Prout has a degree in Computing from the Victoria University of Manchester. SmartGroups.com was bought by Freeserve for United States$100 million and ran until 2006 when it was shut down by Orange, who had acquired Freeserve some years earlier.
He was the founder in 1996 of Intracus Limited, whose innovative LDAP 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 web site with several million members, and was the precursor to today"s social network services.
