StartupRealities

StartupRealities No 23 The Land Stewardship and Sustainability Council (LSSC) is an international organisation that certifies sustainable farms and farming practices. Farms can apply for LSSC certification if they meet certain thresholds and ratios: 1) Permaculture  is used on the majority of the land (trees, shrubs and perennial herbs); 2) Polyculture and crop rotation is practiced on tilled land; 3) Old trees and hedges provide ample habitat for wild birds and animals; 4) Rainwater from roofs and paved surfaces is harvested; 5) Farming practices are organic or close to organic (e.g. no use of pesticide or synthetic fertiliser); 6) Animal farming is free-range and all farmed animals are guaranteed animal rights . The LSSC seal of approval gives the produce of certified farms a marketing advantage in front of sustainability-conscious customers. The LSSC certification process is also a valuable consultancy service for farms of all sizes. Sustainable farming (Sourc...

StartupRealities No 22 RockLinguist Limited is a group of foreign-language teaching schools which use guitar players as language teachers and all language learning occurs through foreign language songs and lyrics. SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATION A series of research papers (the most recent from McGill University published on February 27 , 2020) show that there is a connection between music and speech in the human brain. This explains why it is much easier to remember a sentence that has a tune attached to it: "I want to hold your hand" is easy-peasy when you sing it like the Beatles. INTERVIEW WITH THE CEO "When you sign up for a RockLinguist course in English, you are virtually joining a rock band. Seriously!" said company founder and CEO Rochelle Lingers. "Our language teachers play the guitar to their students for half of the duration of the class. They all sit in a circle, teacher and students, and there is a lot of group singing and sometimes even dancing....

StartupRealities No 21 FlattenHills Limited is a construction and real estate company which buys coastal hills, mines the rocks in the hills for construction material, and converts the flattened plots into seaside residential developments. INTERVIEW WITH THE FOUNDER "Two people have inspired me to start my business and they lived more than 2,000 years apart," FlattenHills founder and CEO Phil Halls told us in an interview. "The first one is Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing. His ports and properties empire makes perfect commercial sense. When the shipping and ports business is down, he converts port sites into prime seaside real estate. This business model cannot go wrong," Halls noted. "My other inspiration is China's first emperor, Qin Shihuang. He said he would dig out the mountains and fill up the valleys. I am not sure why he said that but it makes sense if you are building a road, for example: you remove the obstacles and the rubble from the obsta...

StartupRealities No 20 RegenerateSeafood Limited is an aquaculture company that farms seafood in an ethical and sustainable way: by harvesting octopus arms and stone crab claws without killing the animals. The octopus and the crab can regenerate missing limbs in the wild in an evolutionary adaptation of self-defence known as autotomy  (which is commonly seen on land with lizards detaching their tail). SCIENCE The company has selectively bred octopus and crab specimens that survive the limb separation without suffering any other negative effects and that can regrow missing limbs multiple times. The harvesting process is done only under anaesthesia. CEO QUOTE "The octopus and the crab are like the apple tree and the orange tree. We pick the apples and oranges and the trees grow them again the following year," company founder and CEO Regis Seaman said in an interview. "If all meat and fish could be produced in such a sustainable way, people would never again need to...

StartupRealities No 19 PeeGardens Limited produces organic biodegradable pellets which absorb urine and lock in unpleasant smells, making the pellets ideal for environmentally-conscious people to use for fertilising their gardens. ENVIRONMENT Human urine contains valuable soil nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) needed by plants to grow. At the same time, urine flushed down the toilet not only wastes water for flushing but also creates the need for treating the sewage to prevent algal blooms which result from nutrient-rich wastewater reaching the ocean. On the other hand, people buy tonnes of fertiliser for their gardens, while flushing down the toilet the same nutrients that fertiliser contains. The company's pellets simply create home-made fertiliser to replace fertiliser bought at the gardening store. CEO QUOTES "PeeGardens finds a golden lining in the urine cloud, if you'll pardon the pun," joked company CEO Piet Gardi. "Urine is pure gol...

