific companies use big data. Big data is on the tip of everyone's tongue. Everyone understands its power and importance, but many fail to grasp the actionable steps and resources required to utilize it effectively. This book fills the knowledge gap by showing how major companies are using big data every day, from an up-close, on-the-ground perspective. From technology, media and retail, to sport teams, government agencies and financial institutions, learn the actual strategies and processes being used to learn about customers, improve manufacturing, spur innovation, improve safety and so much more. Organized for easy dip-in navigation, each chapter follows the same structure to give you the information you need quickly. For each company profiled, learn what data was used, what problem it solved and the processes put it place to make it practical, as well as the technical details, challenges and lessons learned from each unique scenario. Learn how predictive analytics helps Amazon, Target, John Deere and Apple understand their customers. Discover how big data is behind the success of Walmart, LinkedIn, Microsoft and more. Learn how big data is changing medicine, law enforcement, hospitality, fashion, science and banking. Develop your own big data strategy by accessing additional reading materials at the end of each chapter • Big Data Appliances for In-Memory Computing: A Real-World Research Guide for Corporations to Tame and Wrangle by Dr. Ganapathi Pulipaka and Jodie Bentley. Feb, 2016 This book is a scientific expedition to research and explore the enterprise-grade big data appliances with blended OLTP and OLAP capabilities. Enterprise database systems with the aid of big data analytics create an intelligent ecosystem by taming and wrangling the data coming from extreme-disparate sources of structured and unstructured channels with massive parallelization techniques to discover, visualize, predict, and action the patterns and trends of mashups of big data. The book delves deeper into the research results of industry relevant case studies with the disruption of in-memory computing platform innovation that diffuses high-speed computing and dynamic performance for business applications and explores how these modern big data analytics tools shape the future of aerospace, automotive, consumer goods and beverages, healthcare, government services, high tech, and public sector industries. • Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends by Martin Lindstrom Mar, 2016 Watch out for this one since it´s got the"Most Important Books of 2016" by The New York Times Bestseller and a Forbes 2016 "Must Read Business Book". Apparently written with a investigative kind of way, as in CSI, BONES or a moden-day Sherlock Holmes, , accumulating small clues - the progressively weaker handshakes of Millenials, a notable global decrease in the use of facial powder, a change in how younger consumers approach eating ice cream cones - to help solve a stunningly diverse array of challenges. It has been called Martin's best book so far. It´s a personal, intuitive, powerful way to look at making an impact with your work when harnessing the power of "small data" in your quest to discover the next big thing. It also presents what it takes to create global brands, and reveals surprising and counter-intuitive truths about what connects us all as humans. In Big Data era, mining and matching technological data with up-close psychological insight creates the ultimate image of who we really are and what we really want. With its story-line running through Switzerland, Dubai, United States and in China with great successes story. The book Small Data combines forensic psychology with travelling in an interlocking series of international clue-gathering detective stories. • Blue Goldfish: Using Technology, Data, and Analytics to Drive Both Profits and Prophets by Evan Carroll and Stan Phelps Jan, 2016 A blue goldfish is any time a business leverages technology, data, and analytics to do a "little something extra" to improve the experience for the customer. The book is based on a collection of over 300 case studies. It examines the three R's: Relationship, Responsiveness, and Readiness. Blue Goldfish also uncovers eight different ways to turn insights into action. Are you ready to use info-sense to win profits and prophets? What's your Blue Goldfish? • • Patterns in Data Management: A Flipped Textbook by Jens Dittrich Feb, 2016 This book is an enhancement of the previously written educational videos on database technology I recorded in 2013/14. This book is not a standard textbook on database techniques. The main goal of these videos was to use them in my intermediate-level university course designed for B.Sc. students in their third year or M.Sc. students of computer science. Though my students liked the classroom model and the videos, many students asked for an additional written script that would allow them to quickly lookup explanations for material in text. Therefore, in spring 2015, I started working on the course book script which it´s trying t stay away from the old-fashioned text-oriented textbook. Now focusing in the flipped textbook Idea, it is concise in the explanations letting you to quickly find and remember terms. in this book you will find: (1) links to videos as well as slides I designed for this course, (2) for each video a textual summary of the video content phrased as questions and answers plus the most important slides and graphics from the videos, (3) Q&As as well as (4) exercises. The autor Jens Dittrich is a Full Professor of Computer Science in the area of Databases, Data Management, and Big Data at Saarland University, Germany. Affiliations also to: U Marburg, SAP AG, and ETH Zurich. Also associated to CISPA (Center for IT-Security, Privacy and Accountability. His research focuses on fast access to big data including in particular: data analytics on large datasets, main-memory databases, database indexing, and reproducibility. • Healthcare Disrupted: Next Generation Business Models and Strategies by Jeff Elton and Anne O'Riordan Feb, 2016 Healthcare Disrupted is an inspirational call-to-action for everyone associated with healthcare, especially for the innovators. It sets the framework and language for executives to govern their products, services, and strategies evolution in an increasingly value-based healthcare system during a time of uncertainty and great change. Elton and O’Riordan give many real world examples. And attempt to discuss unanswered questions. Clearly ‘no action’ is not an option and the book compels you to question yourself ‘What is your role in this digitally driven change? And how can your firm can gain competitive advantage and lead?. Health Disrupted captures the impact of the use of big data and thoughtfully develops new approaches to value creation in the healthcare industry. • • • • • Big Data Governance: Modern Data Management Principles for Hadoop, NoSQL & Big Data Analytics. by Peter Ghavami Jan, 2016 The book is a must-read for organizations´ data scientists, data engineers and information technology leaders who are implementing big data platforms. In Big Data Governance the author offers numerous policies, strategies and recipes for managing big data. In the book he has collected best practices, it addresses many issues that are prevalent with data security, privacy, controls and life cycle management, data quality, data stewardship, regulatory considerations, data council, architectural and operational models from the world’s leading organizations who have successfully implemented big data platforms. He offers the latest techniques and methods for managing big data effectively. Big Data for Business Leaders: What Today's Decision-Makers Need to Know by Judith Selby. Mar, 2016 This book provides a complete understanding of key Big Data basics for the non-technical reader. The term "Big Data" is becoming common buy it is not well understood outside of IT circles. Bid Data for Business Leaders delivers a nontechnical description of how Big Data is used, including legal and ethical concerns, and how affects corporations and transactions. Real-Time Big Data Analytics by Sumit Gupta and Saxena Shilpi. Feb, 2016 This book is for Big Data architects, developers, or programmers who want to Design, process, and analyze large sets of complex data in real time and/or develop software and frameworks to implement real-time analytics in open source technologies. It includes information on reliability of messages processed using Storm, transformations and database-level interactions, strategies to real-time data processing, Loading of datasets, building of queries, and it makes recommendations how to handle and process real-time transactional data, explore big data technologies and frameworks, work through practical challenges and use cases of real-time analytics versus batch analytics, develop real-word use cases for processing and analyzing data in real-time using the programming paradigm of Apache Storm, , use and optimization of Apache Storm for production deployments and workloads, Amazon Kinesis and Elastic MapReduce process and stream data, Spark SQL interactive and exploratory data analytics; and finally how to develop common enterprise architectures/applications for real-time and batch analytics. In short, this book provides you with the skills required to quickly design, implement and deploy your real-time analytics using real-world examples of big data use cases. • Apache Pig: Getting started with Data Science on Hadoop by Mario Meir-Huber. Jan, 2016 Part of the Kick Start series, in which they get you started fast on understanding the technology: Apache Pig is focused on helping managers, sales staff, consultants, trainers and students understand the use of Apache Pig. The series kick start attempts to provide a very fast entry into a new technology. The Kick Start comes with a lot of samples that can be downloaded from the book homepage: http://cloudvane.com/kick-starters/. Apache Pig: Getting Started: is useful if you need to build up knowledge on Pig within hours and don't want to spend weeks learning the content. Architecting Experience: A Marketing Science and Digital Analytics Handbook (Advances and Opportunities with Big Data by Scot R Wheeler. Jan, 2016 Architecting Experience has been designed to help readers develop the understanding of marketing data, technology and analytics. It´s intended for postgraduate students in Digital and Direct Marketing Master's programs and professionals in IT, Research, and Marketing. This book answers the most relevant marketing question "with an ever expanding array of digital touch points at one's disposal, how does one deliver content and experiences around one's brand that build relationships and drives results?" answer to this is "through the application of data and analytics to drive highly relevant, contextual targeted content and adaptive experience". In a world with infinite amount of content and methods for consuming that content, marketing communication today is about appealing to individuals, person by person. Effectively appealing to customers requires delivery of brand experiences built on relevance and recognition of context. . • • • The New Rules of Sales and Service: How to Use Agile Selling, Real-Time Customer Engagement, Big Data, Content by David Meerman Scott Jul, 2016 Sales and service have been redefined in the era of information. Because buyers are better informed, and come with more info, choices and opportunities than before, everything about sales has changed. Salespeople must adapt because the digital Economy. Now, as customers have available total information beforehand on the web, means salespeople must transform from authorities to consultants, product narratives must tell a story, and businesses must be agile enough to respond before opportunity is lost. This book offers a reference guide for new realities of selling when buyers are in charge. Today buyers are in charge. There is no more 'selling', there is only buying. The New Rules of Sales and Service shows how to stay on top of your selling and service customers game when rules have changed. New methods and strategies, new marketplace, this book is your essential guide to navigating the new digital marketplace, it introduces: The new sales cycle and how informative Web content drives the buying process, how to provide real-time sales and service 24/7 without letting it rule your life, the importance of the new understanding of the buyer personas, shows how modern customer service keeps existing clients and expands new business, why content-rich websites motivate interest, establish authority, and drive sales and finally how social media is transforming the role of salesperson into valued consultant. All in all, these are just some of the best rated 2016 books, with over 4 of 5 stars, both technical and commercial aspect of Big Data Innovation and Use have been discussed. There are many many more. Remember already in 2016 there are over 400 titles already published. Reading, browsing and knowing about some if these will assure to be updated in the information game.

