Jodee Rich bound for social return

Controversial Australian entrepreneur, Jodee Rich, is set to return to the Aussie business scene, creating an Australian portal for his social-media venture PeopleBrowsr.

The PeopleBrowsr homepage (Screenshot by Luke Hopewell/ZDNet Australia)

Established in early 2007, PeopleBrowsr aggregates public social-media posts from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Wordpress and other sites into mineable data to track and on-sell the trends and information to other businesses.

Rich told The Australian that an Australian portal for the social-media data mine PeopleBrowsr would be arriving in Australia "shortly".

At its inception, PeopleBrowsr built itself a stable of public posts from Flickr, YouTube and Craigslist, before launching an application programming interface bridge into Twitter and Facebook in 2008.

So far, PeopleBrowsr has aggregated the last three years of "public online conversations", spanning 20 terabytes of storage space.

The goal of PeopleBrowsr is to monitor social-media trends for brands, events and individuals. PeopleBrowsr's clients so far include Kodak, Disney, Sony, SAP, Bacardi, Comcast and Universal Music in the US.

The PeopleBrowsr website believes that, over the next 12 months, Twitter's market of posts will grow from its current 15 billion collective tweets by a hundredfold.

Rich's entrepreneurial journey has not been without incident, after the multimillion-dollar collapse of Imagineering and, most recently, Australian telco One.Tel.