Wired UK to launch in 2009

This was on MediaGuardian.co.uk today. The magazine does not launch until 2009, but talented journalists with a passion for Wired are welcome to register their interest as contributors c/o web [AT] davidrowan [DOT] com.

Stephen Brook, Press Correspondent
guardian.co.uk,
Monday June 30, 2008

Conde Nast will launch a UK version of Wired magazine and its accompanying website next year and has hired the Jewish Chronicle's editor, David Rowan, to edit it.
The UK debut issue of the monthly technology magazine will arrive on newsstands in the first half of 2009.
Conde Nast bought Wired, which started in San Francisco in 1993, in 1998.
The publisher will also launch a version of Wired in Italy early next year, prior to the UK launch. The editor will be Riccardo Luna.
"Wired is the market-leading magazine about how technology is changing the world; a highly influential and visionary title that explores ideas and innovation, culture, politics and business, and how technology impacts on contemporary civilisation," said Nicholas Coleridge, managing director of Conde Nast.
Jamie Jouning, associate publisher of GQ since 2004, has been appointed as publisher of Wired. Jamie Bill, publishing director of GQ since 2003, will oversee both titles as publishing director.
Rowan has edited the Jewish Chronicle since 2006, having previously worked at the Guardian for 10 years, where he launched the weekly Editor magazine, ran the opinion, education and Saturday features sections and was editor of GuardianUnlimited.
The UK edition of Wired will launch after the Italian version. Wired reports on how technology affects culture, business, the economy and politics.
Rowan will leave the Jewish Chronicle later in the year and is negotiating a leaving date with the newspaper.
"I got offered something that was too exciting not to take up," he said.
"When I got approached by the best magazine publisher in the world for the most exciting magazine - I thought 'wow'."
...

Read more!

Neuromarketing: The search for the brain's 'buy' button

By David Rowan

It is 7pm in the body-imaging unit at Ulm University Hospital, southern Germany, and with the day's last patients returning to their wards, Dr Henrik Walter finally has the clinic's vast MRI scanner to himself. The angiograms pinned to the observation-room wall, their snaking arteries a humbling portrait of human vulnerability, are an awesome tribute to the life-saving wonders of magnetic resonance imaging - a technology that has revolutionised the way doctors visualise conditions ranging from tumours to ruptured tendons. Tonight, thankfully, Dr Walter's mission has nothing to do with medical diagnosis. He wants simply to peer into your innermost desires.

As neuroscience paints an ever clearer picture of how our minds work, researchers such as Henrik Walter are coming to understand how we process feelings that affect our purchasing decisions. By mapping out which parts of the brain are active when we choose a favourite breakfast cereal, or lust after a sports car, they claim to have discovered "objective" ways to predict which designs or marketing pitches will appeal most to us. It is, they fully admit, a relatively new branch of neuroscience, but that has not stopped some of the world's largest corporations paying close attention. For if brain images can tell them which brands trigger the strongest subconscious responses, and which commercials or logos touch us most deeply, then why would they have any further need for unscientific focus groups?

This quest for marketing's holy grail is already persuading multinationals such as Unilever and Ford to pay scientists to scan volunteers' brains. Hollywood studios are testing brain responses to film trailers, and food manufacturers are using neuro-imaging to fine-tune multi-million-pound product launches. They call the technique "neuromarketing", and hope that it will open up the consumer's inner mind like never before. All that remains is to convince the public that neuromarketing is not simply a powerful new tool designed to manipulate us.

As a paid volunteer removes his shoes to lie down in Ulm's white-and-pink Siemens scanner, Dr Walter - a clinical psychiatrist by day - explains that tonight's research involves studying how the brain responds to expected financial rewards. When the young man, wearing a pair of specially adapted Sony virtual-reality goggles, sees various symbols come into view, he must press one of two buttons on a hand-made keypad to win 20 cents or a euro. At times, the computer program will trick him and pay him nothing at all, but that is all part of the test. For what Dr Walter, his researcher and the technician watching behind the glass want to see on their monitors is which parts of the brain light up when we face sudden disappointment - as well as an extended winning run.

Tonight's work is designed to stretch our understanding of a powerful neurotransmitter called dopamine, and may perhaps eventually benefit the schizophrenia patients Dr Walter treats in his day job. But if you ever plan to buy a Mercedes-Benz, a Jeep, a Chrysler or a Smart car, Dr Walter's brain-scanning studies may also affect you. The Ulm neuroimaging research is partly funded by DaimlerChrysler, which hopes that Dr Walter and his colleagues - by looking deep inside the human brain - will eventually reveal the secrets of designing and selling a more universally appealing car.

"At first they just wanted a better understanding of man-machine interaction," explains Dr Walter, a thoughtful 41-year-old whose short greying hair lends him an air of distinction. "They said, 'Well, we know how to improve cars, but we're limited by the way people interface with the cars'. So we put people into the MRI scanner with a driving simulator, to see what happens in the brain when you're both driver and passenger.

"Then their consumer department approached us and said they were considering various car interiors, and wanted us to test the reactions in people's brains to tell them which would go down best. We explained that we couldn't do that, as the stimuli were too similar, but we said we could test the cars' exterior designs. So we devised a way to measure which cars rated as the most attractive, according to the brain's reactions."

The lab recruited a dozen young men, who were asked to rate photographs of cars on a scale from one to five. "Then we looked into their brains," Dr Walter explains. "We had three types of cars: sports cars, small cars and family cars. When we compared what happened in the brain, we found several areas were more active when looking at sports cars. One of the most interesting was the nucleus accumbens - a very deep and small area linked to reward. Other researchers have found that it is activated if you take cocaine, or look at sexual stimuli, or get food you like such as chocolate. Yet we found the same effect for non-natural objects such as motor-cars. It was fascinating."

You might not think a brain scan would be necessary to determine that men generally rate Ferraris above Ladas. But Dr Walter is more interested in tracking the neurological circuits that underlie such preferences. He found that cars deemed attractive, for instance, trigger activity in a brain area called the fusiform gyrus, thought to specialise in our perception of human faces, and in the lateral occipital complex, normally active when we are analysing shapes. "People often say shape is a very important criterion for them in judging a car's attractiveness," Dr Walter reflects. "And maybe they feel comfortable when the design reminds them of a human face."

Yet what makes the experiment so potentially valuable to firms like DaimlerChrysler was the scanner's ability to confirm which cars the volunteers told him in interviews that they liked or disliked. Because the MRI results tallied with their spoken preferences, Dr Walter knew they were being honest. "Where things get interesting is when there are discrepancies between what people are telling you and what's actually happening in their brains," he explains. "They might say, 'Oh, I don't like that car' -but their brain could be telling you otherwise. The next question," he adds, "is what this means for selling cars."

++++

Magnetic resonance imaging was first used to scan a full human body in 1977. But it was not until the early 1990s that neuroscientists adapted standard MRI scanners to produce three-dimensional images of brain activity at any particular moment. Mental processes, they understood, trigger an increased flow of blood in the specific part of the brain that is involved. What this new technique, called "functional MRI" (or "fMRI"), let them do was pinpoint these tiny changes in blood flow as brightly coloured areas on computer screens.

As they have learned more about which regions of the brain correspond to specific emotions or instinctive thoughts, neuroscientists have been able to "read" these fMRI images to map out where, and possibly what, somebody might be thinking. If you identify strongly with a magazine, for instance, your brain may buzz with activity in a region known as the medial prefrontal cortex. If a corporate logo inspires anger, an fMRI scan might show activity in your amygdala. And whatever you might be telling market researchers that you think of their products, your brain images could be revealing a deeper "truth" that you yourself may not even have acknowledged. No wonder marketing consultancies are talking up fMRI as the key to unlocking the consumer's mind.

Neuromarketing was first put on the map by the BrightHouse Institute for Thought Sciences, working out of the neuroscience wing of Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. Launched in June 2002 to give corporations "unprecedented insight into their consumers' minds", BrightHouse promised nothing less than to "change the marketing world forever".

For the first time, the company claimed, neuromarketing could let companies "understand the drivers of their consumers' behaviour". "What it really does is give unprecedented insight into the consumer mind," Adam Koval, chief operating officer, explained later that year to the Canadian Broadcasting Company. "We will enable our clients and partners to design advertising, marketing campaigns and eventually products that will more effectively engage and drive their target audience's behaviour." Marketers were promised concrete result "in higher product sales or in brand preference or in getting customers to behave the way they want them to behave".

Marketers, by their nature, tend towards hyperbole. Yet BrightHouse's message - promising an end to "advertising clutter", and the secret to "loyal, long-lasting consumer relationships” - has been greeted with the utmost seriousness among civil-liberties activists. Last December, Ralph Nader's campaign group, Commercial Alert, denounced the agency's research as "something that could have happened in the former Soviet Union for the purposes of behaviour control". It demanded that Emory University immediately ban "neuromarketing experiments on human subjects" as unethical - an accusation that the university and the company strongly dispute.

Such denials do not faze Gary Ruskin, Commercial Alert's executive director. "This is about the corruption of medical research to induce disease and human suffering," Ruskin explains, as gifted as his opponents in the art of shaping a persuasive message. When asked how, exactly, this non-invasive scanning technology could cause "disease", he replies quick as a synaptic brain signal. "People are subjected to an epidemic of marketing-related illnesses - obesity, Type II diabetes, alcoholism - and millions of children will eventually die from the marketing of tobacco," he says. "So any small increase in the effectiveness of advertising could be devastating on public health."

Commercial Alert is demanding legal restrictions on this "Orwellian" research. "Because the dangers are huge," Gary Ruskin insists. "What happens if these firms take on political clients? The history of the twentieth century is the history of the catastrophic deployment of political propaganda that swallowed whole countries in a genocidal frenzy."

For all its visionary credentials, BrightHouse has been caught off-guard by Commercial Alert's campaign. So, in response to a blitz of damaging publicity, the agency has been busy tweaking its own marketing message. It has dropped the phrase "Thought Sciences" from its name - it is now "BrightHouse Neurostrategies" - and has toned down its website claims to stress that "our focus is decidedly from the consumer perspective". Still, BrightHouse admits to conducting neuromarketing research for one Fortune 500 company. It will not name the corporation, but the agency has existing "client relationships" with Coca Cola, Hitachi and Delta Air Lines among others.

Dr Justine Meaux, a neuroscientist employed by BrightHouse as "research scientist and marketing strategist", says she receives on average a call a day from pharmaceutical companies, consumer-product giants and other businesses looking to find magic answers from neuromarketing. Yet despite the evident profits to be made - and BrightHouse may charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for a project - Dr Meaux must often turn away potential clients. "Companies looking for the brain’s 'buy button' will likely be disappointed with neuroscience, as there is no magic brain area that can predict whether or not people will buy a product," she explains. "Neither neuroscience nor marketing can read someone’s thoughts or inject messages into a consumer’s mind."

Rather than predict what a consumer is thinking, she says, brain scans can help explain how they are thinking: how they develop relationships with brands; how brand loyalty can be identified through neuroimaging; and what brain patterns define a "positive" brand relationship.