Big Data Jobs Trends 2016 by @alfredosahagun for @3nglishOnline

Big Data Job Market Types of jobs in the big data field. At the beginning of last year 2015, according to Forbes The Hiring Scale for Jobs that require Big Data skills was of 76 point out of 100 being the highest of the Hiring Scale score, where it´s the most difficult for companies to discover the accurate candidates for their needs. A recent study at the end of 2015 result from Wanted Analytics, leader data provider resulted in four main areas of opportunity within the Big Data Industry, these skill sets are: Acquisition of Data, Mining of Data, Structuring of Data and Analysis of Data. This taxonomy comprised by workplace analytics leader Wanted Analytics, is normal terminology today in the industry. Wanted Analytics is acquiring work related data for some time now; a database of far more than a billion job listings testifies it. Its objective is to collect and analyze hiring trends, now it`s present in more than 150 countries worldwide. The National Job Posting Average that is opened to fill a cloud computing expertise IT professional is 47 days. Ever accelerating thus far, and particularly for the last couple of years and months, demand for big data skills through many career choices or jobs have grown loads over the past few years, is likely to still grow even more. In January 2015 according to the study as printed in Forbes Magazine the hiring data was already as this: • The most required, in first place with, 25% of Required Big data skills positions was for Software Developers of Applications, it had already grown and half-double just within that same year. • The second most required skills set or profession was and still is: Computer Systems Architects or Computer Engineers, accounting for 10% of wanted big data jobs; which half-double within a year too. • In third place, Marketing Managers, with a large 7% of the pie of hired big data jobs and accelerating even faster than the two previous jobs, with 85% increase in demand in a year. • As well as the four need skill profession, which is: Computer Systems Analysts, coming up in demand almost doubling from the previous year with 90% increase, and 5% share quota of the demanded big data jobs pie. • Fifth, Marketing and Market Research Specialists and Analysts also 5% approximately, and growing in demand by 50% half-doubled too within that year. • Unlike the Sixth, Management Analysts at roughly 4%, which went down by 12% in demand. • The positions with a 3% of Market Quota are: Web Developers, Network Administrator and IT Research Scientist. • All in the rise, but also watch out specially for IT Project Managers which tough still account for less than 4% demanded jobs of the big data world, it grew a whole 123,60% in just one year. Most (3 quarters) of the Industries looking for big data professionals look in the following 5 areas. First, The Professional, Scientific and Technical Services with 27.14%, Second, the Information Technologies Sector with 18.89%, Third, the Manufacturing with 12.35%, Fourth, the Retail Trade with 9.62% and Fifth, Sustainability, Waste Management & Remediation Services at 8.20% are the industries with the most job openings requiring big data expertise. All the other industries added up account for the remaining 25% to total the big data tech services demanded. This pie chart displays the open positions for the beginning of January 2015: • Over $100,000 a year is the median salary for professionals with big data expertise! Other sample jobs in this category can include: Big Data Solution Architect, Linux Systems and Big Data Engineer, Big Data Platform Engineer, Lead Software Engineer and Big Data (Java, Hadoop, SQL). Big Data Jobs Salaries The distribution of salaries is quite high, perhaps not as exuberant as hedge funds financial investors, but it doesn’t have any risk to research, learn and become expert in these fields of technology. • The worse 10% of Big Data Jobs makes 70.000$ and the 25th percentile is at 85.000$ approximately. • The Big Data Job Market Median Salary or average pay is just over 100.000$. • And the 75th percentile of salaries goes well over 120.000$ packet per year. • Finally the best 10% jobs in Big data earn more than 140.000$. In truth IT Professional Salaries, whether involve in the IM Tech or In the IB commercial area of the Bid Data Companies have been doing good in the salary range for years, Since year 2012 results aren´t much different. The average business staff base salary is just below the US$ 100.000 whereas the business management salary is over $120,000. Technical Knowledge salaries can be better, with data integration/data warehousing salaries at around $100,000 for staff and well over $120,000 for managers. Beware that the gap between staff salaries and management salaries has indeed widened tough. The right Human Resources powers up the Company, as well as its development, for some time now, in every leading industry as it´s the tech industry now, there's a fight to find, convince, attract and keep outstanding IT Candidate professionals with business intelligence and information management. It´s a well-known fact that within the Bid Data Industry the Talent Gap was been widening from the different of talents with clear BI analytics, and other more directed towards the IM version as noted in the InformationWeek IT Salary Survey. That´s regards the average salaries but what about those BI, and IM outstanding talents at the uppermost part of the pay scales, for CEO and those Consultant, Advisor who can tell the board of Companies what will occur next. A generation gap is emerging within BI and information management workforce. The young generation is pouring ideas, predictive insights and it constantly forward-looking. Normally they are great mathematicians, statisticians who are knowledgeable in programming and know about data modeling. The young next generation, according to a survey by Accenture technologies are close enough to the technology, so that they are familiar with the different algorithms to use with the right data. As created data grows in the five V´s volume, variety, velocity, veracity and value, the big data grows deeper and deeper and more accurate predictive models insights are needed, therefore the best jobs go to those who are updated in Open Source emerging big- databases such as NoSQL and Hadoop platforms. In general database professional are changing organizations in aiding them to put in order their information, draw better conclusions and to put more and more information into work, with the objective of mire efficiency. Big Data Job Locations Usually big data positions are in the Washington (Alexandria and Arlington), in California (Santa Clara, San Jose, San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Oakland and Fremont. Especially on the West Coast in the south areas (California and New Mexico) and on the north like Seattle, Portland and Vancouver (Canada). And on the East coast we have the highest Big Data Jobs concentration also in the north area surrounding Delaware, Arlington (Washington), around NYC and New Jersey, and Boston Massachusetts specially. Candidate Competition It's would be great to find a way out to know who's prepared to lead the big-data initiatives of the future and the areas that will need to be developed. Usually the number of well-prepared candidates oscillates for dense locations as NY around 27.000, or lesser places with less than 10.000 candidates. These are: The places with the highest job volume are the San Jose – Sun Valley - Santa Clara with more than 2.700 places for Bid Data professionals. In second and third place with just above 2000 jobs are: San Francisco – Oakland – Freemont area and Washington-Arlington-Alexandria area. In fourth place there´s New York, Northern New Jersey, Long Island with more than 1500 big data positions. The Boston – Quincy – Cambridge zone has 1200 jobs and the Seattle, Tacoma, Belleview just below 1100. Then Dallas, Forth worth Texas has around 700 jobs, as the Chicago – Naperville area. Then Long Angeles – Long Beach and finally the Raleigh North Carolina have just over 500 positions. There´re more places with less than 500 jobs offer which don´t account for as many as to be specified here. Which Companies demand more Big Data Positions. Though large renowned companies that account for 5.30% of the Big Data Job Employment such as IBM (International/Intelligent Business Machines) and INUIT INC. with 3.60% of the total big-data-related employment have reduced their number of required Big Data related skills by 525 and 240 positions. All other main Big Data Employers for the beginning of last year 2015 were: CISCO with 5.70% of the total big-data-related employment, with 3.600 more jobs in a year, and Oracle with 3.60% employed, with 2250 new employees and then there are those companies that account for almost 2% of big-data-related employment as Amazon, EMC Corporation, CRGT Inc, Teradata, Sabre and Noblis. Skills Demanded on the Rise Most Demanded Skill Sets in Big Data with a rough percentage of skill-need are in order Preference: Java 6,60%, SQL 5.80%, Apache Hadoop 5,50%, Software Development 4,70%, Linux 4,10%, Python 4%, NoSQL 2,74%, Data Warehousing 2,73%, UNIV 2,43% and Software as a Service 2,38%. There are many others with less demand. A recent study, from source InformationWeek. State of IT. Staffing Survey, has revealed that during the next couple of years big data and analytics will be a top hiring priority for companies, almost half of big-data related companies have been the recent years increasing staffing in all-big-data-related-areas by a minimum of 10% and up to more than 100%. Unluckily more than half of all IT companies agree that it will be hard to find good big-data analytics expert candidates soon. This is called the expertise Gap that´s currently being broadening. The IT leaders will answer this contingency by a strategy of 4 four main actions: the hiring of new employees certainly (here there technical, retraining of existing people, hiring of temporary employees and contracting of consultants to fill the gap. This isn´t the only concerning developing gap in the industry, there´s clearly a technical gap as well. Here are some of the most looked for Job-Expertise by Companies demanding Big Data-related Technical Skill Sets: JOBS DEMANDED ON THE RISE: Information Technology Project Managers There was a 123.60% jump in demand for Information Technology Project Managers with big data expertise, and an 89.8% increase for Computer Systems Analysts. The following table provides an overview of the distribution of open positions by occupation and the percentage growth in job demand over time. Python Programmers In year 2015 the demand for Python programming expertise increased 96.9% in big-data related positions in the last twelve months. Computer Systems Analysts Demand for Computer Systems Analysts with big data expertise increased 89.9% in the last twelve months. Computer and Information Research Scientists Demand for Computer and Information Research Scientists rose 85.40% within a year. Analytics experts Remember from the 4 big data area (data acquisition, management-processing, storing and this last one Analytics seems to be the most In-vogue for IT and non IT companies. In fact 53% of big data-focused companies say will be tough to find experienced and trained Analytics Experts for the upcoming years. Big Data IT Staffing´s report offers some instructions for how to look for the right talent. IT frontrunners not only plan to borrow, or take borrowed talent but also now mostly to train them, here are some tips of what job candidates should ought to do to stay on top of their hiring game: Firstly, as an incentive for employees to further enhance their education, retrain or broaden it, therefore it should be instituted tuition-reimbursement programs for IT and Tech educational opportunities related to the company´s aim. Secondly, have existing employees attend continuous education ops, conferences, seminars, webinars, online or not courses and classes for their training. Where to find talent For large companies it would be a good idea to open a shop near the IT Universities, as much of them already do, but a smaller growing online business requiring better big data bachelors and experienced professionals might want to open a branch near these communities to ensure being able to draw upon the best of these college and schools. As is the area of California, Santa Ana, Palo Alto, Silicon Valley and others. Just go near where the talent is. How to reduce the Widening Talent Gap and Salary Gap When it´s time to rethink how to improve existing talent, specially the less qualified. By building teams, structure based on projects to mix different functions but also structure of teams by expertise or groups based to share knowledge. Many companies have analytics experts, but their work is often secretive and limited to areas as research and development, whereas mixing in teams with new apprentices or interdisciplinary business can be a great opportunity for company´s growth. Enrolling in Academic Big Data Analytics programs is a way to solve the difference of IM to BI analytics. Analytics have been a major big data topic the last years, many universities have focus programs on these aspects and produce graduates with high degree of advanced IT and Big Data knowledge. The most recognized newly established degree programs are at Northwestern University, North Carolina State University, the University of Alabama., Oklahoma State, Georgia Tech, MIT, Texas Tech, California State University and the University of Connecticut. A more hand-on manufacturing, practical learning with the use of machines can be obtained from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, Carnegie Mellon and the University of California at Berkeley. Our sixth and seventh tips relate to the skills you should look for and the corporate culture you should cultivate as a would-be employer. The advice cuts both ways if you're a would-be big data analytics employee; read on to consider our detailed advice on what skills to build and the type of environment where you might feel at home. As a conclusion, government agencies and businesses nowadays are relaying on big data and their data-driven results, and in turn this has increased the demand for analytics and information management expertise, the industry, its insights and salaries of its many jobs are in the rise. __ By Economist @AlfredoSahagun for @3nglishOnline Content Writers and @EnglishxSpanish translation Services. On Apri 16th, 2016.

