StartupRealities

StartupRealities No 160 MoonlightHarvester is a renewable energy company that generates (expensive) electricity from moonlight and utilises it for special occasions, for example to provide moonlight-powered illumination at wedding ceremonies. Generating electricity from moonlight is not commercially viable unless the power is used for symbolic purposes for which customers are willing to pay an enormous premium. Even at full moon, the moon is 100,000 times less luminous than the sun at noon. The company takes great care to store separately in special batteries the power generated at night from moonlight so that it is never mixed with cheap solar energy. MoonlightHarvester is working on developing future technology that may be able to capture starlight in addition to moonlight. This will allow the company to launch a franchise operation called StarlightHarvester. Starlight is much dimmer even than moonlight so harvesting it in any material way with existing solar panels is currently ...

StartupRealities No 58 EastWestConcerts is a concert organiser that pairs up a Western and an Asian singer to perform together on tours in the US, Europe and Asia. This expands the market and the awareness of the respective singer in their non-native region. CEO QUOTE "You scratch my back, I scratch yours. This is the principle we use when we pair up two stars who are known in their region but unfamiliar further afield. Even the biggest K-pop stars don't have the same level of recognition in the US as they have in South Korea; and the other way round: Taylor Swift is a celebrity in America and Europe, but not necessarily in China," said company founder and CEO Ellen West. Concert in Melbourne, 2005 (Source: Wikipedia )

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...