Micro Meets - The monetization

Anyone can buy a ticket for a chance to meet their favorite celebrity, the more tickets someone buys the better the chance they have of meeting the celebrity. For less popular celebrities, the cost per ticket could be $25 dollars. For big names, it could go up to $200 per ticket. I expect the number of tickets sold per meet to range from 20 to 1000. The cost of setting up a meet is fairly minimal, $10 worth of employee time to find a restaurant and make the reservations and maybe $50 for a security guard during the meet, everything else will be online and close to free. I expect the value of a meet would be around $5,000 ($50 a ticket and 100 tickets sold). Half of the revenue would would go to Micro Meets and the other half would go to the celebrity or the charity of their choice.

Micro Meets - The idea

The basic scenario is this: a celebrity finds out that they have a gap in their schedule a few days ahead of time. They then post on twitter that they are going to have lunch with a few fans soon in the city they’ll be in. The link they give on twitter leads to a page where fans can buy tickets to get a chance at the lunch. The more tickets they buy, the better the chance at getting the lunch. A few hours before the lunch, the ticket sales close and the winners get an email. The winners find out where and when the lunch will be.

Micro Meets handles practically everything: finding and making reservations at the restaurant, doing the ticket sales and payment processing, giving the meet location information to the winners, and providing security.

Micro Meets - The motivation

The internet has allowed people with uncommon interests to create large communities with other people who share those interests.  Within these groups, celebrities have emerged who may have hundreds of thousands of fans but who are little known to the general public. There may be tens of thousands of these internet celebrities in the US.  

Celebrities, like most people, travel. While traveling, people often have down time or gaps in the schedule. Instead of killing time by watching re-runs of Top Chef in the hotel room, wouldn’t it be better for the celebrity to meet some fans over a meal and make some money for themselves or their favorite charity?

DC Desalination - The pitch

Waste heat means wasted opportunity. DC desalination could make tens of billions of dollars in profit per DC in water scarce cities.

DC Desalination - The fun part

What I like about this idea is how it uses what would normally be considered waste to add value, billions of dollars of it. Designing a MED that would be very efficient and not require much O&M would be important. The design would also require that the MED handle the fluctuations in load the come with data centers.

DC Desalination - The growth potential

If this was done in LA it could make $80 to 90 billion a year in profit. There are probably five to ten other cities where this would make sense. The global profit could be close a trillion dollars.

DC Desalination - The monetization

The goal would be to convince one of these tech companies to build a DC in one of these water poor regions; DC Desal would then pay the tech company for their waste heat. For an idea how how much this might be worth, lets take a look at Los Angeles. In the dry season, the cost of water is basically $4 per hundred cubic feet or $1.40 per cubic meter. Using electricity for an MED plant, it’s possible to achieve $0.70 per cubic meter of desalinated water, or half of what LA citizens are paying. It’s worth noting that the water cost they are paying is likely heavily subsidized or politically negotiated with other parts of the state. Now, if the company running the DC is paid $0.40 for the heat required to desalinate a cubic meter of water and the water was sold to the city at the current rate, that would be a dollar of profit per cubic meter.

The electricity cost in LA is about $0.20 per kilowatt hour. It takes roughly 3.5 kWh to make a cubic meter of water using MED. Let’s say that the DC that would be built would have an average load of 40 megawatts and 35 of those would turn into heat used for desalination. That means that 240,000 cubic meters (or 63 million gallons) of drinking water could be produced per day. The per capita daily usage of water in LA is 123 gallons, so this could be enough water for about half a million people or an eighth of the city’s population. If revenue from the water is $1 per cubic meter, that would be $88 billion a year. The cost of building the MED would be several hundred million to half a billion dollars, which could be paid for within two days of desalination revenue.

Another, smaller, source of revenue would be the sea salt from the brackish water that comes out of the MED. Ocean water has 35 ppt salt or 35 kilograms per cubic meter of water. The brackish water wouldn’t be pure salt water, but that’s good enough for this approximation. Per day that would be 8,400 kg of sea salt. I think the salt would be worth about $2 per kg. Over a year there would be about $6 million for salt. Clearly the salt isn’t nearly as valuable as the clean water.