Big Data Jobs Trends 2016 by @alfredosahagun for @3nglishOnline

Big Data Jobs Trends 2016 by @alfredosahagun for @3nglishOnline content writers, @EnglishxSpanish translation services, @Insi

Friday, April 15, 2016

BLOG ENTRY NUMBER 100

BIENVENIDOS / WELCOME THIS IS BLOG ENTRY NUMBER 100 WHAT A SLACKER JUST 100 WRITINGS / READING IN MORE THAN 10 YEARS ... .. . ORE TO COME

PropertyGuru - the company overview - by @alfredosahagun for @3nglishOnline content writers @spanishxenglish translations

PropertyGuru PropertyGuru was founded in May year 2007 and its official site set up in December. Property Guru established became Singapore’s Properties and Real State Main Website quickly. The platform provides access to property and home-related products but it also offers services, news, , information, guidance, downloads, tools and the largest online property database in Singapore. History Unlike many entrepreneurs who pursue a long inspiring dream, the founder of this company Steve Melhuish only became passionate of real estate after he decided that it was a large market in need, or with a clear niche and he made his startup. Some say it may have started to be incubated back in 2004; its founders and bosses are Steve Melhuish and Jani Rautiainen. Now with over 300 hundred employees Property Guru is the most successful real estate business platform in Asia. His mission and objective was to allow users, potential buyers and or investors research more efficiently online real state and property market, and now he controls the largest Internet real estate website in the region with 14 million users a month. In fact, the renowned Alexa Rank from Alexa Inc, A commercial web traffic data and analytics California-based Company, gave Property Guru.com an Alexa index of 8,618 as of January 2016 of Interned traffic, certifying it as Singapore’s leading online property portal, PropertyGuru. The British-born Steve Melhuish didn´t know much at all on the real estate market in back in 2005, and now he dominates the industry. Melhuish´s Wife and he had just recently moved to Asia and to the city two years earlier and were extremely shocked and frustrated of how difficult it was to browse and find new housing in Asia, specifically in Singapore. The previous and current search sites like Realtor.com, RentaHouse, Century21 and other were popular only in the United States, but not so yet in Asia, in fact, properties advertising were still handled by the newspaper´s classified ads until Melhuish decided to found PropertyGuru formally in 2007. How it works Relying on Computer Database processing and Online access, they area more efficient of course that the traditional newspapers and or real estate agents options. Also, money is often saved because it can be more easily scrutinized through the many choices. PropertyGuru’s website allows buyers and sellers, or users in general search through for properties based on filters as Prices, Type, Location, Size, Features, etc: and see many photos of interiors and floor plans. PropertyGuru makes money in their operations in three main ways: - Agents fee: by charging agents a fee to use the platform. - Advertising: It sells online ad spots on the platform and also adds on the printed newsletter. And finally, - Property developers: Assisting the entire campaign from advertising to sales for property developers. Growth and Expansion In its home town Singapore, Ong Teck Hui the National Director of Research at Property Broker Jones Lang LaSalle Inc., says PropertyGuru has already become the most common platform for people to go searching to buy or rent real state. They have created a bit like a “Coke brand for Drinks” when you want to find a property you think of PropertyGuru. Remember, only in Singapore, Property Guru holds 90% of the property sales market. The expansion Melhuish has begun into Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, introducing varieties of the site and applications to sell their products. Fundraising In June 2012, the idea raised almost 50 million US$ from European property portal group, ImmobilienScout24. In June 2015, the 47 years old expat was able to raise 130 million US$ from venture capital investors as Indonesia’s´ Emtek and TPG Capital, achieving the 2nd biggest funding amount of that year for a Southeast Asian Company. PropertyGuru’s fundraising was the 2nd largest amount in the region. The 1st fundraised amount was earned by GrabTaxi Holdings a taxi-substitute-riding- service, rival to Uber Inc. in Southeast Asia. Melhuish is also astonish of the startups growth since in the short span of time numberous rivals have emerged and disappeared in the past eight years. Two months before he teamed with partner Jani Rautiainen to start PropertyGuru, 3 new competitors entered the market, including iProperty Group. In November, iProperty was acquired by REA Group News Corp. unit which owns real estate websites in Europe, Australia and China. At the moment PropetryGuru is still private and handle´s hundreds of billions of dollars every year, nonetheless Melhuish has declined to discuss PropertyGuru’s valuation and stated that there´re no immediate plans for an IPO Initial Public Offer to open up their capital to shareholders, and grow with this extra capital. Revenues PropertyGuru incomes derive from the same two main sources as most online web businesses do: First, from the Fee of Enrolment, or Agents fee, which is a rent amount required to make use of the platform and Second, the selling of marketing and advertising online. Also in Property Guru´s case they have advertisement in printed newsletters to complement bringing people into the online web-based system. And get fee from backing up whole marketing project for construction developers. Nowadays Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand´s joint business account approximately for at least $150 billion annual market for property transactions. Recently as its largest deal so far, PropertyGuru´s as an investment to power up its core business, has decided to acquire Ensign Media, architectural luxury properties websites and magazines content developer, in Melhuish´s words this is in order to build strength and depth in the markets to become integrated player. Competitors The Properties´ online business is a very competitive one. PropertyGuru competes with startups and banks. In Melhuish own words he says that “they commonly have one or two new competitor every year” PropertyGuru is currently facing challenges to its leading position; if some of the giants gain more market and or develop faster it may stop being the region’s hottest startups. Some of this are: 99.co, by Facebook´s co-founder Eduardo Saverin and Sequoia Capital, using an interface similar to Airbnb, 99.co is one of the main and toughest competitors. founded by Singapore impresario Darius Cheung, of 35 years thinks the real difference his Google-like “99.co” property platform and that PropertyGuru is that whereas traditional property websites are influenced in their search results by whoever pays more to get priority listings. His 99.co startup doesn’t, they mostly care Google-like to find the most accurate market properties results. Cheung says “this encourages people want to put more accurate, quality information”. Some of most famous competitors are: Asiapropertyworld.com, propertyportalwatch.com, global leader, www.propertywire.com, www.listglobally.com, and big corps as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp too. Another product competitor is: DBS Group Holdings Ltd., Southeast Asia’s largest lender, has an application to list transactions and provide an all-online-check mortgage calculator to help users buy a home. But for now, at least in Singapore, the Company accounts for roughly 90% of the Real State Sales market. More than the following four competitors together! Consumer Shift PropertyGuru has developed and launched successfully 15 mobile apps in Southeast Asia to fend off the consumer shift to tablet computers and mobile phones, of users, buyers and agents in the four Asian countries. Locale is important to keep customer´s loyalty, therefore PropertyGuru has done everything from allowing prospective buyers to search for property “near here” and enabling agents to upload listing for better flexibility, automation and customizing. For their target market, and their branding (imaging) PropertyGuru has adopted a method of focusing on higher quality agent listings ranked higher, regardless of whether they pay or not, to keep up a high-end look and customer base. Milestones and Recognitions 2008 Best Singapore Property Portal in CNBC Asia-Pacific Property Awards. 2009 World's Best Property Portal 2009 winner, Asia's Best Property Portal and "Best Singapore Property Portal at the CNBC Asia-Pacific Property Awards. 2010 Best E-enterprise Company 2010 winner at the Singapore infocomm Technology Federation (SiTF).Best Performing VC Backed Company 2010 winner at the Singapore Venture Capital & Private Equity Association (SVCA). 2011 PropertyGuru won "Gold Award - Online Business 2011" at the South-East Asian SME Tiger Awards. PropertyGuru won "Top 100 Asia Technology Firm 2011" at the Red Herring Award. 2012 Best Mobile App - Merit at the Singapore infocomm Technology Federation (SiTF) 2013 Best Informative Use of Mobile - Gold winner at Marketing Magazine's MobEx Awards Most Popular app - Bronze at the Singapore infocomm Technology Federation (SiTF). Best Mobile App by Media Owner - Gold winner. 2014 Best Best Direct Response Campaign – Bronze winner. App/Content by A Media Owner - Gold winner at Marketing Magazine's MobEx Awards. What´s to Come Though the competition seems to be tough, specially of introducing the Asian successful idea into the western world. PropertyGuru certainly has a head start. The company has chosen to remain private and privately run; they are ensuring making more right decisions along to near future. We expect more assertive business decisions from Mr. Steve Melhuish to lead the way into Asian´s Property Booms. ___ Written by economist @alfredosahagun – for @3nglishOnline content developers and media marketing @englishxspanish translation service and @insitutoidiomas online language classes.