For instance, a recent BrightHouse study - intended for submission to a neuroscience journal - examined how "preference" is encoded in the brain. Dr Meaux and her scientific director, Dr Clint Kilts, asked 13 volunteers to begin by rating how much they liked or disliked various items ranging from commercial brands (Coca Cola bottles) and celebrities (Madonna) to generic vegetables (broccoli). The volunteers were then placed inside Emory's MRI scanner and, as they studied images of each item, their brain activity was recorded.

The results sent a flurry of excitement through the nascent world of neuromarketing. When the subjects were looking at objects that they "really loved", Drs Meaux and Kilts noticed intense activity in a brain region called the medial prefrontal cortex. This area had been shown in previous experiments to correspond with thoughts about a person's sense of self. In a marketplace obsessed with self-image, could BrightHouse have found a way to identify when a dress or a mobile phone makes a consumer feel: "Now, this really is me"?

++++

There is nothing new in corporations co-opting scientific research to sell us cigarettes or soap powder. Almost 50 years ago, Vance Packard's best-selling book The Hidden Persuaders exposed a world of "psychology professors turned merchandisers [who] are subtly charting your inner thoughts, fears and dreams so that they can influence your daily living". Packard's concern was the new "motivational research" industry, which used "insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences" to channel our thought processes. "Typically," he warned, "these efforts take place beneath our level of awareness; so that the appeals which move us are often, in a sense, ‘hidden’. The result is that many of us are being influenced and manipulated."

Since then, corporate marketers have tried everything from focus groups to galvanic skin response meters to try to discover how we really feel about their products. Dewar's Scotch used group hypnosis to explore early memories of the drink; an agency working for the National Lottery operator, Camelot, tested one of its Billy Connolly commercials on a panel wearing headsets that captured their brains' electrical signals. (Camelot says it used the agency "purely to run focus groups".) Now even Hollywood studios are looking inside our heads: a Los Angeles marketing firm is working with Steven Quartz, who runs the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at the California Institute of Technology, to scan film-goers' brains as they sample movies. "Participants will watch trailers while in a scanner, and we'll provide a report that covers both global and scene-by-scene reactions to the trailer, as well as casting responses," Dr Quartz explains. His service, launching this spring, will also be available to magazines and television channels.

The unanswered question is how much useful information marketers will actually learn. "Suddenly everyone's very keen to do fMRI studies, because they know they can produce impressive pictures of the brain with yellow and orange blobs in all the right places," Henrik Walter says, not entirely convinced by some of the current hype. Tim Ambler, a senior fellow at London Business School who has studied the brain's responses to brands, worries that bogus claims are being made for neuromarketing before the technology is sufficiently precise. "I'm reminded of the quacks who emerged when x-rays were invented and said they could make you better," he says. "Instead they killed a lot of people. In 30 years we'll definitely be able to pre-test advertising using neuroscience, and it will replace focus groups. But I don't buy today's claims, unless we can independently evaluate them."

Michael Brammer, an fMRI specialist at the Institute of Psychiatry, in London, agrees that the corporate world is becoming "over-enamoured" of the technology's current capabilities. "You're actually only measuring tiny changes in a very noisy [brain] signal," cautions Dr Brammer, one of Britain's most experienced practitioners. Still, that has not stopped him setting up his own commercial neuromarketing agency to capitalise on the growing demand.

His Oxford-based company, Neurosense, offers neuroimaging and psychological tests to help companies plan "product launches, sales promotions, packaging design, point-of-sale displays and advertising strategies". Although Dr Brammer will not disclose too many details, The Times has established that his biggest fMRI client is Unilever, whose brands include Domestos, Sunsilk and Birdseye. As with most companies we contacted, Unilever declined to discuss its brain-imaging studies.

But Dr Brammer, 55, who brims with passion for his research, is happy to explain what commercial clients are looking for. "They are asking questions such as, 'Should we go with this product or this product?'" he says. "Mounting a large advertising campaign or developing a new product is an extremely expensive business. Neuroimaging offers an extra dimension, providing additional, and probably more numerically accurate information about brain responses, than were available before."

Neurosense conducts its research using a clinical MRI scanner at the Institute of Psychiatry, in south London, with the permission of the ethical committee. Michael Brammer has thought a great deal about the ethical implications of neuro-imaging, and he is well aware that the technology could be used for socially questionable purposes. "I suspect that somewhere on this planet, someone's thinking, 'Should we give our senior executives a brain scan to see how suitable they are?' And I'm sure there are people in politics in this country who'd be overjoyed by an objective measure of their popularity."

Dr Brammer would, for his own part, refuse to help corporations "peddling harmful substances". "When people are engaged in research that has the capability of being used for malign ends, they need to take an ethical stance," he reflects. "I would have reservations if I could seriously see that what I was doing was being translated into an attempt to control and manipulate, rather than simply learn more about brain function. It's a fine line."

Concern is growing among academics about the use to which neuro-imaging discoveries may be put. Steven Rose, the Open University neurobiologist whose next book is called The Future of the Brain, has deep reservations about the unregulated use of fMRI. "Much of what these neuromarketing firms are selling is snake oil, but I have real ethical concerns about where brain control and brain manipulation are going," he says. "It's not that these techniques will necessarily work, but if people think they work, we'll become an ever more monitored society."

He cites research by the US military aimed at monitoring fighter pilots' brain patterns to predict when they are likely to lose concentration. "We are also hearing claims that you could use brain imaging in advance of someone committing a crime, because some criminals have shown a particular brain response. Does that mean we'd scan the population to determine who is likely to be a psychopath? I can see potential intrusions on personal freedom, and it's time we had an informed public debate."

++++

In the meantime, the world's corporations are clamouring to learn how scanning volunteers' brains might boost the bottom line. After running a series of fMRI experiments last summer at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston, Texas, Dr Read Montague, a neuroscience professor, received an inquiry from PepsiCo Inc. The company's concern to learn more about his academic research was not, perhaps, surprising: after all, Dr Montague, who runs Baylor's Human Neuroimaging Lab, had reenacted the "Pepsi Challenge" with the help of MRI brain scans.

The original challenge, made famous through 1970s TV commercials, pitted Pepsi against Coke in blind taste tests. Although Coke was ahead in sales, more people seemed to prefer the taste of Pepsi. By feeding his subjects squirts of Coke and Pepsi while they lay inside the scanner, Dr Montague hoped to understand why. Sure enough, when his subjects were told that they were drinking Coke, the fMRI scans showed more activity in the brain's medial prefrontal cortex, a region where we process feelings related to reward. This happened even if they only thought they were drinking Coke, but were actually tasting Pepsi.

"There is something about the way Coke is pitched to us that references something very familiar, warm and fuzzy inside us," Dr Montague concludes. "It may have nothing to do with Coke's rationally thought-out branding strategy, but somehow the memory and brand image of Coke insinuates itself in the nervous system in a way that affects our behaviour. And Pepsi's does not. It could be as simple as the hard consonants in the word 'Coke', or it could be something about always using red. Whatever it is, we could see the effect."

Such findings, Dr Montague believes, will only encourage corporate marketing departments to delve deep within the human subconscious. As a scientist, this causes him some concern. "I'm a true believer that companies can really be evil," he says. "Just look at the tobacco companies. We're not safe just leaving this technology in the corporations' hands - they could put people into the scanners in search of all the signatures that correspond to behavioural biases."

The technology, meanwhile, continues to attract new corporate admirers. As MRI scanners become cheaper, smaller and more portable, Dr Montague can see neuromarketing specialists moving into most large corporate marketing departments. "Because that's neuroscience's goal, right? To decompose us into a set of computations that we can quantify. And if companies can turn feelings into numbers, and understand how the biological parts of our brains give rise to them, then think what they'll do with that knowledge." He pauses. "I can see why some people don't like that idea."

(Written for The Times Magazine, February 5 2004)

Read more!

The Observer: How technology is changing our food

Still worried about 'E' numbers? Do try to keep up. How about sliced bread that lasts for months? Or steak and chips rustled up from the submolecular constituents of nothing more than fresh air? As David Rowan reports, food technologists are dreaming up ever new ways of feeding us - and the future is any colour you want

Think of Thomas Hefti the next time you sip a soft drink. As a senior scientist with the world's biggest flavourings manufacturer, there is a very good chance that Hefti will have designed the precise taste sensation that follows. With a repertoire approaching 20,000 synthetic varieties - 300 for strawberry alone - the quietly spoken flavourist has simply to flare his wide moustache-brushed nostrils to know whether his latest concoction needs a tad more methyl benzoate, a drop less butyl isobutyrate. Surrounded by hundreds of vials in his laboratory outside Zurich, his nose at the service of his scientific knowledge, Hefti's chemical wizardry is helping define the modern food industry.

You may not have heard of his Swiss company, Givaudan, but you will certainly have sampled its range in your breakfast cereals, ice creams, herbal teas, biscuits, cake-mixes, soups and chewing-gums - indeed, anywhere a manufacturer might add flavourings to enhance a foodstuff's taste. Today Givaudan's formulations go into one in every five of the world's artificially flavoured foods; and although the company will not name its customers, you can safely assume that it supplies most of the big names.

This morning's challenge for Hefti is to develop an innovative grapefruit flavour, followed by a new synthesis of lime and, if he has time, a modern variety of mandarin. He knows the optimal amount of trans-2-hexenal that will enhance a sweet's apple flavouring - and that, by reformulating the recipe with added heptyl acetate, he can turn apple into pear. The secret is what he calls 'creative appraisal' of the flavours provided by nature: although a real banana comprises around 225 volatile flavour components, Hefti can engineer an artificial alternative using just nine ingredients, although some formulations will need up to 70. A kilogram of the recipe - vanillin, ethyl butyrate, isoamyl acetate, benzyl acetate, eugenol, phenethyl alcohol, isoamyl isovalerate, cis-3-hexenol, all mixed into a solvent - will flavour 5,000 litres of drinks. Even if it lacks the fresh fruit's nuances, the result is impressively familiar to anyone who has ever tasted a banana fast-food milkshake.

Some tastes are harder to synthesise - 'a good coffee flavour is tough,' Hefti admits - but he relishes the challenge. In the meantime, there are always newly discovered natural tastes and smells to reproduce, thanks to Givaudan's international expedition programme. In hot-air-balloon missions over Madagascan rainforest, botanists seek out highly flavoured 'new' molecules from plants and tree bark. Its laboratories have already copied some examples for use in children's lollipops.

But do we really need 300 varieties of factory-manufactured strawberry flavouring? You might expect your strawberry yoghurt or premium ice cream to contain at least a smidgen of fruit derivatives, but that would be to underestimate the skills of the professional flavourist (not forgetting his peers specialising in colourings and preservation). Not that the catch-all term 'flavouring' on the label is designed to arouse any suspicions about the synthetic formulations within.

Thomas Hefti's patient smile suggests that he has been put on the defensive before. It would, he explains calmly, be uneconomic for the food industry to rely solely on real strawberries; there would not be enough fresh fruit to go round, and besides, the individual berries contain far too little natural flavour to make large-scale extraction viable. What works for a cake mix might taste wrong in a child's medicine. 'And not everyone wants the same flavour,' he adds. 'Even in nature you have strawberries that are riper or greener. The foodstuff producer might want their product recognised as distinct.'

