Richard A. Prout (born 1967) is a British entrepreneur.

Prout has a degree in Computing from the Victoria University of Manchester. He was the founder[1] in 1996 of Intracus Ltd, whose innovative LDAP directory products were bundled by Novell[2] and Netscape,[3] and which in 1999 created SmartGroups.com,[4] which by 2001 had become Europe's leading Virtual community web site with several million members, and was the precursor to today's social network services.

SmartGroups.com was bought by Freeserve for US$100 million[5][6][7] and ran until 2006 when it was shut down by Orange, who had acquired Freeserve some years earlier.

References

  1. ↑ "Bnet article confirming Prout CEO of Intracus". Business Wire. 13 May 1999. Retrieved 19 July 2009.
  2. ↑ "Novell Directory Article" (PDF). Retrieved 19 July 2009.
  3. ↑ Weltman, Rob; Dahbura, Tony (2000). LDAP programming with JAVA by Rob Weltman. ISBN 9780201657586. Retrieved 19 July 2009.
  4. ↑ "SmartGroups.com web archive". Archived from the original on 1 January 2006. Retrieved 19 July 2009.
  5. ↑ McIntosh, Bill (17 March 2000). "Freeserve Acquire SmartGroups article in The Independent". London. Retrieved 19 July 2009.
  6. ↑ "Freeserve Acquire SmartGroups article in the Financial Times SmartGroups Press references web archive". Archived from the original on 23 August 2000. Retrieved 19 July 2009.
  7. ↑ "Freeserve Acquire SmartGroups article on CNN Financial SmartGroups Press references web archive". Archived from the original on 23 August 2000. Retrieved 19 July 2009.


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