misc reading.. . The Dark Side of Dubain - Dubai isnt all Gold

The dark side of Dubai Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging. British Expat In The UAE? Avoid Losing 55% of Your UK Pension Download a Free Expat Pension Guide your.qropschoices.com/HMRC-listed Diet Food Delivery Plan 14 days Trial Packages @ AED 1,750. Includes 3 meals & 2 snacks per day healthfactory.com/Healthy_Plan Mohammed Bin Rashid City Luxury MBR City villas for sale. Find available Villas - View here! www.justproperty.com/ The wide, smiling face of Sheikh Mohammed – the absolute ruler of Dubai – beams down on his creation. His image is displayed on every other building, sandwiched between the more familiar corporate rictuses of Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders. This man has sold Dubai to the world as the city of One Thousand and One Arabian Lights, a Shangri-La in the Middle East insulated from the dust-storms blasting across the region. He dominates the Manhattan-manqué skyline, beaming out from row after row of glass pyramids and hotels smelted into the shape of piles of golden coins. And there he stands on the tallest building in the world – a skinny spike, jabbing farther into the sky than any other human construction in history. But something has flickered in Sheikh Mohammed's smile. The ubiquitous cranes have paused on the skyline, as if stuck in time. There are countless buildings half-finished, seemingly abandoned. In the swankiest new constructions – like the vast Atlantis hotel, a giant pink castle built in 1,000 days for $1.5bn on its own artificial island – where rainwater is leaking from the ceilings and the tiles are falling off the roof. This Neverland was built on the Never-Never – and now the cracks are beginning to show. Suddenly it looks less like Manhattan in the sun than Iceland in the desert. Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history. I. An Adult Disneyland Karen Andrews can't speak. Every time she starts to tell her story, she puts her head down and crumples. She is slim and angular and has the faded radiance of the once-rich, even though her clothes are as creased as her forehead. I find her in the car park of one of Dubai's finest international hotels, where she is living, in her Range Rover. She has been sleeping here for months, thanks to the kindness of the Bangladeshi car park attendants who don't have the heart to move her on. This is not where she thought her Dubai dream would end. Her story comes out in stutters, over four hours. At times, her old voice – witty and warm – breaks through. Karen came here from Canada when her husband was offered a job in the senior division of a famous multinational. "When he said Dubai, I said – if you want me to wear black and quit booze, baby, you've got the wrong girl. But he asked me to give it a chance. And I loved him." All her worries melted when she touched down in Dubai in 2005. "It was an adult Disneyland, where Sheikh Mohammed is the mouse," she says. "Life was fantastic. You had these amazing big apartments, you had a whole army of your own staff, you pay no taxes at all. It seemed like everyone was a CEO. We were partying the whole time." Her husband, Daniel, bought two properties. "We were drunk on Dubai," she says. But for the first time in his life, he was beginning to mismanage their finances. "We're not talking huge sums, but he was getting confused. It was so unlike Daniel, I was surprised. We got into a little bit of debt." After a year, she found out why: Daniel was diagnosed with a brain tumour. One doctor told him he had a year to live; another said it was benign and he'd be okay. But the debts were growing. "Before I came here, I didn't know anything about Dubai law. I assumed if all these big companies come here, it must be pretty like Canada's or any other liberal democracy's," she says. Nobody told her there is no concept of bankruptcy. If you get into debt and you can't pay, you go to prison. "When we realised that, I sat Daniel down and told him: listen, we need to get out of here. He knew he was guaranteed a pay-off when he resigned, so we said – right, let's take the pay-off, clear the debt, and go." So Daniel resigned – but he was given a lower pay-off than his contract suggested. The debt remained. As soon as you quit your job in Dubai, your employer has to inform your bank. If you have any outstanding debts that aren't covered by your savings, then all your accounts are frozen, and you are forbidden to leave the country. "Suddenly our cards stopped working. We had nothing. We were thrown out of our apartment." Karen can't speak about what happened next for a long time; she is shaking. Daniel was arrested and taken away on the day of their eviction. It was six days before she could talk to him. "He told me he was put in a cell with another debtor, a Sri Lankan guy who was only 27, who said he couldn't face the shame to his family. Daniel woke up and the boy had swallowed razor-blades. He banged for help, but nobody came, and the boy died in front of him." Karen managed to beg from her friends for a few weeks, "but it was so humiliating. I've never lived like this. I worked in the fashion industry. I had my own shops. I've never..." She peters out. Daniel was sentenced to six months' imprisonment at a trial he couldn't understand. It was in Arabic, and there was no translation. "Now I'm here illegally, too," Karen says I've got no money, nothing. I have to last nine months until he's out, somehow." Looking away, almost paralysed with embarrassment, she asks if I could buy her a meal. She is not alone. All over the city, there are maxed-out expats sleeping secretly in the sand-dunes or the airport or in their cars. "The thing you have to understand about Dubai is – nothing is what it seems," Karen says at last. "Nothing. This isn't a city, it's a con-job. They lure you in telling you it's one thing – a modern kind of place – but beneath the surface it's a medieval dictatorship." II. Tumbleweed Thirty years ago, almost all of contemporary Dubai was desert, inhabited only by cactuses and tumbleweed and scorpions. But downtown there are traces of the town that once was, buried amidst the metal and glass. In the dusty fort of the Dubai Museum, a sanitised version of this story is told. In the mid-18th century, a small village was built here, in the lower Persian Gulf, where people would dive for pearls off the coast. It soon began to accumulate a cosmopolitan population washing up from Persia, the Indian subcontinent, and other Arab countries, all hoping to make their fortune. They named it after a local locust, the daba, who consumed everything before it. The town was soon seized by the gunships of the British Empire, who held it by the throat as late as 1971. As they scuttled away, Dubai decided to ally with the six surrounding states and make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The British quit, exhausted, just as oil was being discovered, and the sheikhs who suddenly found themselves in charge faced a remarkable dilemma. They were largely illiterate nomads who spent their lives driving camels through the desert – yet now they had a vast pot of gold. What should they do with it? Dubai only had a dribble of oil compared to neighbouring Abu Dhabi – so Sheikh Maktoum decided to use the revenues to build something that would last. Israel used to boast it made the desert bloom; Sheikh Maktoum resolved to make the desert boom. He would build a city to be a centre of tourism and financial services, sucking up cash and talent from across the globe. He invited the world to come tax-free – and they came in their millions, swamping the local population, who now make up just 5 per cent of Dubai. A city seemed to fall from the sky in just three decades, whole and complete and swelling. They fast-forwarded from the 18th century to the 21st in a single generation. If you take the Big Bus Tour of Dubai – the passport to a pre-processed experience of every major city on earth – you are fed the propaganda-vision of how this happened. "Dubai's motto is 'Open doors, open minds'," the tour guide tells you in clipped tones, before depositing you at the souks to buy camel tea-cosies. "Here you are free. To purchase fabrics," he adds. As you pass each new monumental building, he tells you: "The World Trade Centre was built by His Highness..." But this is a lie. The sheikh did not build this city. It was built by slaves. They are building it now. III. Hidden in plain view There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats, like Karen; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers? Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Dubai are bussed from their sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town, where they are quarantined away. Until a few years ago they were shuttled back and forth on cattle trucks, but the expats complained this was unsightly, so now they are shunted on small metal buses that function like greenhouses in the desert heat. They sweat like sponges being slowly wrung out. Sonapur is a rubble-strewn patchwork of miles and miles of identical concrete buildings. Some 300,000 men live piled up here, in a place whose name in Hindi means "City of Gold". In the first camp I stop at – riven with the smell of sewage and sweat – the men huddle around, eager to tell someone, anyone, what is happening to them. Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. "To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it is hell," he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal's village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2,300) for the work visa – a fee they'd pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise. As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied. Sahinal was in a panic. His family back home – his son, daughter, wife and parents – were waiting for money, excited that their boy had finally made it. But he was going to have to work for more than two years just to pay for the cost of getting here – and all to earn less than he did in Bangladesh. He shows me his room. It is a tiny, poky, concrete cell with triple-decker bunk-beds, where he lives with 11 other men. All his belongings are piled onto his bunk: three shirts, a spare pair of trousers, and a cellphone. The room stinks, because the lavatories in the corner of the camp – holes in the ground – are backed up with excrement and clouds of black flies. There is no air conditioning or fans, so the heat is "unbearable. You cannot sleep. All you do is sweat and scratch all night." At the height of summer, people sleep on the floor, on the roof, anywhere where they can pray for a moment of breeze. The water delivered to the camp in huge white containers isn't properly desalinated: it tastes of salt. "It makes us sick, but we have nothing else to drink," he says. The work is "the worst in the world," he says. "You have to carry 50kg bricks and blocks of cement in the worst heat imaginable ... This heat – it is like nothing else. You sweat so much you can't pee, not for days or weeks. It's like all the liquid comes out through your skin and you stink. You become dizzy and sick but you aren't allowed to stop, except for an hour in the afternoon. You know if you drop anything or slip, you could die. If you take time off sick, your wages are docked, and you are trapped here even longer." He is currently working on the 67th floor of a shiny new tower, where he builds upwards, into the sky, into the heat. He doesn't know its name. In his four years here, he has never seen the Dubai of tourist-fame, except as he constructs it floor-by-floor. Is he angry? He is quiet for a long time. "Here, nobody shows their anger. You can't. You get put in jail for a long time, then deported." Last year, some workers went on strike after they were not given their wages for four months. The Dubai police surrounded their camps with razor-wire and water-cannons and blasted them out and back to work. The "ringleaders" were imprisoned. I try a different question: does Sohinal regret coming? All the men look down, awkwardly. "How can we think about that? We are trapped. If we start to think about regrets..." He lets the sentence trail off. Eventually, another worker breaks the silence by adding: "I miss my country, my family and my land. We can grow food in Bangladesh. Here, nothing grows. Just oil and buildings." Since the recession hit, they say, the electricity has been cut off in dozens of the camps, and the men have not been paid for months. Their companies have disappeared with their passports and their pay. "We have been robbed of everything. Even if somehow we get back to Bangladesh, the loan sharks will demand we repay our loans immediately, and when we can't, we'll be sent to prison." This is all supposed to be illegal. Employers are meant to pay on time, never take your passport, give you breaks in the heat – but I met nobody who said it happens. Not one. These men are conned into coming and trapped into staying, with the complicity of the Dubai authorities. Sahinal could well die out here. A British man who used to work on construction projects told me: "There's a huge number of suicides in the camps and on the construction sites, but they're not reported. They're described as 'accidents'." Even then, their families aren't free: they simply inherit the debts. A Human Rights Watch study found there is a "cover-up of the true extent" of deaths from heat exhaustion, overwork and suicide, but the Indian consulate registered 971 deaths of their nationals in 2005 alone. After this figure was leaked, the consulates were told to stop counting. At night, in the dusk, I sit in the camp with Sohinal and his friends as they scrape together what they have left to buy a cheap bottle of spirits. They down it in one ferocious gulp. "It helps you to feel numb", Sohinal says through a stinging throat. In the distance, the glistening Dubai skyline he built stands, oblivious. IV. Mauled by the mall I find myself stumbling in a daze from the camps into the sprawling marble malls that seem to stand on every street in Dubai. It is so hot there is no point building pavements; people gather in these cathedrals of consumerism to bask in the air conditioning. So within a ten minute taxi-ride, I have left Sohinal and I am standing in the middle of Harvey Nichols, being shown a £20,000 taffeta dress by a bored salesgirl. "As you can see, it is cut on the bias..." she says, and I stop writing. Time doesn't seem to pass in the malls. Days blur with the same electric light, the same shined floors, the same brands I know from home. Here, Dubai is reduced to its component sounds: do-buy. In the most expensive malls I am almost alone, the shops empty and echoing. On the record, everybody tells me business is going fine. Off the record, they look panicky. There is a hat exhibition ahead of the Dubai races, selling elaborate headgear for £1,000 a pop. "Last year, we were packed. Now look," a hat designer tells me. She swoops her arm over a vacant space. I approach a blonde 17-year-old Dutch girl wandering around in hotpants, oblivious to the swarms of men gaping at her. "I love it here!" she says. "The heat, the malls, the beach!" Does it ever bother you that it's a slave society? She puts her head down, just as Sohinal did. "I try not to see," she says. Even at 17, she has learned not to look, and not to ask; that, she senses, is a transgression too far. Between the malls, there is nothing but the connecting tissue of asphalt. Every road has at least four lanes; Dubai feels like a motorway punctuated by shopping centres. You only walk anywhere if you are suicidal. The residents of Dubai flit from mall to mall by car or taxis. How does it feel if this is your country, filled with foreigners? Unlike the expats and the slave class, I can't just approach the native Emiratis to ask questions when I see them wandering around – the men in cool white robes, the women in sweltering black. If you try, the women blank you, and the men look affronted, and tell you brusquely that Dubai is "fine". So I browse through the Emirati blog-scene and found some typical-sounding young Emiratis. We meet – where else? – in the mall. Ahmed al-Atar is a handsome 23-year-old with a neat, trimmed beard, tailored white robes, and rectangular wire-glasses. He speaks perfect American-English, and quickly shows that he knows London, Los Angeles and Paris better than most westerners. Sitting back in his chair in an identikit Starbucks, he announces: "This is the best place in the world to be young! The government pays for your education up to PhD level. You get given a free house when you get married. You get free healthcare, and if it's not good enough here, they pay for you to go abroad. You don't even have to pay for your phone calls. Almost everyone has a maid, a nanny, and a driver. And we never pay any taxes. Don't you wish you were Emirati?" I try to raise potential objections to this Panglossian summary, but he leans forward and says: "Look – my grandfather woke up every day and he would have to fight to get to the well first to get water. When the wells ran dry, they had to have water delivered by camel. They were always hungry and thirsty and desperate for jobs. He limped all his life, because he there was no medical treatment available when he broke his leg. Now look at us!" For Emiratis, this is a Santa Claus state, handing out goodies while it makes its money elsewhere: through renting out land to foreigners, soft taxes on them like business and airport charges, and the remaining dribble of oil. Most Emiratis, like Ahmed, work for the government, so they're cushioned from the credit crunch. "I haven't felt any effect at all, and nor have my friends," he says. "Your employment is secure. You will only be fired if you do something incredibly bad." The laws are currently being tightened, to make it even more impossible to sack an Emirati. Sure, the flooding-in of expats can sometimes be "an eyesore", Ahmed says. "But we see the expats as the price we had to pay for this development. How else could we do it? Nobody wants to go back to the days of the desert, the days before everyone came. We went from being like an African country to having an average income per head of $120,000 a year. And we're supposed to complain?" He says the lack of political freedom is fine by him. "You'll find it very hard to find an Emirati who doesn't support Sheikh Mohammed." Because they're scared? "No, because we really all support him. He's a great leader. Just look!" He smiles and says: "I'm sure my life is very much like yours. We hang out, have a coffee, go to the movies. You'll be in a Pizza Hut or Nando's in London, and at the same time I'll be in one in Dubai," he says, ordering another latte. But do all young Emiratis see it this way? Can it really be so sunny in the political sands? In the sleek Emirates Tower Hotel, I meet Sultan al-Qassemi. He's a 31-year-old Emirati columnist for the Dubai press and private art collector, with a reputation for being a contrarian liberal, advocating