StartupRealities No 18 InvasiveWeeds Limited is a bioscience company that researches invasive species  and weeds to find useful substances, genes or other uses of invasive plants and animals that can be beneficial to the local economy, to science and to humanity. For example, the invasive species of Japanese knotweed has been found to contain high amounts of resveratrol, an active chemical compound found in grape skin. FINANCE The company is primarily financed by public funding, as its projects are ideal for winning research funding from the EU Horizon 2020 programme and the US National Science Foundation. It patents and licenses its scientific discoveries which contributes a smaller share of the company's revenue. SCIENCE POPULARISATION The company is an active contributor to the Wikipedia page: List of edible invasive species . For example, Kudzu (Japanese arrowroot, a legume species of climbing perennial vines) helps in controlling erosion and enhances the soil, as ...

StartupRealities No 17 SpaceBonanza Limited is a moonshot-project company that searches for extraterrestrial (ET) civilisations in space with the goal of adopting their novel technology and commercialising ET intellectual property on Earth. The company finances the deployment of powerful telescopes to search for intelligent life beyond Earth and transmit encoded messages, with the expectation that it will have the first-mover advantage when contact with aliens is eventually established. SCIENCE The company focuses on exploring the habitable zone of nearby stars, i.e. the region in star systems with planets close enough to their star to sustain liquid water on the planet surface. SpaceBonanza transmits encoded messages to the nearby stars with science questions such as "How can you achieve time travel?" and "How do you utilise quantum entanglement?" TIMELINE Investors are bankrolling the company for a period of 35 years as SpaceBonanza is not expected to gene...

StartupRealities No 16 EscalateTruth Limited is a fact-checking, fact-verification and fake news filtering company that plays the role of "arbiter of truth" in media. The company's verification process does not involve judgements on matters of opinion (e.g. is Donald Trump good or bad) but flags incorrect facts, fake news and factual lies. VERIFICATION PROCESS The company's fact checking and verification process goes through four hierarchical levels:      1. ALERT An investigation is triggered either after notification by a human reader or automatically as a result of an AI algorithm (spider or bot) spotting potentially incorrect factual information in the media. Whenever a reader uses the "citation needed" label (commonly seen on Wikipedia) to tag a piece of information, this triggers an investigation by EscalateTruth.      2. POPULAR VOTE The disputed facts are put to popular vote among online readers, who are given three possible options: True...

StartupRealities No 15 BrushMassage Limited manufactures and installs simple household self-massaging equipment resembling rotating carwash brushes. The equipment comes in different shapes and sizes: full-size for human users, mini-size for head massage only, and medium size for massaging pets. Dogs are particularly fond of the BrushMassage equipment as it allows them to turn it on and use it with the push of a single button. The pet-sized machine has been named #Scratchums.

StartupRealities No 14 StartupFiction Limited is an event organiser of science and entrepreneurship journalism competitions focused on developing fictitious stories about fictional science-based startups. Several dozen national StartupFiction competitions are held each year across the world, with the winners going on to compete in an annual global competition. The only two rules of the competition are that A) the startup ideas developed in the story line have to be novel but not implemented yet, and B) science and recent scientific discoveries and advances should have some role in the business model of the startup. TARGET AUDIENCE The StartupFiction competitions target three main types of participants: A) Entrepreneurial writers; B) Ideation practitioners; C) Failed entrepreneurs (who often have clever ideas but are not keen on execution, i.e. the operational side of managing and growing a business). AWARDS & JUDGING The competition has global awards in a dozen...

StartupRealities No 13 MeteoJewels Limited is a global meteorite exploration and retrieval company that tracks down meteorite falls, retains samples for scientific research and makes jewellery out of surplus meteorites. The company produces jewellery only from meteorites with confirmed provenance after passing verification via a range of chemical and mechanical lab tests. GLOBAL STATS MeteoJewels uses advanced astronomical tracking of meteors and meteorites and sends expeditions of scientists to recover newly fallen meteorites up to 10 times a year, which is the current rate of established new meteorite occurrences on Earth. In addition, the company organises around 50 expeditions a year to search for and retrieve meteorites that are known to have fallen on a certain day in the past, out of a catalogue of some 1,400 witnessed falls known to science so far. Drones are extensively used for ground surveillance and meteorite spotting. The company does not mine meteorites that have not...