Besides, we consumers apparently want those heavily processed tastes that have become familiar. 'If a German consumer is used to eating tinned pineapple, he will expect a tinned pineapple flavour,' Hefti claims. 'But in the Philippines, they will expect pineapple flavourings to taste like fresh pineapples.' In other words, having weaned us off fresh fruit, the food industry now finds us rejecting the taste of the real thing.

Givaudan's scientists do not like the word 'artificial'. Heini Menzi, vice president for European R&D, explains that it would be helpful if this article instead used the term 'nature identical' to refer to non-natural flavourings. 'NI' chemicals, Dr Menzi explains, are identical in their molecular composition to ingredients found in nature. The difference is that they have been synthesised in the lab by a chemical process - allowing a flavour originating in a plant to be manufactured cost-effectively in vast quantities.

There can be big savings: it will cost around £4,500 to isolate a kilogram of vanillin, which flavours everything from ice cream to cola drinks, directly from vanilla beans. But in the lab it can be synthesised for less than £6 per kilogram, typically using by-products from the paper or petrochemical industries. Either way, you end up with 4-hydroxy-3-methoxybenzaldehyde, and if the marketing people insist that consumers want vitamin C in their non-natural orange-flavoured drink, it can always be added later.

What really frustrates Menzi is the perception that NI flavourings are any less wholesome. 'The public assumes that natural means healthy, that NI means dubious - and that's not true,' he says. 'All food is only chemistry, after all - but that sort of language is scary to the general public. So people become concerned, "Oh, this is artificial..." And to some extent, yes it is. But the chemist can get to the same molecule, whether he takes it physically out of the raw plant, or via synthesis. From a taste point of view, you could use either.'

Besides, he adds, naturally sourced flavours may include all sorts of undesirable residues left over from the farm: herbicides, pesticides, microorganisms, even levels of plant toxins that, he suggests, could be harmful. In a state-of-the-art plant like Givaudan's, the consumer is guaranteed a healthier end product, he suggests and if he is aware of any irony in his explanation, he does not show it.

In the vast factory where the chemistry takes shape, a short stroll from the development labs, each formulation is defined by its own intense pungent or treacle-sweet odour: burnt roast beef one moment, caramel and peardrops the next, barley soup and horseradish to follow. Two industrial robots create the more common flavours from 400 chemical compounds; around them, white-coated men mix the smaller batches by hand from among 2,500 ingredients piped down from the storage vaults. These ingredients are stored in large tubs labelled with words you rarely see on food-ingredients lists: 'Ethyl octanoate-2', 'Hexenal-2-trans', 'Pentyl-iso valerate', 'Butanol', 'Neryl acetate', 'Ethyl decanoate', 'Benzaldehyde', 'Valerolactone gamma', and occasionally a gentler, more familiar term such as orange oil or eucalyptol. The resulting formulations, stacked up in sealed plastic tubs at the loading yard, show how global this industry has become: Worcester sauce flavouring going to South Africa, tomato flavouring heading to Japan. An orange-juice flavouring, to 'improve' Slovenian OJ, is labelled 'Highly flammable, Harmful'. There is even 'black tea' flavouring destined for China.

'Humanity doesn't need a single extra flavour,' Menzi admits, 'but the market will absorb more. Each year there are one or two new chemicals that have an impact.' Advances in neuroscience, he says, will produce further innovations: 'Once we understand how we perceive sweetness, we could think of molecules with no calorific value that trigger the right neurons,' he explains.

Still, as science brings them ever-greater opportunities, Givaudan's visionaries accept that they cannot ignore the public's prejudices. 'Today you have a lot of consumers in Europe concerned about the authenticity of food,' Menzi says. 'They want authentic strawberry flavours, authentic chicken - and that puts a lot of weight on natural raw materials.' If the market demands more natural raw materials, then Menzi will supply them. But, he is at pains to point out, 'that doesn't mean that natural is any better than NI'.

++++

Sue Dengate first knew there was something wrong with her daughter Rebecca when, as a baby, she simply refused to sleep. 'It was terrible,' Dengate says from her home in New South Wales. 'There's nothing more tiring with a baby who needs round-the-clock attention. Then, as Rebecca grew older, she was constantly restless and irritable, very difficult to discipline, and quite defiant. It was as if she entered the terrible twos and never came out.'

Only when Rebecca was 11 was she diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). By systematically excluding food ingredients using the elimination diet, Sue discovered the cause of her daughter's problems. 'That diet was our magic solution,' she says. 'Within days, avoiding the foods that caused all the trouble, she was a completely different person. There are 50 additives which have been found to disrupt children's behaviour, and Rebecca had been affected by all of them. The trouble is, there are more of them being added all the time - and they're released on to the market before their effects have been properly tested.'

The experience set Dengate on a long campaign to help other families whose health had suffered because of food additives. She has written books including Fed Up and The Failsafe Cookbook , and now runs a a support group called the Food Intolerance Network. Its heart-wrenching members' newsletter, combining personal tales of despair with amateur investigative science, lists problems such as children's asthma, migraines, skin rashes and irritable bowel syndrome that are firmly blamed on an ever-growing range of commonly used additives. 'What I thought was fresh meat from my local supermarket hasn't been fresh at all,' contributes one mother in the most recent edition, after discovering that her daughter's severe asthma improved when she switched to a local butcher's steaks. 'Meat is sent to the supermarket in vacuum packs, then repacked in trays and sold as fresh. But the pack lasts the supermarket up to eight weeks, so the meat can be up to 60 days old in the vacuum pack before sold as fresh.' Another writes: 'My three-year-old daughter developed eczema at six months when I introduced solids, and by eight months she needed frequent cortisone cream.' After isolating food additives that were the cause, the eczema is almost gone.

Some of the complaints concern synthetic bread preservatives and antioxidants used to prevent rancidity in oils (reactions include asthma, depression, fatigue and learning difficulties). Others relate to 'natural' additives such as the colouring annatto yellow and flavour enhancers called ribonucleotides, that, in the concentrations used in foods, have been linked to itchy skin rashes and swollen mouths and throats in some individuals.

If any of the technologists' other planned innovations do produce unfore seen harmful effects, Sue Dengate warns, it could be decades before we isolate the cause.

Still, at least her own story has a happy ending: Rebecca, now 21, manages to control her diet rigorously, and as a result is healthy. 'And lovely,' her mother adds. 'But you know, even when we discovered what was the cause of her problems, I was left grieving for 11 years of my daughter's life that had been stolen from me. That,' she says a little sadly, 'is the major regret of my life.'

++++

Readers of Observer Food Monthly might naively imagine that society had finally woken up to the dangers of cheap, over-processed foods, and come to place a value in knowing the provenance of what we eat; that informed opinion now considers natural, if not organic, foods to be worth paying a premium for; and that today's nutrition-led problems, from obesity to children's hyperactivity, ought to be addressed before we commit to tomorrow's genetically modified uncertainties.

But turn instead to publications with names such as Food Chemical News, Food Engineering, Food Product Design and Food Technology , and you quickly realise that the multi-billion-pound food industry has some very different priorities. In the stainless-steel world of perpetual innovation described in their pages, you can watch the vast body of food scientists striving to find ever newer ways to synthesise products to sell to us. This scientific revolution is about anything but returning to nature: today's buzzwords are superingredients and shelf-life extension, nutrigenomics and nutraceuticals, biosensors and biotechnology enhancements. It is not food we are dealing with, you quickly learn, but 'food systems' - industrialised 'solutions' designed to maximise manufacturers' investment returns while promising untold new consumer benefits. Untold benefits, that is, that the last few hundred generations have somehow done without.

The industry's annual pilgrimage this year will be to Las Vegas, where for a week in July the Institute of Food Technologists will bring together 20,000 specialists for its agenda-setting Food Expo. The five-day technical programme suggests just where the industry is heading: with keynote presentations on 'Second generation genetically modified foods', 'Advances in food irradiation research', and 'The role of edible coatings and biopolymers in food packaging', it becomes clear how far the science lab is writing tomorrow's menus.

The schedule also addresses those inconvenient little hurdles that jump up in the way of progress, with workshop topics including cost-effective responses to the obesity crisis ('Expanding Margins, Not Waistlines!'), and, with food regulation a growing menace, a symposium entitled 'The Fallacy of the Consumer's Right to Know'. As one of the speakers promises, it will help manufacturers fight all those 'nonessential' demands from consumers to know what exactly they are eating - demands stemming simply from 'curiosity, faddism and activists'.

Many of those 'faddists' who shun the technologists' advances in favour of organic produce or natural ingredients may despair at the human diet's relentless industrialisation. Yet talking to some of the delegates planning to attend the IFT expo, it becomes clear just how far today's emerging technologies are going to be sold to us on their potential health benefits. 'Nutraceutical' supplements with claimed medicinal benefits are increasingly being designed into mainstream food recipes; in the future, they may be accompanied by 'nutrigenomic' diets, custom-prescribed by doctors to minimise health risks that are highlighted by your personal DNA. Think of nutritionally enhanced eggs or chocolate, designed specifically to lower your chances of developing Alzheimer's or bone cancer. The scenario is not that far removed, considering that chemical additives such as beta apo 8'carotenal, canthaxanthin and citranaxanthin are already widely used in poultry feed to 'enhance' the colour of egg yolks.

It is no surprise that much of today's research money is spent on technologies designed to keep food 'fresher' for longer. Why bin a sliced loaf after a few days if techniques developed for Nasa can preserve it for months if not years? Why rely on pasteurisation if pathogens can be killed using gamma rays?

Since Nasa first irradiated meat 32 years ago to feed the Apollo 17 crew, the technology has persisted as one of the industry's favourite means of prolonging shelf life. Irradiation kills bacteria such as salmonella and E.coli O157, and stops vegetables from sprouting. But its opponents have used concern about chemical byproducts, and damage to vitamins and enzymes, to limit its use. So the public, warned by campaigners that the process can add potential toxins such as formaldehyde to their meat, have never quite come on board. In Britain, food regulations currently allow only herbs, spices and vegetable seasonings to be irradiated. Still, the industry continues to campaign for the technology's eventual widespread introduction.

In the meantime, its scientists have devised a whole other tool kit with which to keep foods on the shelves for longer. Their techniques range from high-pressure processing (HPP), which might blast your orange juice with pressures up to 150,000 pounds per square inch, to pulsed electric field (PEF) technology, which subjects fresh foods to bursts of high-voltage electricity. Both prevent bacteria from reproducing without destroying the food's texture or taste - so expect more of your ready-meals to be blasted and zapped in future.

Scientists at Kraft Foods, the multinational whose brands range from Philadelphia cream cheese to Kenco coffee, foresee a time soon when a food package itself will signal when its contents are no longer edible. 'We call it smart packaging,' says Manuel Marquez-Sanchez at Kraft's NanoteK consortium, an alliance of 15 universities exploring how nanotechnology can aid food production. 'With a combination of tiny sensors and activators built into it, the pack will know if something is wrong, and correct itself or warn the consumer. It might have anti-microbial properties that can detect microorganisms - which extends a food's life.'

