Forbes' corporate clan gathering

I'm at Gleneagles - somewhere I haven't been since Tony Blair and Bob Geldof were finding a strange common cause, and George Bush was putting a Strathclyde police officer in hospital after losing control of the presidential First Bicycle.

I'm listening to John Dane III, an American builder of hyper-luxury yachts, talking about the new era of inconspicuous consumption, and the challenge of building products that are inescapably conspicuous.

Quoting a client with a fuel tank of more than 20,000 litres, on filling up in Monaco: "I've never finished a trip to the Med where the cost of the fuel was more than the cost of the wine, so it doesn't matter."

"A lot of these people think of these mega-yachts as the castles of the 21st Century," he suggests.

"They make a statement, they're very personalised, they're very safe ,and they're an experience the whole family can do."

He hasn't taken a yacht order since last September, and doesn't expect the market to return for a couple of years.

The occasion is the Forbes Chief Executive Officer Forum, where the business magazine that prides itself on its corporate/family links back to New Deer, Aberdeenshire, is taking part in the Homecoming Scotland programme.

It's finding that the old turf still has all the kitschy old brand images, but that it's being run by Scottish Government ministers and quango bosses pushing hard at a message about technological innovation.

Steve Forbes, patriarch of the business clan since the death of his father Malcolm, was interviewing Alex Salmond this morning, with a strong focus on the former presidential candidate's fixation with tax-cutting.

The publisher got close to a pledge from the First Minister to set up a new prize for technology, following up on the well-trailed Saltire Prize for renewable energy research and development. Expect a life sciences prize in the next manifesto. The Dolly Award, perhaps?

Mr Salmond wasn't biting on the idea of a flat tax, however. But he was delighted to have the idea of independence described as "neat" by the US conservative.

On the day the Calman Commission delivered plans for future tax powers at Holyrood, Forbes pointed out that it was the tax issue led to American independence, so why not Scotland?

Amid various conference sessions for Forbes' gathering of corporate bosses, the session on future technology has been perhaps the most illuminating.

Among the Next Big Techie Things, Ron Tolido, chief technology officer from Capgemini, suggests the way of the future could be found by following Google's recent launch of a social networking tool, linking email, instant messaging, blogging and video, its launch eclipsing that of Microsoft's new search engine, Bing.

From the Danish bio-science chief executive of Novozymes was a future of bio-ethanols created from agricultural waste, turning the production of fuels on its head, at least geographically.

No more, says Steen Riisgaard, an oil-based energy economy that puts refineries where large ships can dock and land oil. In future, the refineries will be repopulating America's corn belt and Brazil's sugar belt - though not much discussion of the impact on food prices of diverting crops.

Perhaps the most significant change for consumer electronics, according to Warren East of digital corporation ARM, will be more flexible screens, to move away from the laptop inflexibility I'm looking at as I type.

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