Adrian Tear

Category: B2B

  • MegaSorcery

    MegaSorcery

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    Adrian developed the MegaSorcery website when he ran MegaSorcery Limited, the consultancy company he established in late 2007, soon after leaving Allegran Limited.

    In many ways the MegaSorcery site is a precursor to this website, just without the Research and Teaching strands, which had not yet been developed!

    Several of the websites listed on the What We Do page of MegaSorcery are now live on the Websites page of adriantear.com.

    The site also listed a few projects, including work with Ordnance Survey and UCL on strategising OS’ future direction, and database and web systems consultancy with Trucost, since acquired by S&P Dow Jones Indices for over £14 million.

    If you are interested in working with Adrian on a consultancy project please get in touch.

  • HerdManager

    HerdManager

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    Not the prettiest of sites, and more of a What might have been than anything else, HerdManager was partially developed as a demonstration of the sort of data management that is possible with a ColdFusion-based site, a database and a whole lot of Structured Query Language (SQL) statements.

    The functionality to add new records to the herd has been disabled with this restored version! The rest of it (sort of) works.

    Farm management is a complex business and, since this prototype was developed in around 2000, things have evolved substantially.

    At the time neither the capacity nor the funding existed to turn HerdManager into a fully-fledged product.

    It is interesting to think, however, that this idle exercise in how to learn ColdFusion could have turned into something much bigger…

    The software we now use at Ascog Farm, the Australian Agriwebb website and application, has raised $ millions in funding and acquired competitors as it has expanded.

    It even enables farmers to upload KML boundaries of their ‘paddocks’, or ‘fields’, as we call them in the Northern Hemisphere…

    According to a CB Insights page found online, Agriwebb’s 2021 valuation sat at $77.09 million!

    What might have been, had Adrian not been so busy with everything else at the time…

  • GoCarbonFree

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  • ExactMedia

    ExactMedia

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    ExactMedia Limited was co-founded in 2000 with the involvement of Adrian Tear and Tony Sellen – through their incubator, First Virtual Group plc – and others in the media, public relations and Internet industries.

    At the dawn of targeted advertising on the Web, ExactMedia incentivised consumers to complete demographic and interests questionnaires while providing a performant ad server that could also target advertisements based on users’ answers.

    Adrian designed a Question Engine which could define questions and scripts (sets of questions) in the database.

    The questions, or scripts, could be embedded within the GoldenCarrots website to collect user data.

    The various components of the offering, although well-developed, never really took off, leaving this as yet another development in the What might have been category.

    When you remember that Google bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in March 2008, and that Momentive (the maker of Survey Monkey) was acquired for $1.5 billion in May 2023, the failure to commercialise ExactMedia may be considered somewhat unfortunate…

    We were definitely on to something!

  • LeadHat

    LeadHat

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    Lead Hat Limited offered Internet and Web consultancy, design, hosting and web applications development.

    The website was one of several designed around this time by Pete McDonagh at Codesign.it, who Adrian had met while working on the 2000 London Election project.

    With a strong technical offering, Lead Hat offered a number of computing technologies for website development, including:

    • ColdFusion
    • Microsoft Active Server Pages
    • PHP
    • Microsoft SQL Server
    • MySQL
    • Oracle
    • C, C++

    Owned 20% by FirstVirtual Group plc the company started offering web development services in 2000, just a few months before the ‘dot com crash’ of March to October that year partially wiped out demand for its services.

    Despite the ‘dot com crash’ Lead Hat picked up some good clients and had notable success with:

    • 2001 UK General Election – A website developed in partnership with the Daily Telegraph newspaper to cover the UK General Election of that year.
    • Wild Bunch – A website and content management system for the film distribution company.

    In 2002, having had a lean time in the web development services business, Adrian Tear and Tony Sellen abandoned this sector in favour of developing consumer websites of their own.

    The new business, Allegran Limited – founded in 2002, went on to develop lottery, dating and property websites. It was sold to Daily Mail General Holdings three years later in an eight figure deal.

  • First Virtual

    First Virtual

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    FirstVirtual Group plc was a ‘technical incubator’ established by Adrian Tear and Tony Sellen following their exit from Business Geographics Limited in 2000. The business aimed to take shareholdings in exchange for development work; sweat for equity.

    The website was one of several designed around this time by Pete McDonagh at Codesign.it, who Adrian had met while working on the 2000 London Election project.

