StartupRealities

StartupRealities No 142 WindfarmEcosystems installs giant brush-like metal structures on the underwater surface of offshore wind turbine pylons to create a habitat for fish, crustaceans, kelp and algae. The metal bristle-like structures go out sideways more than a dozen metres from the pylon foundations, creating a coral reef-like structure and a kelp forest around every wind turbine. The average wind turbine creates a habitat in a cylindrical shape of around 50 metres in diameter and resembles the vertical brushes used by a car wash. CEO QUOTE "Remember that story from 1972 when they dumped two million automobile tyres at Osborne Reef, off the coast of Florida, to enhance the ecosystem? The experiment failed spectacularly - no life stuck to the tyres as they had not tested the concept and there was no scientific foundation to this experiment. In contrast, we implement WindfarmEcosystems projects based on a solid foundation of proven and tested scientific research . And it wo...

StartupRealities No 125 Storypedia is an online publisher which produces collections of the world's most interesting non-fiction stories. The company has a range of publications of the format "Top 100 Most Fascinating Stories in ...": History, Nature, Science, Art, Politics, Business; as well as of a similar format: "Top 100 Hidden Stories in ...". A key part of the successful storytelling format is the length of each story, which does not exceed half a page. CEO QUOTE "Everybody knows Cinderella and Snow White. Which is why we don't include banal fiction stories like this in our collections. We aim to educate and inspire our readers, not bore them to death. However, we do incorporate some mythological stories where the line between history and fiction has been blurred. Our primary objective is to surprise you, to tell you something new, to reveal a world of wonder," said Storypedia founder and CEO Stormie Pedralbes. Medieval encyclopedis...

StartupRealities No 123 CorporateJour is a publishing house which helps major corporations launch and run peer-reviewed scientific journals in the field closest to the company's industry. For example, the Salesforce Journal of Digital Marketing and the Google Journal of Online Advertising are two of the company's existing or potential corporate journal projects. These scientific journals are different from a corporate magazine as they publish proper scientific research and the papers are reviewed by a board of editors. CEO QUOTE "A corporate magazine massages the ego of the CEO and the Board of a company. A corporate journal advances the scientific agenda of the industry by publishing relevant research, experiments, debates and conference proceedings. Our journals bring the future closer and sooner," said company founder and CEO Corazon Journaux. Peer review (image source: Wikipedia )

StartupRealities No 95 OneIPodPerChild is an international education foundation that gives children in developing countries a solar-powered MP3 player with pre-uploaded science and education talks in the local language. CEO QUOTE "We try to spark an interest in science and technology in children. The 5.0 GB memory of the MP3 player can store 200 hours of audio podcasts on a variety of interesting topics. And if a child finishes the first batch of 200 hours, they can download another 200, and then another, from the local school teacher. We provide teachers with a library of several thousand hours of podcasts," said company founder and CEO Ona Chiltern. One Laptop Per Child image from Nepal (source: Wikipedia )

StartupRealities No 82 TrumpScientific is a research company that explores scientific and business ideas based on guidance from US President Donald Trump. The company is currently researching whether injecting disinfectant or exposure to UV light can have positive health effects on mice recovering from a viral infection (as suggested by Donald Trump in April 2020), in the hope that this can lead to human trials at the next stage. TrumpScientific does not have any insider connections to the US President and only uses ideas that the US President has broadcast to the public in his tweets or press conferences. CEO QUOTE "President Trump is much maligned by the mainstream media. However, many of his 'maverick' ideas contain seeds of divergent thinking that, if implemented, may lead to novel businesses or scientific discoveries. The fact that this has not yet happened does not discourage us. Moonshots take time and shooting at the moon is not for the faint-hearted," sa...

StartupRealities No 80 ScienceTransfer is a technology transfer and entrepreneurship promotion company that pairs up scientists, computer programmers and business people and encourages them to set up science-based startups. The company serves as an accelerator for such startups: it first identifies feasible scientific ideas through a range of competitions held around the world; then it matches the scientists and researchers with IT- and business-savvy co-founders to form a founding team; and then it helps the team scale up the idea into a business. CEO QUOTE "We match scientists with three types of people: hackers, hipsters and hustlers. Hackers are the coders, also known as computer programmers. The hipsters are the design people: those who tinker with user experience. And the hustlers are startup founders skilled in sales and marketing. Our motto is simple: SHHH! This stands for Scientists, Hackers, Hipsters, Hustlers," said ScienceTransfer founder and CEO Scirocco T...

StartupRealities No 60 FlatEarthImplements is a company that produces scientific and pseudo-scientific instruments for members of the Flat Earth Society , with which they can conduct experiments in search of proof that the Earth is flat. The company's pseudo-scientific instruments (e.g. loaded gyroscopes) are more popular with Flat Earth followers than properly-calibrated instruments and therefore command higher prices. The reason for this logical contradiction is that Flat Earthers consider the pseudo-scientific instruments "untampered", while the calibrated instruments that do not support the Flat Earth hypothesis are considered "tampered". CEO QUOTES "We don't take a stance on the founding tenets of the Flat Earth movement. It goes back to ancient history and beyond - to primeval history. No one disputes their historical origins and we give them credit for their unwavering commitment to tradition." - noted FlatEarthImplements founder and CE...

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...

Introduction to Startup Realities At Startup Realities: 1) The business models are real: all production, operation, marketing and finance strategies make commercial sense. 2) The science is real: from proven fundamental science to innovations and scientific discoveries published in the last several days. Any unconfirmed scientific hypotheses are marked as such ("hypothesis yet to be tested") 3) The startups are hypothetical but realistic, or at least feasible. After all, "the value of an idea lies in the using of it", said Thomas Edison. After all, the world is fractal: one thing leads to another and patterns repeat. Watch out for these patterns as they invariably lead to the next startup. Mandelbrot set fractal (Source: Wikipedia )