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

    HomeHunter

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    Allegran Advertising Limited was spun out of Allegran Limited in February 2005. The new company was designed to explore non-core business and one of the first concepts to emerge from this development was HomeHunter, soon rechristened QpHomes. Adrian was always rather keep on the HomeHunter concept and created most of the database architecture and programming logic, allowing users to self-describe their property for sale, adding rooms, measurements and photographs as they went.

    QpHomes amassed over 12,000 property listings between April 2004 and March 2006, when the operating company name was changed to Vivid Medianet Limited. However, despite interest from some major companies (including Tesco) in this space, the legal position of self-listed property advertisements was always somewhat unclear. Listings sites could have been treated as estate agents, necessitating the checking of all user-generated content for accuracy.

    Clearly, this was not feasible and not until 2012 did government propose to allow private sale ads by amending the Estate Agents Act and repealing the Property Misdescriptions Act. All this, of course, came too late for QpHomes which closed its doors in 2006. Tesco abandoned its Property Market in 2008 and sold the business to Spicerhaart.

    Vivid Medianet Limited was renamed GoCarbonFree Limited in March 2007 and focused on the new GoCarbonFree website, a B2C points collection site which aimed to buy and ‘retire’ carbon credits through commissions on user’s shopping interactions.

    Unfortunately, like QpHomes, this concept would also eventually be filed under the What might have been category.

  • 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

    GoCarbonFree

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    The GoCarbonFree website was an interesting concept designed to incentivise consumers to spend through the site – on a wide range of products including books, fashion, computers, games, health, mobile phones etc. – with rewards in carbon credit points, which could be used to buy and ‘retire’ Gold Standard Carbon Credits or Second Period European Carbon Futures on the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS).

    The website was one of several produced by GoCarbonFree Limited, an early spin-off from Allegran Limited that operated under three different company names over a period of years.

    Despite the growing interest in doing something about climate change, GoCarbonFree never amassed enough users for commercial success.

    Later on, Adrian attempted to do something about climate change himself by submitting an application to build three wind turbines on land his family own at Ascog Farm on the Isle of Bute.

    Like GoCarbonFree, this worthy effort also ended in failure so both are firmly in the What might have been category…

  • 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!