gradual reform. He is wearing Western clothes – blue jeans and a Ralph Lauren shirt – and speaks incredibly fast, turning himself into a manic whirr of arguments. "People here are turning into lazy, overweight babies!" he exclaims. "The nanny state has gone too far. We don't do anything for ourselves! Why don't any of us work for the private sector? Why can't a mother and father look after their own child?" And yet, when I try to bring up the system of slavery that built Dubai, he looks angry. "People should give us credit," he insists. "We are the most tolerant people in the world. Dubai is the only truly international city in the world. Everyone who comes here is treated with respect." I pause, and think of the vast camps in Sonapur, just a few miles away. Does he even know they exist? He looks irritated. "You know, if there are 30 or 40 cases [of worker abuse] a year, that sounds like a lot but when you think about how many people are here..." Thirty or 40? This abuse is endemic to the system, I say. We're talking about hundreds of thousands. Sultan is furious. He splutters: "You don't think Mexicans are treated badly in New York City? And how long did it take Britain to treat people well? I could come to London and write about the homeless people on Oxford Street and make your city sound like a terrible place, too! The workers here can leave any time they want! Any Indian can leave, any Asian can leave!" But they can't, I point out. Their passports are taken away, and their wages are withheld. "Well, I feel bad if that happens, and anybody who does that should be punished. But their embassies should help them." They try. But why do you forbid the workers – with force – from going on strike against lousy employers? "Thank God we don't allow that!" he exclaims. "Strikes are in-convenient! They go on the street – we're not having that. We won't be like France. Imagine a country where they the workers can just stop whenever they want!" So what should the workers do when they are cheated and lied to? "Quit. Leave the country." I sigh. Sultan is seething now. "People in the West are always complaining about us," he says. Suddenly, he adopts a mock-whiny voice and says, in imitation of these disgusting critics: "Why don't you treat animals better? Why don't you have better shampoo advertising? Why don't you treat labourers better?" It's a revealing order: animals, shampoo, then workers. He becomes more heated, shifting in his seat, jabbing his finger at me. "I gave workers who worked for me safety goggles and special boots, and they didn't want to wear them! It slows them down!" And then he smiles, coming up with what he sees as his killer argument. "When I see Western journalists criticise us – don't you realise you're shooting yourself in the foot? The Middle East will be far more dangerous if Dubai fails. Our export isn't oil, it's hope. Poor Egyptians or Libyans or Iranians grow up saying – I want to go to Dubai. We're very important to the region. We are showing how to be a modern Muslim country. We don't have any fundamentalists here. Europeans shouldn't gloat at our demise. You should be very worried.... Do you know what will happen if this model fails? Dubai will go down the Iranian path, the Islamist path." Sultan sits back. My arguments have clearly disturbed him; he says in a softer, conciliatory tone, almost pleading: "Listen. My mother used to go to the well and get a bucket of water every morning. On her wedding day, she was given an orange as a gift because she had never eaten one. Two of my brothers died when they were babies because the healthcare system hadn't developed yet. Don't judge us." He says it again, his eyes filled with intensity: "Don't judge us." V. The Dunkin' Donuts Dissidents But there is another face to the Emirati minority – a small huddle of dissidents, trying to shake the Sheikhs out of abusive laws. Next to a Virgin Megastore and a Dunkin' Donuts, with James Blunt's "You're Beautiful" blaring behind me, I meet the Dubai dictatorship's Public Enemy Number One. By way of introduction, Mohammed al-Mansoori says from within his white robes and sinewy face: "Westerners come her and see the malls and the tall buildings and they think that means we are free. But these businesses, these buildings – who are they for? This is a dictatorship. The royal family think they own the country, and the people are their servants. There is no freedom here." We snuffle out the only Arabic restaurant in this mall, and he says everything you are banned – under threat of prison – from saying in Dubai. Mohammed tells me he was born in Dubai to a fisherman father who taught him one enduring lesson: Never follow the herd. Think for yourself. In the sudden surge of development, Mohammed trained as a lawyer. By the Noughties, he had climbed to the head of the Jurists' Association, an organisation set up to press for Dubai's laws to be consistent with international human rights legislation. And then – suddenly – Mohammed thwacked into the limits of Sheikh Mohammed's tolerance. Horrified by the "system of slavery" his country was being built on, he spoke out to Human Rights Watch and the BBC. "So I was hauled in by the secret police and told: shut up, or you will lose you job, and your children will be unemployable," he says. "But how could I be silent?" He was stripped of his lawyer's licence and his passport – becoming yet another person imprisoned in this country. "I have been blacklisted and so have my children. The newspapers are not allowed to write about me." Why is the state so keen to defend this system of slavery? He offers a prosaic explanation. "Most companies are owned by the government, so they oppose human rights laws because it will reduce their profit margins. It's in their interests that the workers are slaves." Last time there was a depression, there was a starbust of democracy in Dubai, seized by force from the sheikhs. In the 1930s, the city's merchants banded together against Sheikh Said bin Maktum al-Maktum – the absolute ruler of his day – and insisted they be given control over the state finances. It lasted only a few years, before the Sheikh – with the enthusiastic support of the British – snuffed them out. And today? Sheikh Mohammed turned Dubai into Creditopolis, a city built entirely on debt. Dubai owes 107 percent of its entire GDP. It would be bust already, if the neighbouring oil-soaked state of Abu Dhabi hadn't pulled out its chequebook. Mohammed says this will constrict freedom even further. "Now Abu Dhabi calls the tunes – and they are much more conservative and restrictive than even Dubai. Freedom here will diminish every day." Already, new media laws have been drafted forbidding the press to report on anything that could "damage" Dubai or "its economy". Is this why the newspapers are giving away glossy supplements talking about "encouraging economic indicators"? Everybody here waves Islamism as the threat somewhere over the horizon, sure to swell if their advice is not followed. Today, every imam is appointed by the government, and every sermon is tightly controlled to keep it moderate. But Mohammed says anxiously: "We don't have Islamism here now, but I think that if you control people and give them no way to express anger, it could rise. People who are told to shut up all the time can just explode." Later that day, against another identikit-corporate backdrop, I meet another dissident – Abdulkhaleq Abdullah, Professor of Political Science at Emirates University. His anger focuses not on political reform, but the erosion of Emirati identity. He is famous among the locals, a rare outspoken conductor for their anger. He says somberly: "There has been a rupture here. This is a totally different city to the one I was born in 50 years ago." He looks around at the shiny floors and Western tourists and says: "What we see now didn't occur in our wildest dreams. We never thought we could be such a success, a trendsetter, a model for other Arab countries. The people of Dubai are mighty proud of their city, and rightly so. And yet..." He shakes his head. "In our hearts, we fear we have built a modern city but we are losing it to all these expats." Adbulkhaleq says every Emirati of his generation lives with a "psychological trauma." Their hearts are divided – "between pride on one side, and fear on the other." Just after he says this, a smiling waitress approaches, and asks us what we would like to drink. He orders a Coke. VI. Dubai Pride There is one group in Dubai for whom the rhetoric of sudden freedom and liberation rings true – but it is the very group the government wanted to liberate least: gays. Beneath a famous international hotel, I clamber down into possibly the only gay club on the Saudi Arabian peninsula. I find a United Nations of tank-tops and bulging biceps, dancing to Kylie, dropping ecstasy, and partying like it's Soho. "Dubai is the best place in the Muslim world for gays!" a 25-year old Emirati with spiked hair says, his arms wrapped around his 31-year old "husband". "We are alive. We can meet. That is more than most Arab gays." It is illegal to be gay in Dubai, and punishable by 10 years in prison. But the locations of the latest unofficial gay clubs circulate online, and men flock there, seemingly unafraid of the police. "They might bust the club, but they will just disperse us," one of them says. "The police have other things to do." In every large city, gay people find a way to find each other – but Dubai has become the clearing-house for the region's homosexuals, a place where they