Jodee Rich

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

John David "Jodee" Rich is an Australian businessman, who founded Imagineering Ltd, a microcomputer software and hardware distributor in Australia and South East Asia, in 1980.

He wrote his first program in 1972, on punch cards and at the age of 12.

In 1980 he developed a commodity analysis system on 64k Apple II, later sold to investment banks.

He studied accounting, economics and computer Science at Sydney University - BEc in 1981 Between 1981 and 1990 he founded and listed "Imagineering", a microcomputer software and hardware distributor for Visicalc, Lotus 123, Borland, 3Com operating in Australia and South East Asia and started Imagineering's sister company "Tech Pacific". Both firms were sold to First Pacific in 1990.

From 1990 to 1995, Rich attended University of Sydney studying biochemistry and attended Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, as well as being a commercial flying instructor.

Rich formed (with James Packer as a shareholder) a service provider of GSM mobile and long distance calls - One.Tel - in Australia in 1995. One.Tel expanded its operations overseas in 1998. In 1999, Packer's Publishing and Broadcasting and News Corporation made a $600 million investment in the business as it committed to building Australia's fourth mobile network. The company acquired a GSM operation for $500 million in 2000.

One.Tel Australia was placed in administration in May 2001, after PBL and News Corporation withdraw their earlier stated support for an underwritten rights issue. One.Tel UK was sold to British Gas for $200 million and is still trading with more than 1 million customers.

Rich has been involved in litigation with the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) since December 2001[1], while a Special Purpose Liquidator is currently investigating the circumstances of the cancelled rights issue.

In 2007 Jodee went back to programming and created PeopleBrowsr, a next generation dashboard into Twitter, Facebook and other online social networks, being project leader and working with a team of 12 developers based in US, Germany, Russia, Australia and India.

[edit] Notes

This article or section includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks in-text citations.
You can improve this article by introducing more precise citations.