Nanotechnology involves manipulating matter at the molecular level to create entirely new materials and microscopic machines (a nanometre, is a billionth of a metre). The food industry is already getting excited at the prospect of tiny nanotechnology robots, or 'nanobots'. 'Instead of harvesting grain and cattle for carbohydrates and protein, nanobots could assemble the desired steak or flour from carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms present in the air as water and carbon dioxide,' Marvin Rudolph, director of DuPont Food Industry Solutions, which advises ingredients companies, predicted breathlessly in Food Technology magazine. No need, then, to nurture such inefficient and expensive food sources as cows and plants, if new industrial processes can simply replicate their atomic structures in pre-flavoured shrink-wrapped packages. But Dr Rudolph's vision went further: 'Nanobots present in foods could circulate through the blood system, cleaning out fat deposits and killing pathogens,' he suggested. In other words, these new industrial creations could actually promise to benefit human health. How useful would that be to an industry seeking to deflect public concern over obesity?

Manuel Marquez-Sanchez, too, has big hopes for nanotechnology. By manipulating ingredients at the nano level, and storing them in 'nanocapsules', he believes that Kraft will be able to devise such treats as an interactive, customisable drink. 'The idea is that everyone buys the same drink, but you'll be able to decide its colour, flavour, concentration and texture,' he explains enthusiastically. 'Once you have a technology to design nanocapsules, based on food-grade materials, you can offer products that put the consumer in control.' Although the industry, one presumes, will wish to retain control of everything from labelling requirements and costs to the degree of prior safety testing.

Dr Marquez-Sanchez, who works from Kraft's labs in Illinois, will not say which brands of drink he is working on, but he admits that Kraft is certainly looking to bring the resulting products to market. 'It's definitely possible,' he says. To show how serious he is, he mentions a 'shake gel' that he has developed - a drink which becomes thicker or more watery according to how hard it is shaken. 'You can choose how thick you want it - and the beautiful part is that if you change your mind it's reversible.' The tiny polymers that cause the effect are not yet food grade, but that hurdle, he says, could be overcome within two years. And by using ultrasound or radio frequencies to trigger these nanocapsules, we could determine the colour, fragrance or taste of our fruit drink or wine.

The Kraft vision is not universally welcomed. Pat Mooney, executive director of the Canadian technology watchdog the ETC Group, has particular worries about the damage that nanoparticles might do to our bodies or to the wider environment - seeping into rivers as tiny pesticide particles from farmed fish, or damaging our brains as they bypass the human immune system. 'Once you get below 100 nanometres in size, all the characteristics of an element change,' he explains. 'We just don't know what it will mean for human health. Nanoparticles can enter the body's cells, and at 30 nanometres can pass the blood-brain barrier. Kraft's packaging materials and drinks-with-100-flavours could be great - but what happens to the nanoparticles you don't want when you drink a glass? Are you sure they'll pass through your body safely? And what do they do to the environment afterwards? There are big safety questions, but nobody's regulating it.'

But Marquez-Sanchez says that his job is simply to uncover the knowledge, and to leave others to decide how to use it. 'I'm a scientist,' he says. 'I used to work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the knowledge developed there might be used to develop a nuclear bomb. But it might also lead to the use of cobalt-60 [in radiotherapy] to kill tumours. You have a choice.'

Few organisations have shaped food technology as much as Nasa and its well-resourced friends at the US Army's research labs at Natick, Massachusetts. The space programme is directly responsible for spin-offs such as water filters and softeners, enriched baby food, portable cooler-warmers, and freeze-dried ingredients; Nasa money has also accelerated the development of microwave ovens and irradiated food. So if today's research successfully enhances food provision in a future space mission, there is a very good chance that it will become available in supermarkets tomorrow.

The current challenge at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, is to produce food that will still be edible years from now. Michele Perchonok, a food scientist in the Advanced Food Technology unit, has studied the emerging food-preservation techniques, from high-pressure processing and pulsed electric fields to radio-frequency sterilisation and oscillating magnetic fields. The Army, she says, has developed a sandwich that is still edible after seven years, although Dr Perchonok has not yet tasted it ('the quality isn't as good as you'd like to see,' she explains). Still, her own mission is only marginally less daunting: to ensure that food sent with the Mars mission will survive three to five years in space.

Because these new preservation techniques replace conventional high-temperature heat processing, the space crews will enjoy food that, according to Perchonok, retains more of its taste and nutrients. 'That's the fascination with these new technologies,' she says. 'We're going to have higher-quality food - and the benefits could come to consumers.' She pauses briefly. 'The question, I suppose, is do we really need food that lasts for three years?'

The food industry is always looking for new ways to push back their products' use-by dates. If there is less wastage when items are being shipped across the world, and weeks-old fruit can still appear 'fresh' at the checkout, then producers see the results in their profits. Much of the buzz today surrounds 'modified atmosphere processing' and 'active packaging', in which meat or lettuce leaves are flushed with antimicrobial gases, washed in chlorine, or wrapped in packages lined with chemicals such as butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) or tertiary-butylhydroquinone (TBHQ) - some of which are suspected carcinogens. But it is one thing to make a bagged pre-washed salad last an extra month; will supermarkets really want 'shelf stability' of three or four years?

'It's almost intuitive for the human race to want to eat fresh food,' argues Richard Young, policy adviser to the Soil Association. 'I accept that it's been one of the great successes of agriculture in the last century to extend the range of produce we can enjoy out of season - but when you've got shelf lives going even into a second year, it seems we're moving into an area where the risks outweigh the benefits.' The big danger of the modern food industry, he adds, is 'that the rate of change is occurring on a completely different scale to anything in human evolution. And we're not giving ourselves any time to adjust to any problems that we can't yet see.'

There is way to predict the direction that food technology is likely to take: follow the money. And as more of us look to improve our health, the market is booming for 'functional' or 'nutraceutical' foods that claim to enhance our wellbeing. In Geneva last week, where the 'nutraceutical' and 'cosmeceutical' industries gathered for the Vitafoods International convention, much was made of the $6.3 billion that the sector is already said to be worth. Among the exhibitors seeking their share were the manufacturers of Xlim, 'the drink idea for figure awareness'.

But it's the multinationals who will dominate this revolution. Kellogg's has cereals and pasta containing psyllium, a grain said to help lower cholesterol; Nestlé has joined L'Oréal, to produce dietary supplements that claim to 'improve the quality of skin, hair and nails by supplying nutrients essential to their physiology'.

At the factory level, these growing demands mean finding new ways to obtain health-enhancing ingredients on an industrial scale: rather than rely on fish to produce the omega-3 fatty acids that benefit our hearts, for instance, the omega-3s can now be sourced straight from algae. But it also means introducing new health-focused marketing claims for food prod ucts that may owe more to old-fashioned hype. Will SkinCola, the new 'cellular renewal' drink marketed as 'the first skincare beverage', really promote 'beautiful clear skin' through ingredients such as 'activated oxygen and Z-Bec, a combination of zinc and vitamins'?

Julian Mellentin, who co-wrote The Functional Foods Revolution and analyses the industry for the newsletter New Nutrition Business, is sceptical of some of the more visionary claims. Beyond the new scientific findings about the benefits of naturally healthy foods (such as broccoli and wholegrains), he sees functional foods as remaining a niche area for some time.

What, though, if all these nutritional advances were combined with the genetic revolution that has finally cracked the human genome? What if your GP used your genetic profile to design you a customised diet that included nutraceuticals that could give you a longer, healthier life?

'It's not a question of whether, but when,' according to Jim Kaput, a biotechnologist at the University of California at Davis and a leading figure in the field of 'nutritional genomics', or 'nutrigenomics'. So convinced is Dr Kaput that we will one day be eating personalised foods to fight our genetic predispositions that he has become president of a Chicago biotech company called NutraGenomics.

The reason that so much dietary advice in the news appears to be contradictory, Kaput claims, is that we all respond to foods according to our own individual DNA patterns. 'The organic, vegetarian-hippy types say that if it's natural, it's good for you, and you should have it every day,' he says. 'That's not right. We're self-dosing, and we don't know how foods such as ginseng will affect us long-term. Yes, we're all going to die - but we want to live a little longer.' And science will be there to help.

'We're going to make that diet-gene connection,' Kaput says, 'linking specific nutrients to health in each individual. In 10, maybe 15 years, we'll be able to do genetic tests that will allow us to tweak your diet, so that you will be given dietary supplements according to your dietary profile. And in 25 years, if society allows it, we'll test babies at birth. Given this genotype, we'll say, here's their optimum diet for maintaining health.'

Once science has revealed our optimum diet, says Kaput, society will have to grapple with the ethics of whether the state should force us to eat the foods that will make us healthier.

Talking to a scientist such as Kaput, so enthralled by the promise of technology, it seems pointless to suggest that naturally grown, unadulterated produce seems to have served human health pretty well over the centuries. Yet does have a point when he highlights the gap between what we know about healthy eating, and what we actually choose to eat? The west's trans-fat saturated, synthetically flavoured, salt-packed fast-food diet has been incontrovertibly linked to the rise in type two diabetes and obesity - but it is something we seem unwilling to give up. Considering this government's caution over introducing a 'fat tax', it seems unlikely that its successors will wish to force us to eat greens that suit our genes.

Still, the future will not wait. Jozef Kokini, director of the Centre for Advanced Food Technology at at Rutgers University, agrees with Jim Kaput that our dietary choices will become far more 'intelligent'. 'Fifteen years ago, the idea of making food choices that are optimal for each one of us personally sounded like science fiction,' he says. 'Today it's real science. The personal diet will prevent cancer and increase your lifespan and your quality of life.'

Food science, Dr Kokini adds, is in the midst of a revolution, with 'truly an explosion' in new ideas. 'You'll find foods that are better designed in terms of health prevention attributes, oranges that will last three weeks and still be fresh, a bunch of new textures and flavours with mouthfeel you can't even conceive of.' It will, he says, be 'a very exciting time over the next 20 years, a revolution. You'll be amazed.'

And if new revenue streams follow, you can presume the food industry will enthusiastically embrace it. After all, why should science make way for naysayers such as Sue Dengate, at the Food Intolerance Network? 'What all this means is higher doses of cheaper food additives leading to more irritability, restlessness and sleep difficulties,' Dengate says in despair. 'Why can't food technologists just stop mucking around with our food supply?'

Because if anything does go wrong in today's highly globalised industry, it is not just local food supplies that will be affected. 'It's impossible to predict consequences that will eventually flow from new technologies,' warns Richard Young at the Soil Association. 'In the 1950s, antibiotics were widely used as food preservatives before the problems of antibiotic resistance became clear. And who could have predicted that BSE and CJD would result from the animal feed we were using?'

(The Observer Food Monthly, May 16, 2004)

Read more!

Trendsurfing columns from The Times Magazine

Cellphone cinema (The Times Magazine, December 2 2006)
The new corporate names (The Times Magazine, September 30 2006)
DNA hacking (The Times Magazine, September 16 2006)
Crowdsourcing (The Times Magazine, June 24 2006)
Consumer-created ads (The Times Magazine, April 15 2006)
Very light jets (The Times Magazine, January 7 2006)
Porncasting (The Times Magazine, November 5 2005)
The personal factory (The Times Magazine, October 29 2005)
Prediction markets (The Times Magazine, October 8 2005)
Freeganism (The Times Magazine, September 17 2005)
Sponsored weddings (The Times Magazine, January 29 2005)
Toy hacking (The Times Magazine, January 15 2005)
Alternate reality gaming (The Times Magazine, November 29 2004)
Podcasting (The Times Magazine, November 8 2004)
MORE....

