Richard A. Prout (born 1967) is a British

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values t ...

. Prout has a degree in Computing from the

Victoria University of Manchester The Victoria University of Manchester, usually referred to as simply the University of Manchester, was a university in Manchester, England. It was founded in 1851 as Owens College. In 1880, the college joined the federal Victoria University. Afte ...

. He was the founder in 1996 of Intracus Ltd, whose innovative

LDAP The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP ) is an open, vendor-neutral, industry standard application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) network. Directory serv ...

directory products were bundled by Novell and Netscape, and which in 1999 created SmartGroups.com, which by 2001 had become Europe's leading

Virtual community A virtual community is a social network of individuals who connect through specific social media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals. Some of the most pervasive virtual commun ...

web site with several million members, and was the precursor to today's

social network services A social networking service or SNS (sometimes called a social networking site) is an online platform which people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career content, interests, act ...

. SmartGroups.com was bought by

Freeserve Freeserve was a British Internet service provider, which was founded in 1998. At its height, the company became a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index, before merging into the Wanadoo group in 2000. It then became a subsidiary of France Telecom, w ...

for US$100 million and ran until 2006 when it was shut down by

Orange Orange most often refers to: *Orange (fruit), the fruit of the tree species '' Citrus'' × ''sinensis'' ** Orange blossom, its fragrant flower * Orange (colour), from the color of an orange, occurs between red and yellow in the visible spectrum ...

, who had acquired Freeserve some years earlier.

References

1967 births Living people {{UK-business-bio-1960s-stub