    The ‘dot com crash’ of March to October 2000 didn’t exactly help First Virtual Group along but two projects did get off the ground:

    • Lead Hat Limited – An investment in a web development company led by Adrian Marshall.
    • Exactmedia Limited – An investment in an online marketing and rewards company.

    Faced with the partial collapse in demand for online development, and difficulty in fund-raising, Tear and Sellen abandoned the concept of web development for third parties’ and set about developing profitable consumer web sites for themselves.

    The new business, Allegran Limited – founded in 2002, went on to develop lottery, dating and property web sites. It was sold to Daily Mail General Holdings three years later in an eight figure deal.

  • Business Geographics – 1999

    Business Geographics – 1999

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    The URL geoweb.co.uk was still in use for the Business Geographics Limited (BGL) website in 1999 but the appearance of the site, and amount of content, had evolved considerably from earlier versions.

    Still largely written in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) the website now featured many more images as well as various database-driven elements, using Microsoft Access databases and the Allaire ColdFusion scripting language (now owned by Adobe), e.g., to power the News section.

    Throughout the early to mid-1990s, when many of our competitors were still using paper brochures for price lists or marketing material, our website brought in many leads.

    Our use of database-driven methods was also innovative, enabling us to pitch for work on higher-end projects and to develop sophisticated sites of our own, such as the 1997 UK General Election website once hosted at election.co.uk.

    Fortunately, and impressively given the 25+ odd years that have elapsed since the 1997 Election or 1999 BGL websites were created, these database-driven pages written in Cold Fusion Markup Language (CFML) still work today.

    The computer hosting this archive is running Ubuntu Linux, Apache2 and Tomcat and the open source Lucee CFML server with the UCanAccess JDBC driver for Microsoft Access databases. Back in the day it was Windows NT, IIS and the Allaire CFML server…

    Bathe in the late-1990s aura of the old geoweb.co.uk website by taking a step back in time to visit the Business Geographics site as it was in mid-1999.

  • Business Geographics – 1995

    Business Geographics – 1995

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    The URL geoweb.co.uk was originally used for the Business Geographics Limited (BGL) website.

    Adrian learnt to design websites in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) in the early 1990s, not long after its creation and release by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989/1990. This website started life any time around 1993.

    Bathe in the early to mid-1990s aura of the old geoweb.co.uk website by taking a step back in time to visit the Business Geographics site as it was in mid-1995.

    The BGL website from around 1999 has also been restored, by which time the amount of content, and our expertise in authoring websites, had grown considerably…

  • MegaSorcery Limited

    MegaSorcery Limited

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    Adrian founded MegaSorcery Limited on 11 December 2007 having exited Allegran Limited following its acquisition by a major UK newspaper publisher in an eight figure deal.

  • Lead Hat Limited

    Lead Hat Limited

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    Founded by Adrian Marshall in 2000 and 20% owned by FirstVirtual Group plc, Lead Hat Limited started offering database-driven web development services in 2000, just a few months before the ‘dot com crash’ of March to October that year partially wiped out demand for its services.

    Lead Hat Limited was a full service Internet agency providing everything from server hosting through to brand management, system design and implementation.

    Despite the ‘dot com crash’ Lead Hat picked up some good clients and had notable success with the 2001 UK General Election website, a fine arts auction website and a database-driven website for film distributors Wild Bunch.

    • UK General Election – 2001

      UK General Election – 2001

      The 2001 United Kingdom General Election was held on Thursday 7 June 2001. Having produced a ground-breaking website for the 1997 UK General Election, Adrian and his colleagues were keen to repeat the exercise for 2001. Some of the data from 1997 could be re-used in the 2001 website, e.g., to calculate swings, while a…

    • LeadHat

      LeadHat

      Lead Hat Limited offered Internet and Web consultancy, design, hosting and web applications development. The website was one of several designed around this time by Pete McDonagh at Codesign.it, who Adrian had met while working on the 2000 London Election project. With a strong technical offering, Lead Hat offered a number of computing technologies for…

    In 2002, having had a lean time in the web development services business, Adrian Tear and Tony Sellen abandoned this sector in favour of developing consumer websites of their own.

    The new business, Allegran Limited – founded in 2002, went on to develop lottery, dating and property websites. It was sold to Daily Mail General Holdings three years later in an eight figure deal.