Read more!

The Times: Strings attached - The Kabbalah Centre exposed

Its celebrity followers claim the ultra-fashionable Kabbalah Centre has brought them serenity and fulfilment. But others are coming forward to accuse the organisation of emotional manipulation and financial pressure. DAVID ROWAN investigates

It was the rabbi's sudden demand for £65,000 to "cleanse" her late parents' souls that finally drove Susie to speak out. She had already faced moments of doubt during 13 months as a volunteer member of the London Kabbalah Centre. There was the instruction before a visitors' open day to "work on those not yet ready to buy, and forget those with their wallets already out"; then the intense pressure for her to spend £360 on "holy" books and £900 attending a religious ceremony. But these glancing reservations were far from Susie's mind when she agreed to meet the rabbi for a friendly cappuccino. She had become close to his family through the centre in recent months, often taking his son to the cinema or the zoo, and signing up at his suggestion for more classes. An attractive and financially independent businesswoman in her early thirties, Susie had also confided in him about her unfulfilled spiritual and emotional needs, no doubt partly caused by her parents' early deaths. She had dabbled with Neuro-Linguistic Programming, but now seemed to have found fulfilment - like Madonna and Elizabeth Taylor - in the structured teachings of the Kabbalah Centre.

The centre, based in Los Angeles, has attracted widespread celebrity support in recent years, with new members drawn to the persuasive mystical teachings of its founder, Rabbi Philip Berg. Berg - "the Rav" to his followers - has proved a controversial figure among more conventional rabbis, who question his fundraising methods as well as his teachings, such as his claim that Jews would have survived the Holocaust had they only studied Kabbalah. But for Susie, the London Kabbalah Centre was simply a supportive network that she had allowed to touch ever-larger areas of her life.

So when she met the rabbi on January 26 near the centre's new £3.65 million offices in Stratford Place in the West End of London, she wondered why he seemed unusually serious. "I thought maybe it was because he'd heard some of the questions I'd started asking, such as why, for all its fundraising, the centre was not doing much for the wider community," she recalls. "So I explained that my mother had died of cancer in 1980, and that, though I'm involved with Cancer Research, I'd be willing to participate in community work for the centre in hospitals, or prisons, or with the homeless." According to Susie, the rabbi looked at her and said that there was one thing she could do to honour her parents' memory: she could buy the centre a new Kabbalistic Torah, the sacred scroll containing the five Books of Moses. "He explained that their souls would benefit from the 'light', and my channels would be opened," she says. "He said that I had 'Klippah', which means negative energy that stops the light coming into my life, and that was why I couldn't have a relationship with a man, or have children, and why people in my business were stealing money. There were only three Kabbalistic Torahs in the world, he said, but if I donated money there and then, he would bring one there tomorrow, just for me."

Susie asked the cost, but was initially told that she was not ready to hear "because you focus on the material aspect, not the spiritual". "He said it wasn't about the money, it was about getting closer to the light. Then he said that it would cost $110,000. I smiled, and explained that I didn't have the money. And he said, repeatedly, 'No, I'm sure you have it. Do it for me, do it for your parents.'

"To get out of what was now a very uncomfortable situation, I explained that everything was invested in property. And he replied: 'Then give us a property!'" The rabbi then made another suggestion. "He said, 'I'll let you pay by instalments.' I could write a series of post-dated cheques that his wife would cash each month. When I insisted that the cheques would bounce, he again started to argue quite aggressively that I did have it, and that we should go straight to the centre and sign."

Susie left the café in shock. "I felt as if I'd trusted this person so much," she says now. "It was so unexpected. But then I remembered a friend's warning, that I had dismissed at the time, to 'watch out for the money thing'. I feel abused emotionally and blackmailed in the name of 'light'."

Susie has not returned to the centre, despite receiving follow-up calls about the expected donation. Instead, she took her concerns to the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. As she explained to him, she now believes that she was carefully targeted by the centre as a vulnerable yet potentially high-value donor, and that her trust was gained over months of Kabbalah classes and social events. "They seek out people with an obvious need, for what is clearly a very organised form of selling," she now believes. "You stop seeing your friends, you forget your reality. If someone had been weaker, they'd have given the money."

. . . ARTICLE CONTINUES HERE

Read more!

The Times Magazine: How Bratz beat Barbie

Move over, Barbie: there are some hot new kids on the block. David Rowan visits Bratz HQ to discover how these ethnically ambiguous, fashion-crazy dolls are winning our tweenagers' hearts and minds

Richard Landry designs high-end celebrity homes for the likes of Eddie Murphy and Rod Stewart. But today he appears to be winning over that infinitely more fickle customer: a streetwise eight-year-old fashionista from South London. With its Jacuzzi, private lift and sun-deck, Landry's "deluxe three-storey high-rise apartment" has utterly charmed Robyn Henry, who stares transfixed in her fluffy pink coat and knee-length boots, a white handbag swinging elegantly in time with her beaded hair. "Wow! Look at this!" she calls across Hamleys to the two adult cousins who have brought her here this dank November Saturday. "It's the coolest thing in the world! That's what I want for Christmas."

At £149, Landry's gaudy plastic dolls' house won't win any awards for value. But this is the official 2004 "Bratz Pad", built for today's hippest fashion dolls, and brand loyalty is all to consumers like Robyn. She already owns four Bratz and six of her Lil' Bratz friends, for whom today she'll take home a few hot new fashion outfits. "I love Sasha and Cloe, but Yasmin's my favourite," she explains coyly. "She's got the best clothes." Robyn also owns a dozen Barbies - "and the car, and the house" - but, well, she hasn't played with them for ages. "I don't like them much," she whispers, screwing up her nose. "They're not teenagers, like Bratz."

The evolving tastes of one little black girl from South Norwood reflect a more global headache for the world's biggest toy firm. Mattel, whose Barbie range used to command 90 per cent of the international fashion-doll market, has lately slumped towards 60 per cent and seen profits dive. In Britain, a retail audit recently put the 45-year-old blonde into second place. The Bratz, a clique of sultry-eyed, collagen-lipped fashion flirts, have come from nowhere in three years to tell Barbie Millicent Roberts to retire back to Willows, Wisconsin. And the tweens - the booming consumer demographic aged between six and 12 - have broadly tended to agree.

MGA Entertainment, the family-owned California firm that launched Bratz in June 2001, says it will earn $3 billion (£1.6 billion) this year from the dolls and accessories, ranging from the Luscious Lip Phone to the Dazzlin' Disco Karaoke. Barbie still makes more money - $3.6 billion (£2 billion) last year, according to a rather defensive Mattel - but the fashion dolls are tearing out each other's hair. This year, Mattel - with 25,000 employees, as opposed to MGA's 460 - has made some awkward financial disclosures as its upstart rival has eroded Barbie's market share: a 73 per cent fall in profits in the first quarter; a 13 per cent drop in sales in the third. The Bratz, meanwhile, continue to sashay funkily into new markets - increasingly, as in the UK, claiming first place.

What explains the extraordinary appeal of Bratz, beyond catwalk chic, huge expressive faces, and skin tones that cross ethnic boundaries? How have Meygan, Sasha, Jade, Cloe, Yasmin and their newer friends tapped this mysterious pre-teen psyche in a way that increasingly eludes Barbie? It cannot be price: Hamleys sells the Bratz "Formal Funk" dolls for £29.99, whereas a remarkably similar MyScene range, from Mattel, is £7 cheaper and includes a DVD. Old-style Barbies cost less than £10 - yet for some reason, the store's Bratzworld section is far busier this Saturday afternoon than Barbie's magical land of Fairytopia.

The answer lies 6,000 miles away, in a nondescript 150,000 sq ft office complex adjoining an airfield in Van Nuys, southern California. Apart from a temporary vinyl banner, there is nothing to suggest that 16380 Roscoe Boulevard is home to the midriff-bearing dolls "with a passion for fashion". Since MGA moved here a few weeks ago, having suddenly outgrown its old offices, there has been little time to install corporate signs - even if Isaac Larian, the Jewish-Iranian immigrant who founded the company, has arranged for a mezuzah, a scroll containing passages from the Torah, to be affixed to every doorpost as required by Jewish law. Behind one of these security-guarded doorways a buzzing hive of doll designers, hair stylists, make-up artists, couturiers, seamstresses, package creators and "inventors" is finalising what will be the 2006 and 2007 Bratz ranges. Colour box templates are grabbed from printers, Vivienne Westwood monographs are pored over at workstations, tiny hand-stitched leather jackets are handed around for colleagues' thoughts. Animated creativity pervades the long open-plan room, punctuated by occasional giggles and girl-like sighs of approval at the latest arrivals from MGA's Hong Kong factory.

At one end of the building, Poottipong Phoosopha is painting almond-shaped eyes and swollen red lips on to a rack of bald plastic heads. In a room next door, Kristen Kirst is oven-baking the disembodied heads before experimenting with new hairstyles. Beside her, above a montage of Brad Pitt magazine photos, are 60 impaled heads with frizzy blonde locks, black ponytails, white platinum bobs, auburn spikes with green extensions - whatever combinations Kirst feels might excite her fashion-aware consumers. "I'm a Mattel refugee," she whispers as she prepares to root a new style for Jade, her "absolute favourite". "They just want your typical boring styles you've already done ten times." Nearby, another designer in a goatee and a reversed baseball cap declares that he, too, left Mattel "because it was inhibiting my creative freedom, always people telling you what to do". But after Kevin Bloomfield joined MGA, he was excited to find Isaac Larian receptive to his idea for an innovative boys' action figure. The company now sees Alien Racers as its next billion-dollar brand. If the Bratz have a mother figure, it is Paula Treantafelles, a product designer who joined MGA five years ago from Mattel. "I was there towards the decline of their Barbie brand, though they'll never admit it," Treantafelles smiles. "Executives moaned that girls were getting older, faster, so they couldn't be blamed for Barbie's diminishing age profile. I didn't agree. I'd heard about this crazy Iranian guy who could challenge their taboos. So I came here."

Within six months, she had brought Larian her idea: a fashion doll specifically targeting the seven to ten-year-olds whom Mattel was failing to reach. "At this age they're very different to four to six-year-olds," she says. "They're about self-expression, self-identity. When Barbie was in her prime, girls were taught to be career women, to be men's equals. Today, yes, career and education matter, but it's also ‘express yourself, have your own identity, girl power'. Strangely, Barbie might have missed that message."

Her answer was not simply a doll, but a "self-expression piece". Bratz, unlike Barbies, have no "back story" - there are no "Doctor Bratz" or "Vet Bratz"; each can become whatever, whoever their little girl owners want them to be. "The only time we could express ourselves as girls was through our fashion. It really didn't matter what you looked like - you could be blonde, blue-eyed or dark-skinned, dark-haired. I wanted each doll to have a different personality that would be expressed through her fashion." Fashion matters here. Across the company, from design to licensing, executives monitor trend-forecasting services, MTV and the international catwalk. Lui Domingo, 32, one of two main doll designers, used to create £6,000 couture dresses on behalf of Mary McFadden in New York and Richard Tyler in LA. That was before he spent five years outfitting Barbie. "If you had a new idea, Mattel made you go through well over ten approval processes," Domingo recalls. "If, heaven forbid, you picked a colour other than pink, you'd have to justify yourself in a large conference room to 20 people."

