StartupRealities

Startup No 201   TIMBA (The Interesting MBA) is an online program that teaches the entire Business School curriculum in 1,000 stories and videos available as TED talks, YouTube videos and even TikTok footage. Participants vote for the most interesting material in a "Trip Advisor"-style ratings system that determines whether content remains on the programme or gets dropped. The program hires actors to produce in-house videos on a minority of subjects and theoretical topics that have not been covered on existing platforms. Auditing the TIMBA program is free of charge but participants who want to receive a certificate of completion pay a fee. Such participants are not required to take exames but have to re-watch key parts of the content once or twice again months later, to ensure memory retention in line with the "forgetting curve" timeline. CEO QUOTE "Don't we all have horrible memories of the drudgery of school and university courses. TIMBA is the exact oppo...

Startup No 200 Exec Ed For All is an online education company which produces quarterly digests (summaries) of new developments in a dozen MBA-type subject areas (Marketing, Finance, Leadership, etc.). The digests come in two formats: email newsletter and audio podcast. The novelty-focused series forms a continuous top-up programme in which every week one of 12 quarterly newsletters and podcasts are published on a rolling basis. The company's target market are business executives and practitioners who have graduated from university at least five years earlier. In effect, the company democratises access to high-end executive education, as the cutting-edge business-related programmes that leading business schools sell at USD 2,000 per day of training are now opened up to the mass market for an annual subscription of USD 50-100. INTERVIEW WITH THE CEO: "Most MBA alumni and masters graduates find it frustrating or a waste of time when they sign up for a regular online or on-campus ...

Startup No 174 - StartupRealities 2020 series ValueTagger is an artificial intelligence (AI) service that evaluates and tags content on social media based on the value of the information contained in a posting. The key marker of intransient value is whether a posting contains useful information for the reader or is simply meant to convey information about the person posting it. A second dimension of assessing the value of a posting is whether it informs about a forthcoming event or summarises a past event. A third dimension is the originality of the posting: newly created content or a "retweet". CEO QUOTE "I often get asked how an AI can assess such a subjective thing as the value of information to a particular individual. It isn't that difficult: a posting from close friends or family members would usually be considered subjectively valuable even if it is only about the person posting it because you would care about that person. Whereas a posting by a distant a...