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...

StartupRealities No 165 MatrixBiographies is an online memoirs and biographies publisher which uses a matrix format for all its works. Readers are presented with an interactive online table of contents in the form of a 2x2 matrix (two-by-two matrix) where the horizontal axis represents calendar years while the vertical axis is dedicated to recurring topics and themes, e.g. personal relationships, profession and career, nature, travel, etc. Every paragraph is a stand-alone (up to half-page) story with a separate entry in the matrix, as MatrixBiographies relies on non-linear access to information: any story should be self-contained, although most stories also contain links to other stories. The matrix keeps track of entries that have already been opened/read and highlights them in a different colour. CEO QUOTE " Remember those distance tables on foldable maps where the road distance between cities is shown in a two-by-two matrix? This is what we are creating with our matrix bio...

StartupRealities No 141 StoryPrize  awards annual prizes for the best stories that occur and are reported during a year in a dozen categories, including the news media, scientific research, education, medicine, engineering, politics, business, the environment, art and culture. CEO QUOTE "Truth is stranger than fiction. Among all our StoryPrize categories, only two categories is fiction - literature and film. All other stories have to be real. We nominate and recognise the most striking and surprising sequences of events that take place in a year. Our prizes encourage the use of stories and storytelling in education and public communication by building a database of impressive and creative stories in the public domain," said StoryPrize founder and CEO Stormy Pritzker. Trophy cup (image source: Wikipedia )

StartupRealities No 140 WorkMemoirs is a corporate storytelling company that records the story of all employees at a company before they leave. This creates an archive of valuable information and also relieves any negative emotions that may otherwise fester and lead to negative feedback on the market. CEO QUOTE "No one likes to prepare handover notes. But if you asked for people's stories, good and bad, most departing employees would not object to sharing their experiences. You can't imagine how valuable stories become 20 years later. Plus it is so much better if people vent their pent-up frustrations in a structured and useful way right before leaving than ranting about their employer on Glassdoor months later," said WorkMemoirs founder and CEO Worden Mempsted. Memoirs of a Geisha - movie poster (image source: Wikipedia )

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 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 81 StoryFinder is a crowdsourcing and AI company that collects interesting stories for use in education, government, politics and the media. The company's AI bot trawls Wikipedia, news websites and school textbooks for interesting stories that can be repurposed and used in different ways. StoryFinder also crowdsources stories from the public in the format of various competitions and entertainment games. The company publishes a series of popular books called "100 Stories on ...". CEO QUOTE "Stories are fascinating education and learning tools. No one can resist a speaker who starts with 'Let me tell you a story.' What if the entire school curriculum could be put in 10,000 stories? Would so many children still reject formal education then?" - asked company founder and CEO Stormy Finn. Storyteller (image source: Wikipedia )

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 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...