can live in relative safety. Saleh, a lean private in the Saudi Arabian army, has come here for the Coldplay concert, and tells me Dubai is "great" for gays: "In Saudi, it's hard to be straight when you're young. The women are shut away so everyone has gay sex. But they only want to have sex with boys – 15- to 21-year-olds. I'm 27, so I'm too old now. I need to find real gays, so this is the best place. All Arab gays want to live in Dubai." With that, Saleh dances off across the dancefloor, towards a Dutch guy with big biceps and a big smile. VII. The Lifestyle All the guidebooks call Dubai a "melting pot", but as I trawl across the city, I find that every group here huddles together in its own little ethnic enclave – and becomes a caricature of itself. One night – in the heart of this homesick city, tired of the malls and the camps – I go to Double Decker, a hang-out for British expats. At the entrance there is a red telephone box, and London bus-stop signs. Its wooden interior looks like a cross between a colonial clubhouse in the Raj and an Eighties school disco, with blinking coloured lights and cheese blaring out. As I enter, a girl in a short skirt collapses out of the door onto her back. A guy wearing a pirate hat helps her to her feet, dropping his beer bottle with a paralytic laugh. I start to talk to two sun-dried women in their sixties who have been getting gently sozzled since midday. "You stay here for The Lifestyle," they say, telling me to take a seat and order some more drinks. All the expats talk about The Lifestyle, but when you ask what it is, they become vague. Ann Wark tries to summarise it: "Here, you go out every night. You'd never do that back home. You see people all the time. It's great. You have lots of free time. You have maids and staff so you don't have to do all that stuff. You party!" They have been in Dubai for 20 years, and they are happy to explain how the city works. "You've got a hierarchy, haven't you?" Ann says. "It's the Emiratis at the top, then I'd say the British and other Westerners. Then I suppose it's the Filipinos, because they've got a bit more brains than the Indians. Then at the bottom you've got the Indians and all them lot." They admit, however, they have "never" spoken to an Emirati. Never? "No. They keep themselves to themselves." Yet Dubai has disappointed them. Jules Taylor tells me: "If you have an accident here it's a nightmare. There was a British woman we knew who ran over an Indian guy, and she was locked up for four days! If you have a tiny bit of alcohol on your breath they're all over you. These Indians throw themselves in front of cars, because then their family has to be given blood money – you know, compensation. But the police just blame us. That poor woman." A 24-year-old British woman called Hannah Gamble takes a break from the dancefloor to talk to me. "I love the sun and the beach! It's great out here!" she says. Is there anything bad? "Oh yes!" she says. Ah: one of them has noticed, I think with relief. "The banks! When you want to make a transfer you have to fax them. You can't do it online." Anything else? She thinks hard. "The traffic's not very good." When I ask the British expats how they feel to not be in a democracy, their reaction is always the same. First, they look bemused. Then they look affronted. "It's the Arab way!" an Essex boy shouts at me in response, as he tries to put a pair of comedy antlers on his head while pouring some beer into the mouth of his friend, who is lying on his back on the floor, gurning. Later, in a hotel bar, I start chatting to a dyspeptic expat American who works in the cosmetics industry and is desperate to get away from these people. She says: "All the people who couldn't succeed in their own countries end up here, and suddenly they're rich and promoted way above their abilities and bragging about how great they are. I've never met so many incompetent people in such senior positions anywhere in the world." She adds: "It's absolutely racist. I had Filipino girls working for me doing the same job as a European girl, and she's paid a quarter of the wages. The people who do the real work are paid next to nothing, while these incompetent managers pay themselves £40,000 a month." With the exception of her, one theme unites every expat I speak to: their joy at having staff to do the work that would clog their lives up Back Home. Everyone, it seems, has a maid. The maids used to be predominantly Filipino, but with the recession, Filipinos have been judged to be too expensive, so a nice Ethiopian servant girl is the latest fashionable accessory. It is an open secret that once you hire a maid, you have absolute power over her. You take her passport – everyone does; you decide when to pay her, and when – if ever – she can take a break; and you decide who she talks to. She speaks no Arabic. She cannot escape. In a Burger King, a Filipino girl tells me it is "terrifying" for her to wander the malls in Dubai because Filipino maids or nannies always sneak away from the family they are with and beg her for help. "They say – 'Please, I am being held prisoner, they don't let me call home, they make me work every waking hour seven days a week.' At first I would say – my God, I will tell the consulate, where are you staying? But they never know their address, and the consulate isn't interested. I avoid them now. I keep thinking about a woman who told me she hadn't eaten any fruit in four years. They think I have power because I can walk around on my own, but I'm powerless." The only hostel for women in Dubai – a filthy private villa on the brink of being repossessed – is filled with escaped maids. Mela Matari, a 25-year-old Ethiopian woman with a drooping smile, tells me what happened to her – and thousands like her. She was promised a paradise in the sands by an agency, so she left her four year-old daughter at home and headed here to earn money for a better future. "But they paid me half what they promised. I was put with an Australian family – four children – and Madam made me work from 6am to 1am every day, with no day off. I was exhausted and pleaded for a break, but they just shouted: 'You came here to work, not sleep!' Then one day I just couldn't go on, and Madam beat me. She beat me with her fists and kicked me. My ear still hurts. They wouldn't give me my wages: they said they'd pay me at the end of the two years. What could I do? I didn't know anybody here. I was terrified." One day, after yet another beating, Mela ran out onto the streets, and asked – in broken English – how to find the Ethiopian consulate. After walking for two days, she found it, but they told her she had to get her passport back from Madam. "Well, how could I?" she asks. She has been in this hostel for six months. She has spoken to her daughter twice. "I lost my country, I lost my daughter, I lost everything," she says. As she says this, I remember a stray sentence I heard back at Double Decker. I asked a British woman called Hermione Frayling what the best thing about Dubai was. "Oh, the servant class!" she trilled. "You do nothing. They'll do anything!" VIII. The End of The World The World is empty. It has been abandoned, its continents unfinished. Through binoculars, I think I can glimpse Britain; this sceptred isle barren in the salt-breeze. Here, off the coast of Dubai, developers have been rebuilding the world. They have constructed artificial islands in the shape of all planet Earth's land masses, and they plan to sell each continent off to be built on. There were rumours that the Beckhams would bid for Britain. But the people who work at the nearby coast say they haven't seen anybody there for months now. "The World is over," a South African suggests. All over Dubai, crazy projects that were Under Construction are now Under Collapse. They were building an air-conditioned beach here, with cooling pipes running below the sand, so the super-rich didn't singe their toes on their way from towel to sea. The projects completed just before the global economy crashed look empty and tattered. The Atlantis Hotel was launched last winter in a $20m fin-de-siecle party attended by Robert De Niro, Lindsay Lohan and Lily Allen. Sitting on its own fake island – shaped, of course, like a palm tree – it looks like an immense upturned tooth in a faintly decaying mouth. It is pink and turreted – the architecture of the pharaohs, as reimagined by Zsa-Zsa Gabor. Its Grand Lobby is a monumental dome covered in glitterballs, held up by eight monumental concrete palm trees. Standing in the middle, there is a giant shining glass structure that looks like the intestines of every guest who has ever stayed at the Atlantis. It is unexpectedly raining; water is leaking from the roof, and tiles are falling off. A South African PR girl shows me around its most coveted rooms, explaining that this is "the greatest luxury offered in the world". We stroll past shops selling £24m diamond rings around a hotel themed on the lost and sunken continent of, yes, Atlantis. There are huge water tanks filled with sharks, which poke around mock-abandoned castles and dumped submarines. There are more than 1,500 rooms here, each with a sea view. The Neptune suite has three floors, and – I gasp as I see it – it looks out directly on to the vast shark tank. You lie on the bed, and the sharks stare in at you. In Dubai, you can sleep with the fishes, and survive. But even the luxury – reminiscent of a Bond villain's lair – is also being abandoned. I check myself in for a few nights to the classiest hotel in