StartupRealities No 12 SquidOrJelly Limited is a restaurant chain serving sustainable seafood with only two dishes on the menu: squid (calamari) and jellyfish. Customers have the choice of a squid or jellyfish dish at a price of GBP 10, which is twice cheaper than similar binary-choice restaurants such as Burger & Lobster (where the dish costs GBP 20 in London). SUSTAINABILITY While the populations of many commercially-important sea fish species are declining, squid and jellyfish populations are reported to be increasing in many parts of the ocean. SquidOrJelly promotes the consumption of sustainable seafood by focusing on these two abundant types of animals. Squid (also known as cuttlefish) is traditionally eaten in both the East and the West (under the culinary name calamari). Jellyfish  is primarily eaten in East Asia and is served marinated, usually as part of a salad. Squid (Source: Wikipedia )

StartupRealities No 11 SinoIrishCastles Limited is a Chinese real estate investor and weddings & events organiser which buys up castle ruins in Ireland, restores them into functioning castles and offers them as wedding venues to Chinese couples during the warmer and sunnier half of the year (April to October). CONSTRUCTION TECHNOLOGY The company restores castles using on-site 3D-printed plastic bricks and components using recycled plastic bottles as the raw material. The bricks are printed to fit exactly the missing parts of walls and towers. Every plastic brick interlock with the existing parts of the building and with other plastic bricks, which gives the building additional strength. FINANCE The acquisition of castle ruins and the adjacent land is financed with bank loans that are repaid with the revenue flow of wedding fees charged to Chinese wedding planners/agents. MARKETING & OPERATIONS SinoIrishCastles works with the leading Chinese wedding planners under a ...

StartupRealities No 10 TuneSurveyor Limited is a music agency which digitally reviews and assesses independent home-made music compositions by non-professional musicians and composers. The agency's artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm compares all new works against a global database of existing recordings and assesses the "hit" potential of novel works. Plagiarised tunes or compositions too close to existing ones are identified and removed from the set of assessed works (just as  plagiarism detection software Turnitin does with student assignments). The agency purchases promising compositions from amateur artists, thus encouraging musical creativity and the pursuit of composing and recording as a hobby. SCIENCE After TuneSurveyor's AI confirms that a piece of music is novel, a different algorithm called #TuneIterator (based on the principles of variation and selection in genetic algorithms) creates hundreds of variations of the tune and selects the most attrac...

StartupRealities No 9 QuickToire Limited (quick "toilet" in Japanese) is a manufacturer of Japanese-style high-end toilets and toilet seats that reduce the time users spend sitting on the toilet through behavioural nudging techniques (unpleasant noise and electricity), thus significantly reducing the incidence of haemorrhoids. SCIENCE Modern research recommends spending less time on the toilet and avoiding reading on the toilet in order to minimise the likelihood of developing haemorrhoids . There is a pronounced differences in haemorrhoid prevalence rates between two types of countries: those using modern (sitting) toilets record high haemorrhoid prevalence, while those using squat toilets register low percentages of haemorrhoids in the population. Two key factors lead to these differences. Firstly, people spend longer on sitting toilets than on squat toilets. Secondly, when using a sitting toilet, the pressure is concentrated on the anal muscles; while when using a sq...

