Category: B2B

First Virtual Group plc
B2B, First Virtual Group plc, Operated

Following their exit from Business Geographics Limited in 2000 Adrian Tear and Tony Sellen went on to co-found FirstVirtual Group plc.

FirstVirtual Group aimed to be a ‘technical incubator’ taking shareholding in exchange for development work; sweat for equity.

The ‘plc’ (Public Limited Company) in the company name sounded grand but wasn’t. The company was not listed on any stock exchange and, at the time, it was much easier to establish a plc at Companies House, even though the filing requirements were more onerous.
- First Virtual
  
  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…
- 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…
- ExactMedia
  
  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…
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 websites for themselves.

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.
June 20, 2025
Business Geographics Limited
Acquired, B2B, Business Geographics Limited

Co-founded with Tony Sellen on 21st September 1993, Business Geographics Limited (BGL) rapidly established itself as one of the UK’s most innovative Geographic Information System (GIS) consultancies, offering software and data supply, project work, programming and systems integration.

Digging back into the archives the first BGL website, on the iconic but no longer owned geoweb.co.uk URL, shows what pages on the early World Wide Web looked like. The company’s innovative UK General Election site of 1997 and corporate site ca.1999 are also shown.
- Business Geographics – 1995
  
  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…
- UK General Election – 1997
  
  The URL election.co.uk was used for Business Geographics’ coverage of the UK General Election in 1997. Built by a core team of just a handful of people our coverage of events, angled substantially towards an explicitly geographical perspective, garnered millions of hits. The website featured: Adrian wrote about the design of the website for the…
- Business Geographics – 1999
  
  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…
It’s good to look back at some of the content, e.g., the description of the UK’s hierarchical postal system or the Census Packs we created as government-appointed Census Agents.

Over the years the company grew substantially, hiring new staff and moving out of shared offices into a trendy warehouse style space in Dryden Street, Covent Garden.

About four years after its foundation the company was acquired by one of its customers, International Poster Management Limited, a UK outdoor advertising specialist itself owned by US advertising giant Interpublic Corporation.

The acquisition gave Adrian his first ’15 minutes’ in the international business press and another three somewhat turbulent years running the company before leaving with his co-founder in 2000.

Fond memories, many achievements and the inspiration behind a strikingly similarly named course in the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh.
June 20, 2025