town, the Park Hyatt. It is the fashionistas' favourite hotel, where Elle Macpherson and Tommy Hilfiger stay, a gorgeous, understated palace. It feels empty. Whenever I eat, I am one of the only people in the restaurant. A staff member tells me in a whisper: "It used to be full here. Now there's hardly anyone." Rattling around, I feel like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, the last man in an abandoned, haunted home. The most famous hotel in Dubai – the proud icon of the city – is the Burj al Arab hotel, sitting on the shore, shaped like a giant glass sailing boat. In the lobby, I start chatting to a couple from London who work in the City. They have been coming to Dubai for 10 years now, and they say they love it. "You never know what you'll find here," he says. "On our last trip, at the beginning of the holiday, our window looked out on the sea. By the end, they'd built an entire island there." My patience frayed by all this excess, I find myself snapping: doesn't the omnipresent slave class bother you? I hope they misunderstood me, because the woman replied: "That's what we come for! It's great, you can't do anything for yourself!" Her husband chimes in: "When you go to the toilet, they open the door, they turn on the tap – the only thing they don't do is take it out for you when you have a piss!" And they both fall about laughing. IX. Taking on the Desert Dubai is not just a city living beyond its financial means; it is living beyond its ecological means. You stand on a manicured Dubai lawn and watch the sprinklers spray water all around you. You see tourists flocking to swim with dolphins. You wander into a mountain-sized freezer where they have built a ski slope with real snow. And a voice at the back of your head squeaks: this is the desert. This is the most water-stressed place on the planet. How can this be happening? How is it possible? The very earth is trying to repel Dubai, to dry it up and blow it away. The new Tiger Woods Gold Course needs four million gallons of water to be pumped on to its grounds every day, or it would simply shrivel and disappear on the winds. The city is regularly washed over with dust-storms that fog up the skies and turn the skyline into a blur. When the dust parts, heat burns through. It cooks anything that is not kept constantly, artificially wet. Dr Mohammed Raouf, the environmental director of the Gulf Research Centre, sounds sombre as he sits in his Dubai office and warns: "This is a desert area, and we are trying to defy its environment. It is very unwise. If you take on the desert, you will lose." Sheikh Maktoum built his showcase city in a place with no useable water. None. There is no surface water, very little acquifer, and among the lowest rainfall in the world. So Dubai drinks the sea. The Emirates' water is stripped of salt in vast desalination plants around the Gulf – making it the most expensive water on earth. It costs more than petrol to produce, and belches vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as it goes. It's the main reason why a resident of Dubai has the biggest average carbon footprint of any human being – more than double that of an American. If a recession turns into depression, Dr Raouf believes Dubai could run out of water. "At the moment, we have financial reserves that cover bringing so much water to the middle of the desert. But if we had lower revenues – if, say, the world shifts to a source of energy other than oil..." he shakes his head. "We will have a very big problem. Water is the main source of life. It would be a catastrophe. Dubai only has enough water to last us a week. There's almost no storage. We don't know what will happen if our supplies falter. It would be hard to survive." Global warming, he adds, makes the problem even worse. "We are building all these artificial islands, but if the sea level rises, they will be gone, and we will lose a lot. Developers keep saying it's all fine, they've taken it into consideration, but I'm not so sure." Is the Dubai government concerned about any of this? "There isn't much interest in these problems," he says sadly. But just to stand still, the average resident of Dubai needs three times more water than the average human. In the looming century of water stresses and a transition away from fossil fuels, Dubai is uniquely vulnerable. I wanted to understand how the government of Dubai will react, so I decided to look at how it has dealt with an environmental problem that already exists – the pollution of its beaches. One woman – an American, working at one of the big hotels – had written in a lot of online forums arguing that it was bad and getting worse, so I called her to arrange a meeting. "I can't talk to you," she said sternly. Not even if it's off the record? "I can't talk to you." But I don't have to disclose your name... "You're not listening. This phone is bugged. I can't talk to you," she snapped, and hung up. The next day I turned up at her office. "If you reveal my identity, I'll be sent on the first plane out of this city," she said, before beginning to nervously pace the shore with me. "It started like this. We began to get complaints from people using the beach. The water looked and smelled odd, and they were starting to get sick after going into it. So I wrote to the ministers of health and tourism and expected to hear back immediately – but there was nothing. Silence. I hand-delivered the letters. Still nothing." The water quality got worse and worse. The guests started to spot raw sewage, condoms, and used sanitary towels floating in the sea. So the hotel ordered its own water analyses from a professional company. "They told us it was full of fecal matter and bacteria 'too numerous to count'. I had to start telling guests not to go in the water, and since they'd come on a beach holiday, as you can imagine, they were pretty pissed off." She began to make angry posts on the expat discussion forums – and people began to figure out what was happening. Dubai had expanded so fast its sewage treatment facilities couldn't keep up. The sewage disposal trucks had to queue for three or four days at the treatment plants – so instead, they were simply drilling open the manholes and dumping the untreated sewage down them, so it flowed straight to the sea. Suddenly, it was an open secret – and the municipal authorities finally acknowledged the problem. They said they would fine the truckers. But the water quality didn't improve: it became black and stank. "It's got chemicals in it. I don't know what they are. But this stuff is toxic." She continued to complain – and started to receive anonymous phone calls. "Stop embarassing Dubai, or your visa will be cancelled and you're out," they said. She says: "The expats are terrified to talk about anything. One critical comment in the newspapers and they deport you. So what am I supposed to do? Now the water is worse than ever. People are getting really sick. Eye infections, ear infections, stomach infections, rashes. Look at it!" There is faeces floating on the beach, in the shadow of one of Dubai's most famous hotels. "What I learnt about Dubai is that the authorities don't give a toss about the environment," she says, standing in the stench. "They're pumping toxins into the sea, their main tourist attraction, for God's sake. If there are environmental problems in the future, I can tell you now how they will deal with them – deny it's happening, cover it up, and carry on until it's a total disaster." As she speaks, a dust-storm blows around us, as the desert tries, slowly, insistently, to take back its land. X. Fake Plastic Trees On my final night in the Dubai Disneyland, I stop off on my way to the airport, at a Pizza Hut that sits at the side of one of the city's endless, wide, gaping roads. It is identical to the one near my apartment in London in every respect, even the vomit-coloured decor. My mind is whirring and distracted. Perhaps Dubai disturbed me so much, I am thinking, because here, the entire global supply chain is condensed. Many of my goods are made by semi-enslaved populations desperate for a chance 2,000 miles away; is the only difference that here, they are merely two miles away, and you sometimes get to glimpse their faces? Dubai is Market Fundamentalist Globalisation in One City. I ask the Filipino girl behind the counter if she likes it here. "It's OK," she says cautiously. Really? I say. I can't stand it. She sighs with relief and says: "This is the most terrible place! I hate it! I was here for months before I realised – everything in Dubai is fake. Everything you see. The trees are fake, the workers' contracts are fake, the islands are fake, the smiles are fake – even the water is fake!" But she is trapped, she says. She got into debt to come here, and she is stuck for three years: an old story now. "I think Dubai is like an oasis. It is an illusion, not real. You think you have seen water in the distance, but you get close and you only get a mouthful of sand." As she says this, another customer enters. She forces her face into the broad, empty Dubai smile and says: "And how may I help you tonight, sir?"

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Tuesday, April 19, 2016

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Friday, April 15, 2016

BLOG ENTRY NUMBER 100

PropertyGuru - the company overview - by @alfredosahagun for @3nglishOnline content writers @spanishxenglish translations

misc reading.. . The Dark Side of Dubain - Dubai isnt all Gold

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