StartupRealities No 8 LifeBeyond100 Limited is a company that employs 100-year-old people as leadership gurus and public speakers to deliver keynote speeches and one-to-one coaching seminars remotely (via video conference). The company employs centenarians for one hour a week but gives them the option to work overtime if they wish. Centenarian (Source: Wikipedia )

StartupRealities No 7 UnpavedLawns Limited is a landscaping and carbon emissions trading company which converts paved private gardens in urban areas into green space and thus generates carbon emissions micro-credits which are traded on carbon exchanges. The company removes tiles and pavements from front lawns and back gardens and plants shrubs and trees in their place. The vegetation reduces the carbon footprint of these gardens/houses and the generated savings in carbon emissions are sold on carbon exchanges. Back yard lawn (Source: Wikipedia )

StartupRealities No 6 DesertPlantations Limited is an international startup investing in desert land in coastal areas in northern Chile, Namibia and Western Australia and converting the acquired coastal land into fruit and nut plantations and vineyards. The coastal farms are irrigated with desalinated ocean water using inexpensive technology developed by MIT, which does not require any additional energy input for desalination. Rafts of these passive solar-powered desalination systems are floated on the surface of the sea near the shore. The solar rafts produce 6 litres of freshwater per square metre per day. Underwater pipes installed on the seabed connect the rafts and drain the distilled freshwater into storage tanks on land. Drip irrigation systems on the farms are turned on only during the night to minimise water loss. --- AGRICULTURE The output of the desert farms peaks in December-March during the southern hemisphere summer (northern hemisphere winter). The farms supply or...

StartupRealities No 5 EatTheFlowers Limited is a global franchise of gourmet restaurants serving cooked or fresh flowers as high-end food. --- THE SCIENCE BEHIND The company's research unit has carried out a range of research projects that have tripled the number of edible flower species known to humans ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edible_flower ), as well as discovering valuable nutrients in some flowers. --- HAUTE CUISINE EatTheFlowers restaurants have developed over 10,000 recipes with a variety of flowers: A) Bland flowers such as courgette (typically cooked in the South of France) are usually served batter-fried as Japanese tempura. B) Fragrant flowers are most often served as salads or in dessert recipes. Fruit Salad (Source:  Wikipedia ) --- MARKETING & DISTINCTIVENESS A) The restaurant group has developed the first #FlowerSushi recipes in the world. B) For special occasions, a specialist chef at each restaurant can procure the ingredients for an...

StartupRealities No 4 DamSkite Limited is a solar panel producer which has developed printable water-floating perovskite-based solar panels for installation on the surface of freshwater reservoirs. This technology is particularly useful for application at reservoirs in tropical desert areas, e.g. Lake Nasser in Egypt / Sudan. Installing perovskite panels on the surface of Lake Nasser reduces evaporation while also generating electricity. DamSkite panels can be installed on the surface of any oasis lake or marsh to minimise water loss through evaporation. SeaSkite Limited is a sister company of DamSkite specialising in installing solar panels on the sea surface. This is particularly useful in aquaculture as fish farms (e.g. salmon farms) need to provide shade for fish and breed them in almost complete darkness to minimise aggression among fish. --- Background information: Advanced companies developing perovskite solar cells include: 1. Saule Technologies (printable perovskites)...

StartupRealities No 3 SmartRelease Ltd produces a smart fishing net that can sense the type of fish caught in the net and releases the fish that belong to commercially undesirable species. Thus only commercially valuable species of fish are caught, while by-catch and waste is brought down to a minimum. Fishing net (Source: Wikipedia )

StartupRealities No 2 GingerMice Limited is a pet food company that produces flavoured live food for predator pets, e.g. ginger-flavoured mice for cats or vanilla-flavoured rabbits for dogs. Ginger-flavoured mice are produced by feeding the mice copious amounts of organic ginger tubers. Rabbits are given water with vanilla flavour, which gradually concentrates the flavour of vanilla in their flesh. The resulting animals with flavoured flesh are organic treats for pets, with flavours that are aligned with the pet owner's personal taste preferences. In addition to live pet food, the company also offers dry pet food produced in the same way but preserved (pressed and dried) for easier long-term storage. --- TasteTheFlavour  Limited (a sister company of GingerMice) is currently experimenting with growing curry-flavoured chickens and pigs for human consumption. Baby chickens (Source: Wikipedia )