The dolls could have been called Fashion Frenzies, Girrlz or Girlfriends, but the name Bratz was suggested by Carter Bryant, another former Mattel employee whose initial drawings Treantafelles felt "exuded the attitude and expression we wanted". Mattel is now suing Bryant, claiming he secretly worked for MGA while still employed by them; he is countersuing, claiming that Mattel wants to "hijack" Bratz, which he says remained just an idea until after he left. Separately, Mattel is also suing Ronald Brawer, a former employee who in October took over MGA's sales and marketing divisions. Mattel claims he took with him "highly confidential materials"; MGA describes the writ as "frivolous nonsense" timed to deflect attention from poor quarterly results. (Mattel chose not to respond to anything in this article, beyond stressing that "the Barbie brand has been and continues to be the No 1 brand for girls".)

Treantafelles never played with Barbie as a girl. "I never understood how I could aspire to be a 30-year-old mummy when I was still trying to get to be ten," she says. This new doll, then, would be the "anti-Barbie". "Where Barbie is completely profiled - this is my sister, this is my hobby - Bratz would be whatever you choose it to be. We give you the palette, identify with it as you wish." She also wanted "to turn Barbie's proportions upside-down" - hence the oversize head and huge detachable feet. "You're not idolising something supposed to look like you," Treantafelles says. "Instead of 'I should look like that physically', it's 'I want to identify with that'."

And whereas Mattel introduced black and Hispanic Barbies in 1980, Treantafelles - herself Greek-American - wanted to blur the ethnic lines. "We were so careful not to say, 'This is our Hispanic character; this is our African-American…'" At one of our first focus groups, this beautiful little Indian girl saw our darker-skinned doll, and was so excited, screaming hysterically. She'd finally found a character that identified with her. Little did she know that Barbie culture identified that doll as African-American." "Listening to the kids" is coded into MGA's DNA. The company relentlessly focus-groups with children, invites their feedback via its members' clubs, talks back to their Bratz fan sites. Throughout the company, the lessons are drummed in: eight to ten-year-olds aspire to be 16, and so they will reject toys their younger sisters might play with; edginess and rebelliousness reinforce the independence they crave; they absorb "adult" media messages more completely than may be apparent.

"All these wild emotions are playing in your head when you're ten," Treantafelles says. "You want to be pretty, you want to wear fancy clothes. We're just materialising these wild impulses, no different from Beyonce or Christina Aguilera." The punk-inspired range for spring 2005, "Pretty 'N' Punk" - black leather and chains, tartan miniskirts, ripped T-shirts - has tested particularly well. "I don't think that's an accident," Treantafelles says. "It takes the rebellious dark side of every little girl. Is it appropriate? Yes, she understands it completely. We've kept the halo above the logo."

In a darkened room in the San Fernando Valley, halfway between Van Nuys and Hollywood, Isaac Larian is staring intensely through a one-way mirror while distractedly picking at a plate of raw vegetables. Behind the glass screen, Ashley, Joy, Cassandra and five other eight and nine-year-olds are transfixed as Joy, the moderator, unveils four large jigsaws featuring their favourite funky friends.

"Cool!" they coo in unison. "They're awesome! I love Bratz!" adds Jessica. "I'd hang them on my bedroom wall."

"How are we going to get that across on the packaging?" Larian calls across to four MGA colleagues, each scribbling away frantically. "Let's see if they'd buy all four."

Joy has already pre-empted his question. "I might, but that would waste all my money," Sara says thoughtfully. "Ha!" Larian interjects. "I love it, kids are so honest." It is 5.45pm on a wet Wednesday evening, and the weekly Bratz focus groups have been going for an hour when Larian arrives. For a billionaire chief executive, he seems remarkably informal, an open-necked shirt beneath his brown leather jacket, Blackberry e-mail device in one hand, phone in the other. Yet despite the casual appearance, Larian is in complete control here, refining questions for the moderator, berating organisers for showing photo boards rather than actual products. He insists that The Times makes no reference to specific products being tested tonight. "Mattel is dying to find out what we're doing," he explains.

His research staff talk a lot about "age compression" and "KGOY" - a marketing term for "kids growing older younger". When Barbie was introduced in 1959, they point out, her target market was six to ten-year-olds. Today, she appeals mostly to ages three to six.

Another Mattel toy, Fisher-Price's Little People, used to be pitched to two-year-olds. Nowadays they are for one-year-olds. The distinction between childhood and early adulthood has also blurred. Three years ago, the Argos store chain was condemned by British child welfare groups for marketing thongs and padded bras to nine-year-old girls. Pop stars such as Britney Spears, meanwhile, have brought what activists call "hooker chic" into the pre-teen bedroom. To some campaigners, these cultural messages are irrefutably linked to "premature sexualisation" and perhaps even to a lowered age of puberty. The toy industry sees them simply as an untapped commercial opportunity.

"I was looking for a way into this tweens demographic, which has $22 billion to spend," Larian recalls, back in his office. "That's the highest disposable income of any demographic. They don't want to play mummies any more, and they're becoming more multicultural. You've also got the guilt trip from parents working so hard. If your daughter nags you for a doll, you'll buy her one, two, maybe three."

Larian, 50, had his own focus group to convince him: his daughter Yasmin, now 16, and sons Cameron, 10, and 18-year-old Jason. So when Treantafelles first showed him Bryant's sketches, he sought Yasmin's advice. "She said, 'They're really cute.' I thought, if Yasmin thinks so, so will other kids." He still had to convince a sceptical sales force, more familiar with electronic toys and singing baby dolls. So Larian put on make-up and a dress, and addressed his staff as "Persian Bratz". Eighty million dolls later, Bratz now accounts for most of the company's profits. Larian's story is textbook American dream. He arrived from Iran in 1971, aged 17, with a one-way ticket and $750 in his pocket. "I'll never forget that after 30 days, I had 25 quarters left, no job, and was scared to my stomach. I was a kid." Larian walked for 11 miles down a Los Angeles street, stopping to ask for work at every restaurant and gas station.

Eventually, Spires Coffee Shop said he could wash dishes for $1.65 an hour. He would work until 7am, and then study civil engineering.

He discovered that making money was easier. He imported Korean brassware, then moved into consumer electronics. Larian's big break was reading in a newspaper, when in Japan in 1987, about Nintendo's hugely successful Game & Watch toy. "I asked them to give me American distribution rights," he remembers. "They said no, but I was very persistent. Finally they said yes. That year we sold $22 million of Game & Watch."

He soon learnt that children are fickle. "You had to give kids a new fashion, a new product, every three or four months or you would die. We didn't see that. The next year, we had $10 million of inventory. It was scary. I quickly sold the lot to Dixons at 25 cents to the dollar. I thought, forget about the toy business." But he persisted, forming Micro Games of America to license Donkey Kong, Power Rangers and Star Wars merchandise. There were huge sums at stake. When MGA claimed that George Lucas's company, Lucasfilm Ltd, had violated its Star Wars licence by letting another firm sell electronic toys, Larian won $5.6 million in a legal settlement.

By the mid-Nineties, turnover had reached $60 million. In 1997, Larian launched a doll, Singing Bouncing Baby. A Walmart buyer questioned what a games firm knew about dolls; so he changed its name to MGA Entertainment (the MGA stands for Micro Games of America). The doll became a bestseller, and the Walmart buyer challenged Larian to find the new Barbie. So when Treantafelles and Bryant made their pitch, he knew they were on to something. Larian is an unlikely billionaire. His greatest extravagance is a leased chauffeur-driven car, and he only agreed to that "because I was on the Blackberry and cellphone so much that I got into two accidents". In Iran, he says, he was a socialist. "That's one of the reasons I picked civil engineering, so I could go back and build roads. Money can be a blessing and a curse. I'll probably end up giving 90 per cent away to charity."

Meantime, there is still plenty more of it to be made. A new entertainment vice president, hired from Disney, is overseeing a second Bratz DVD, a TV series, and a feature film. A celebrity hit squad is busy ensuring the dolls are regularly photographed in the hands of teen icons such as Avril Lavigne and Hilary Duff. And, of course, there are the 300 licencees busy producing all manner of spin-off merchandise.

"The tween is much more sophisticated than people credit," Marcy George, US licensing director, says during a merchandising brainstorm session. "I met a designer today who was actually talking about embedding rhinestones into swimwear flippers," says Holly Stinnett, a senior brand manager. "They'll be pearlised with glitter, really cool and Bratzy."

Isaac Larian walks in. "Hey, let's not give the enemy too much information," he says. "Frankly, you'll have a whole room that's Bratz - her toothbrush, bedding, apparel, basically her whole life. The opposition, meanwhile, is too busy with corporate politics and suing people. Mattel's boss comes from the cheese industry. [Robert Eckert used to run Kraft Foods.] They don't see that selling cheese and toys are very different.

"It's kind of sad," he continues, "that instead of innovating, the world's top toy company is imitating. After 45 years of working, maybe it's time for Barbie to retire." A more serious question is whether Bratz dolls are sexualising little girls. Last January, a child advocacy group, Stop Commercial Exploitation of Children, led a protest against Bratz and other raunchy dolls outside the International Toy Fair in New York. In a letter sent to the Toy Industry Association, the group spelt out its concerns: "Bratz dolls are highly sexualised dolls with extremely high heels, eyes heavy with make-up, large puffy lips and very skimpy, tightly fitting clothes," it said. "These dolls are at the forefront of a toy trend that promotes stereotyped and sexualised behaviour that children cannot understand. They make the way bodies look a focus of play and equate self-worth with appearance."

Another group, Dads and Daughters, is running an e-mail campaign against MGA's "Secret Date" range of Bratz. "Is there a benefit to anyone but the manufacturer when that toy comes with a seductively dressed female doll, a mystery date, champagne glasses and date night accessories?" it asks. Kay Hymowitz, who has written widely on the commercialisation of childhood in books such as Liberation's Children, believes that the marketing industry is deliberately sexualising girls for profit. "Marketers make it sound like KGOY is just a fact of nature," Hymowitz argues. "The truth is, they have played a central role in making it happen. They want to sell products; they know kids who are independent and ‘empowered' are more likely to tell their parents to buy those products. They know that the way you seize kids' attention is to make them feel older and more glamorous - and sexier."

This "premature sexualisation" can have wider consequences. Ruth Coppard, an NHS child psychologist based in Sheffield, says she sees the impact in 12-year-old fathers and 15-year-olds on the pill: "It's a great commercial opportunity - but is it ethical?" Coppard asks. "The little girl doesn't necessarily understand the sexual connotations of the clothes she sees on television and wants to wear. She might think she's just being fashionable, but the older people around her do pick up those sexual messages. And that erodes our respect for childhood." The consequences, Coppard says, partly explain Britain's high rate of teenage pregnancy. Predictably enough, such views hold little traction back on MGA's design floor. "We are not making a deliberate effort to sexualise these dolls," insists Lui Domingo. "We are making them fashionable, and coincidentally the fashions these days are rather sexy." "As soon as you put a sexy outfit on a doll, all of a sudden it's inappropriate," adds Paula Treantafelles. "The truth is, the celebrities these girls aspire to, the Beyonces and the Aguileras, they're far more inappropriate than Bratz."

