StartupRealities

StartupRealities No 116 MultiCommercials is an advertising agency which produces video commercials that advertise multiple brands of different products in a single video. This allows a multi-faceted ad story to appeal to different target audiences with different brands and products that are advertised, so that every viewer will pick up in the video only what is relevant to the person. CEO QUOTE " We brought the linear world to an abrupt end. Before us, it was 'one commercial = one brand.' Since MultiCommercials was founded, the 'equal' sign has been broken. Just as most movies don't tell a single story, so a commercial no longer needs to advertise a single product. For example, if you see a video made by us where champagne and strawberries are served in a hotel room to a guest with a pearl necklace, this video will most likely be advertising brands in all four categories: champagne, strawberries, hotels and jewellery. In the past, one brand would have been...

StartupRealities No 96 ShakespeareCube is a musical and movie production company which develops modern productions by merging three classical works of the same author into one. The company's first production was an agglomeration of Shakespeare's Hamlet (set in Denmark), Othello (set in Italy) and King Lear (set in Britain) into an interconnected plot. This gave the name to the company. The resulting plot was a modern trans-European movie under the invented portmanteau title Hamothlea (Hamlet-Othello-Lear). CEO QUOTE "Our movies and musicals help introduce the younger generation to the classics of world literature. We intertwine the original plots creatively, so that there is smooth flow between characters and locations from the three original works. My big inspiration for this model is the 1999 ABBA musical 'Mamma Mia!'  The real challenge for us are authors who have left fewer than three major works, e.g. Harper Lee with 'To Kill A Mockingbird' and ...

StartupRealities No 65 MakeTalesMeet is a professional editing and storytelling company which uses both human editors and artificial intelligence (AI) to fix plot discontinuities and enhance the storyline in articles, books, TV and movie plots. PRODUCT VERSIONS The free basic version is an automated algorithm that quizzes the writer with the aim of teasing out new ideas. Potentially interesting objects or characters in the story are identified by the AI and the writer gets asked questions about them, separately or in pairs of two: " What happened to the penguin and the stone? Could they be doing something else or something differently? Could the two be connected? " The basic version also identifies similar items or stories in the body of existing literature and movies and makes suggestions on creating possible references to these in the writer's plot, which leads to recursion . The premium version of MakeTalesMeet involves human editors who review the suggestions o...

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...