Adrian Tear

Category: What might have been

  • Tyres

    Tyres

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    The Tyres website is another example of a ‘what might have been‘ concept.

    The intention, never fully developed in 2008, was to build a B2C website selling car tyres. Behind the scenes, after inputting a tyre size (e.g., 1955517V) the site found prices from a number of suppliers and selected the best value products.

    The website was left unfinished but illustrates the power of the web to ‘disintermediate’ certain transactions. Theoretically, many consumers could have searched for tyres on a website back-ended to a handful of major tyre manufacturers and distributors.

    If that sounds a lot like BlackCircles, founded earlier in 2001, it was.

    And Blackcircles.com was acquired by Michelin for £50 million in 2015!

    C’est la vie!

  • HomeHunter

  • HerdManager

    HerdManager

    Visit now!

    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

  • ExactMedia