Besides, Isaac Larian is smart enough to see the PR benefits of a little controversy. "You know, it's always adults who make these claims about sexualisation," he says. "Ask the kids, and they don't say they like Bratz because they're sexy. It's because they're fashionable."

His warm, gentle expression suddenly becomes one of utter determination. "We're going to make toys that the kids like, not the parents," he says. "They're the customers. The world has changed."

(The Times, London, December 4 2004)

Read more!

Sunday Times Magazine: Inside eBay

It offers everything - including the dream of success and financial independence. More than 10,000 of us make a living from it. Millions more are simply obsessed by it. But is the global phenomenon of eBay spinning out of control? By David Rowan

Fossils are Trevor George's life. His semi-rural 17th-century cottage in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, is packed with them: 2ft-tall local ammonites, Patagonian saltasaurus dinosaur eggs, cretaceous fossilised insects piled up by 365m-year-old Moroccan trilobites. Until a year ago, George, once a soldier with the Royal Engineers, was making a tolerable if undemanding living polishing unrefined fossils in his back-garden workshop, which he would sell on to Britain's remaining beach-front souvenir shops. Then he had an idea that made fellow dealers laugh out loud. Why didn't he photograph and describe some of his older specimens, and try auctioning them on eBay?

George, a short, quiet man with a mischievous pixie grin, assumed that even serious collectors would hesitate before buying petrified life forms over the internet. He did not expect to find himself running a hugely profitable global business. His personal eBay trading account, in the name of "british-jurassic-fossils", made more than 5,100 sales last year, at prices ranging from a few pounds to £2,200. This year, with 200 trilobites or meteorites listed at any time, George expects to double turnover to around £250,000. "The potential's there to make a million a year through eBay, maybe more," he says with undisguised delight, as he fills the kettle which, like the wall clock and garden tools, he bought second-hand over the site. "It's changed my life. If I get two girls doing the typing, a third photographing and packing, I could become the Argos of British fossils."

A decade after an idealistic French-Iranian computer programmer named Pierre Omidyar built a website and auctioned off his broken laser pen for $14, that website is rewriting the rules of British business. AuctionWeb, launched at Omidyar's ebay.com web address from his spare bedroom in California' s Silicon Valley, was conceived as "a place where people can come together" ? an online exchange for all, which would never actually handle merchandise, but would let its users determine a fair market price. In exchange, Omidyar asked for a small proportion of any sale price to pay his web-hosting bills. Today, eBay continues to earn up to 5.25% commission on each sale, plus the fees it charges for everything from listing items to setting a reserve price. That "perfect marketplace", as Omidyar conceived it, is now the internet era's outstanding commercial success story, handling trades worth $34 billion (£18 billion) a year. It is established in 32 international markets and its 135m registered members buy or sell goods worth $1,050 (£560) every second, from over 34m items listed at any time. Corporations such as IBM and Vodafone use eBay to dispose of excess stock, but 95% of this "community" still comprises individuals and small businesses.

Talk to an eBay employee and you'll soon be showered with eager superlatives: the 4m new listings daily, the diamond rings traded every two minutes. But in the past few months, the most extraordinary numbers reflect the company's phenomenal growth in this country, five years after a dedicated website was launched here. With 10m members, the UK is now eBay's third biggest market after the US and Germany, growing at more than 160% each year. So culturally ingrained has it become that a day barely passes without an eBay story making the news- from students auctioning their foreheads to advertisers, to the more worrying reports of illegal gun trades, hard-core pornography, fraud and fake tsunami fundraisers.

But the negative publicity hasn't stopped more than a third of British internet users visiting eBay each month to buy and sell, or just to check how much their Fendi bag or Ferrari Spider might fetch. Some use its chatrooms to swap stories about "eBay addiction", the thrill of bidding leading them into debt. For the more entrepreneurial, the site is a powerful new way to reach customers. The company estimates that at least 10,000 people in the UK now rely on eBay to make a living, having recast an established "offline" business as an internet-based "shop window", or turned a hobby into a commercial venture. For Trevor George, it was both. "You need a passion for what you're selling," he says, scratching rock away from a 2in trilobite using a pneumatic air chisel. "That one's 450m years old," he points out with paternal pride. "Every fossil is individual."

George, 46, first used eBay to sell some old computer printers in December 2003. "They went very quickly, so then I got rid of my old climbing gear," he recalls. "All my friends said fossils would never go, that you can only sell rubbish on eBay. So I tried it. And it works."

He sources his merchandise in China and Morocco, but some of the richest pickings come from a former iron-ore quarry nearby, whose owner happily lets him take away soil by the skipload. His father-in-law, Glyn, a retired engineer, helps out in the workshop, and Richard, his son, offers a hand when not at college. But mostly, once George has cleaned, photographed and listed his precious finds, it is the computerised shop window that does the work. He starts the bids at 99p, £4.99 or £59.99, or specifies a fixed price that lets a customer "Buy It Now". Then, bar the odd e-mail inquiry, he waits at his computer to learn how much he's earned. "I'm comfortable, and I've got a great lifestyle, jetting around the world to collectors' fairs," he says. "It can only grow. I'm offering 30 lines, but there are a hundred I could do. No wonder jobs around the house aren't getting done."

At 1pm, a Parcelforce van arrives to collect 13 boxes destined for Quebec, California, Florida and Coventry. A pile of Jiffy bags for smaller orders sits on the kitchen table, alongside a few of this morning's cheques: one for £159.92, another for £38.50, a third for £4.99. "My accountant warns me to bank the cheques before sending out the goods," George says with a shrug. "But I think it's fairly safe. I've only ever had one person rip me off, pretending his parcel hadn't arrived. Mostly, eBay teaches you to trust people."

That is exactly how its founder intended it. On February 26, 1996, six months after launching the website as a hobby, Omidyar wrote to the "community" explaining that its growth depended on trust. "Most people are honest, but some people are dishonest. Or deceptive. It's a fact of life... But here, those people can't hide. We'll drive them away... This grand hope depends on your active participation... Use our feedback forum. Give praise where it is due; make complaints where appropriate... By creating an open market that encourages honest dealings, I hope to make it easier to conduct business with strangers over the net."

The "feedback forum" would be the key to Omidyar's "grand experiment". Members would be encouraged to rate everyone they traded with - whether as buyers or sellers. They would be asked to define the experience as positive, negative or neutral, and adding a comment visible to all. For the ponytailed Omidyar, who still held a day job programming codes for a Silicon Valley start-up, General Magic, this self-policing mechanism would save his time and give users an incentive to earn each other's respect. George may have been trading for barely a year, but his 99.9% positive-feedback rating, following reviews from 2,185 eBay members, gives him the credibility that will drive sales.

After graduating in computer science from Tufts University in 1988, Omidyar worked for some of Silicon Valley's hottest tech companies before helping launch some of his own. One, eShop, was bought by Microsoft, making Omidyar a millionaire before he was 30. Then, in summer 1995, he decided to experiment with his "virtual exchange".

A few myths have grown up around eBay's birth. One is that Omidyar launched it to help his fiancée, Pam Wesley, now his wife, find some rare Pez sweet dispensers for her collection. That, Adam Cohen discovered, researching his authorised history of eBay, The Perfect Store, was a publicist's invention designed to give a human face to a tech company. Further confusion surrounds the name. It is not a homage to San Francisco's East Bay area, nor Echo Bay in Nevada.

It was simply a contraction of Echo Bay Technology Group, a name Omidyar used for his web consulting business because "it sounded cool". The echobay.com web address had been taken. A contracted form, ebay.com, was available.

Now 37 and living with Pam and their two young children in Nevada, Omidyar is estimated by Forbes magazine to be worth $10.4 billion. Although Omidyar remains chairman, Meg Whitman, an energetic former Disney executive, has been running the company since March 1998. This has left the publicity-shy Omidyar time to devote to his next goal: to give money to causes that, as he sees it, use the networking power of technology to "make the world a better place".

In the company mantra, eBay is "just a platform", letting the busy mother in Ascot compete on equal terms with the global corporation in Akron. But this, critics say, is what lets fraudsters prosper, their unvetted auctions ensnaring the unwary for as long as eBay leaves them to it. This is not, of course, how Omidyar sees it: eBay's hands-off approach lets its users "become empowered by participating in an open and honest marketplace", discovering "their own power to make good things happen". The ponytail may be long gone, but not, it seems, the multi-billionaire's hippie idealism.

In the spare bedroom of an unassuming semidetached house in Bristol, Helen Southcott, 27, sits answering some of the day's 500 e-mails. Three feet away, tapping heavily on a keyboard on the same cluttered desk, Southcott's fiancé, Matthew Ogborne, monitors the bids rolling in on some of the 2,000 items that he listed yesterday for auction.

Until June 2003, Ogborne, now 26, was making an uncomplicated living as a photocopier engineer, and driving a rusting H-registration Metro. He still drives the Metro - but today, as an eBay trader calling himself "MoggieX", Ogborne has a turnover approaching £1m "any day now". In eBay language, that makes him a "Titanium Powerseller", putting him among its top few earners in Britain.

The venture began two years ago with a £2,000 credit-card debt, after Ogborne chanced upon a supplier of digital cameras. He found he could easily make £50 on each by selling them on eBay. He then found an electronics manufacturer to supply him with DVD players, memory cards and home-theatre systems at prices that would let him undercut the high street. Demand was so great that by summer 2003, he'd quit his job and was working from home. "Quitting the job was the most liberating experience for me," says Ogborne. "The hours, and the pay, are much better here." By last summer, the business was bringing in up to £77,000 a month. "It scared the living daylights out of our accountant," he says, sipping tea from an eBay mug. "We've doubled turnover since May; I intend to do so again by the summer. The volume of feedback is mind-boggling."

Southcott has also given up her job in fashion retail to take care of "customer service". This, Ogborne explains, ensures that feedback remains high, which in turn attracts new business and higher prices. After 12,400 customers, MoggieX claims a 99.7% positive rating. "The feedback works for us too," he says. "If a customer has no feedback and is buying £800 worth of kit, you get suspicious and check them out. Warning bells ring if they've bought lots of 99p items simply to build up feedback. But if they've been buying golf clubs - well, that's a human being, isn't it?"

At eBay's UK headquarters, in a Georgian square by the Thames in Richmond, Surrey, you hear a great deal spoken about the "community". The membership might not be welcome here in person - the building is unmarked, the phone numbers unlisted - but as Whitman sees it, they are the company's "soul" and the reason for its success. They loyally offer suggestions on its voluminous bulletin boards; they report back when they find auction rules being breached. Doug McCallum, the UK managing director, calls them "the biggest Neighbourhood Watch in the universe".

That makes Dan Wilson one of eBay's more important UK employees. As "community manager", the 27-year-old is responsible for monitoring members' concerns. When auction fees are raised, as happened in January, he will bring their worries to his bosses' attention. If he hears horror stories about eBay customer support, he investigates. "We're not a democracy, true, but it makes good business sense for us to work with the community," Wilson says. "They have to make money for us to make money - so I really don't think it's the shareholders who are running the show."

As with all eBay employees, Wilson is obliged to trade there himself: internal competitions reward staff with the most improved feedback scores. His most recent sale was an electric coffee grinder that cost him £12.50 in the Whittard sale, which he sold for £18.50. He also made £400 on a box of old 78rpm records that he bought on the site for £1. "Call me the Terrible Trotter, but I don't think you can look the community in the eye unless you know what they do."

The real stars, mentioned with reverence by staff at HQ, are those who are turning over six- or seven-figure sums from home. "Some have given up senior management positions; others are mums who have built up their business by listing their goods when the children are asleep," says Elspeth Knight, responsible for Britain's "Powersellers", those conducting the most transactions. They include Julie King, 33, who was reluctant to return to her demanding job as an IT consultant after giving birth to Lewis two years ago. She decided to try selling shoes from her North Tyneside home. The result was killer-heels-com, where you can buy £15 party stilettos or £14 cowboy boots.

"We now list about 400 pairs at any one time. We expect turnover this year to reach about £150,000, up from last year's £98,000," she says, tired having just put Lewis to bed before another evening packing shoes. That "we", by the way, is deceptive: King, a single mother, runs the business entirely by herself, from visiting wholesalers to answering e-mails. "It's 16-hour days. I'm earning less than I was in IT, but this lets me see my littl'un grow up," she says.

Louise Allen, 25, has no such domestic distractions. She was studying accounting at Leeds Metropolitan University when she discovered eBay, selling a South Park script for £130, then a treadmill for £450. From there, a fitness-equipment business quickly grew, with Allen handling orders from university while her father, in Manchester, arranged deliveries. Last year's turnover was £1.3m. With eBay, you can "launch a business in a day", says Allen, now working full time with a staff of six. "But you can't rely on it 100%. If you can find a new product, it will do well for a few weeks, then the demand disappears. And anyone can copy your idea in an instant." So eBay has become just one outlet for her business, exerciseathome.co.uk.

Still, not all traders are just after money. Simon Stevens, in Coventry, makes just a few hundred pounds each month selling swimming aids and waterproof clothing. After four years on eBay, he is proud that he has earned 99.5% positive feedback. What his customers don't know is that Stevens, 30, has cerebral palsy, "as eBay and the internet don't discriminate on appearance", he says, typing his words into a text phone to be more easily understood. "This has given my business, Enable Enterprises, an opportunity to reach a market that would have been impossible before eBay. I'm not ashamed of being disabled," he adds. "But to be able to compete on a level playing field - that's wonderful."

But there is a darker side to the eBay experience. For all its members' unpaid vigilance, eBay's boundary-free community has allowed fraudsters, pornographers, drug dealers and weapons traders to abuse its loosely regulated hospitality. The company says it would be impractical, and doubtless costly, to vet each of the 4m new items listed for sale each day. Yet by pulling unauthorised auctions only when alerted to breaches, eBay's management is letting its "perfect" marketplace become wilfully soiled.

On a random afternoon in January, The Sunday Times Magazine quickly found auctions under way for illegal flick knives, pirated software, obviously fake designer labels, and junk e-mail addresses - all supposedly banned by eBay. A "poor student girl" in Redditch was offering "nude photos - totally naked!" to repay her overdraft. The current bid was £9 for 10 intimate images. For £4, another trader offered "some really hot pics and video of my sexy wife and her mates playing up". A number of sellers were advertising soiled knickers for up to £20, often employing clumsy typographical tricks to evade the site's proscription of dirty underwear. "Do you want to buy my un USED panties?" one seller asked. "I have had many a wild night packaging these special thongs for you naughty boys. I take requests..."

A seller in Rayleigh, Essex, was offering five "big bud cannabis seeds", with bidding at £6.61 - legal, the listing claimed, unless germinated, but in breach of the rules. You could also buy throwing knives (£3.70), a means to "unlock your Sky box" (£1.99), allegedly "genuine" Viagra (starting at £1), and CDs containing 200m e-mail addresses (£8.99).

Garreth Griffith, responsible for what eBay UK calls "trust and safety", accepts that these items should not have been there. "The challenge is the volume," he admits. "We try to catch them. We're trying to improve really quickly. I feel more confident that we're on top of it."

More awkward for eBay have been the guns. The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) has warned of illegal weapons entering Britain through eBay. Last year, the site was forced to end the auction of a semi-automatic CZ75 pistol 24 hours after it went on sale for £650. "It does nothing for eBay's reputation," the Labour MP Steve McCabe told his party conference in September. "A company making the money eBay is making could afford to properly monitor the site." McCabe has since compiled a dossier of guns allegedly on sale. The site was allowing dealers to sell the weapons without checking whether they were active or not, thus contributing directly to street crime, he claimed. "Dealers know that illegal weapons will be removed from the site within 24 hours, so they are using that time to advertise private sales or advertise empty bags or boxes for sale and offering guns as a free gift."

Doug McCallum says the claims are grossly exaggerated. "It's an outrage that people in their own interests have managed to create an impression that guns and weapons are available on eBay," he says. "We've actually gone further than the law states and banned paintball guns and knives. Obviously, we can't keep a marketplace of this scale clean every moment of every day" (an argument repeated by other executives to The Sunday Times), "but we aggressively invest in removing things as soon as we hear about them."

The company says it does far more than simply wait for tip-offs. "We recognise that the whole foundation of eBay is based on trust," Griffith says. "So we look for references to, say, gun-related terms. We also look at the type of people coming onto the site to identify questionable behaviour. If I've just registered and within a few hours am bidding on eight cars, I'm probably not legitimate. We'd catch that." So why not use automated word filters more effectively? "Could we block the word 'gun'? Yes, but as a result we'd block Guns N' Roses and The Guns of Navarone," Griffith says. The site has indeed begun using key-word filters to block terms related to drugs, guns and pornography until these listings can be manually approved. "Thousands of items" await approval at any time. The other problem is fraud.

In December, sentencing a woman who had sold £3,000 of fake Glastonbury tickets on eBay, Judge Richard Bray warned that the system made committing fraud "easy". Just how easy is made clear by  recent reports, from the 17-year-old Gwent boy who made £45,000 selling nonexistent goods, to John Leary, jailed for four years after selling $1m worth of laptops that never arrived. At least those fraudsters were caught: some of the more problematic transactions have involved fraudulent buyers.. Dheeraj Saxena, a 28-year-old IT consultant from Berkshire, has no idea who cheated him out of his laptop. After waiting for the selling price of £870 to reach him via PayPal, he sent the computer to the address in Russia the auction winner had specified. PayPal announced by e-mail 10 days later that the transaction had been unauthorised and it was reclaiming the funds. "It looks like someone's account was hacked, but PayPal has frozen my account, which is now in debt," Saxena says. "PayPal and eBay have washed their hands of it, and I'm getting threatening notes from PayPal demanding the £170 I'm supposedly in debt."

A trading-standards officer told Saxena that eBay was within its rights, as he had agreed to its user agreement. "So just because you sign up to a damned user agreement, you can get ripped off! And eBay doesn't even give out contact numbers. I'm not using eBay any more. And I'm not settling the outstanding fee. I'm up for a class action!"

Saxena is not alone. Bevans, a Bristol law firm, has been contacted by almost 400 fraud victims, or groups representing them, about suing eBay over allegedly unfair contract terms. "Not all cases could be said to be eBay's fault, and some of these people are a little naive," says Tony Hughes, a solicitor handling the complaints. "But there's a case for saying that eBay is not taking sufficient steps to prevent fraud, and not providing sufficient compensation."

The company says that just 0.01% of trades are confirmed as fraudulent, and that it compensates buyers by up to £105, more if they buy through PayPal. "That's fine for a pair of shoes, but it doesn't help with the case of a £900 saxophone," says Hughes. Most recently, that has included fake tsunami appeals. Still, the risks have not dented eBay's rise. Britain's ultimate bring-and-buy sale is now part of our  mainstream culture, the dinner-party conversation piece that has supplanted house prices, and the only club that could unite second-hand car dealers and celebrities such as Cherie Booth and Sir Paul McCartney. There are now even chains of bricks-and-mortar stores, such as Auctioning4U in London, which exist simply to sell busy people's goods on eBay in exchange for a 30% commission.

Yet for all its success, eBay remains at its core the minimally regulated public noticeboard that Pierre Omidyar envisaged - a powerful commercial exchange, certainly, but also a barely policed storefront for the world's con artists and opportunists, where the live auctions we chanced upon included illegal anabolic steroids, pirated DVDs and even a deactivated Soviet rocket launcher. Naturally, eBay removed these listings once they were drawn to its attention. But as the ultimate multi-billion-dollar winner of the online auction business, it may no longer be enough for eBay to remain "just a platform" that relies on its customers to look after themselves.


****

EXTRA PANELS:

Planet for sale: ebay moments

* Diane Duyser, from Florida, claimed that a 10-year-old image of the Virgin Mary on a toasted sandwich had brought her luck - including $70,000 in casino winnings. The auction was viewed more than 1.7m times before GoldenPalace.com, an online casino, bought the sandwich last November to take on a world tour. The website paid $28,000. It was not long before another eBay seller offered a sandwich toaster able to produce Virgin Mary images.

* In December 2002, Joe and Elizabeth Lapple sold Bridgeville, an 82-acre town that they owned in northern California. Their 19th-century pile of real estate attracted almost 250 bids, including a last-minute offer of $1,777,877. Alas, the supposed buyer, who was never named, quickly disappeared and the property was offered off eBay a year later for $850,000. The sales agents described using the auction site as "a fiasco".

* Nazi, Ku Klux Klan and murder-related memorabilia are banned.

* In July 2000, eBay hosted an auction of handbags owned by personalities including Cherie Booth, Jerry Hall and Lady Thatcher, to benefit the charity Breast Cancer Care. The Thatcher handbag sold for £100,000 to an unnamed bidder, which eBay says remains the highest-value single trade on the UK site.

* In 1999 the website crashed for 22 hours in what the CEO, Meg Whitman, called a "near-death experience".

* The most expensive item yet sold on eBay was a 12-seater Gulfstream II jet, sold by a Texan company, Tyler Jet, in August 2001. The price - $4.9m - was three times the previous record for an eBay end-of-auction price. It was bought by a charter aircraft company in Africa.

* The Beanie Baby craze of 1997 made up 6.6% of total volume of sales for that year.

* In January 2004, Rosie Reid, an 18-year-old student at Bristol University, turned to eBay to auction her virginity and so cut her debts. Within three days she had received 400 offers, including one for £10,000. After eBay cancelled the auction, Reid continued it on her own website, claiming to have accepted a £8,400 bid to sleep with a 44-year-old BT engineer in a London hotel room. The police were investigating but no charges were brought.

* Only 399 Ferrari Enzo sports cars were ever made. So when a "perfect" one came on to eBay's Swiss site last October with just 250 miles on the clock, international bidding was fierce. The winner had to spend £544,000 to secure the car, based in Zurich - just £22 higher than the second-placed bidder. It is the most expensive item that eBa