Shakespeare, in Hamlet, said that brevity is the soul of wit. Could it also be the future of mobile news? Yahoo certainly thinks so.
When the web portal plunked down $30 million to buy Summly, an app that condenses full-length stories into bitesized nuggets that fit on to a smartphone’s screen, it made its 17-year-old creator Nick D’Aloisio the latest toast of the tech world. The newsreader, meeting the demands of 21st-century life, is perfect for the TL;DR or “too long; didn’t read†crowd.
The idea for Summly, or at least its early version, came while the teen was preparing for a history exam. He realized how time-consuming it was to click in and out of search results on Google.
“There is a generation of skimmers. It’s not that they don’t want to read in-depth content, but they want to evaluate what the content is before they commit time,†the British wunderkind told The Guardian.
Backstory
D’Aloisio has been catnip to the press; I imagine his back story to be a movie producer’s wet dream come true. Born in Australia to a lawyer mother and an investment banker father, he began reading college textbooks on astronomy when he was six. He got his first MacBook at age nine and used it to edit home video.
Using open-source software online and the book C for Dummies, he taught himself basic programming at the age of 12, when his family moved back to the UK. He developed a handful of apps before he hit the jackpot with Summly, all from his bedroom in Wimbledon, southwest London. He is set to join Yahoo’s office in the British capital while continuing his studies.
Network of backers
While its catchy “natural language processing†technology made Summly one of the best iPhone apps of 2012 — it had been downloaded almost a million times before it was pulled from the app store following the deal — its influential network of backers should also be taken into consideration.
A lot of fundraising went into Nick D’Aloisio’s young start-up, now bankrolled by Horizons Ventures, the venture capital arm of Hong Kong telecoms billionaire Li Ka-shing. Troy Carter, Lady Gaga’s web-savvy manager, Ashton Kutcher, and Yoko Ono have all chipped in, together with Spotify’s Shakil Khan. The British media personality Stephen Fry did his part by starring in a promotional video. Summly has support from the Stanford Research Institute, the R&D unit that produced Apple’s virtual assistant Siri. So yes, it took a star-studded village — and Yahoo — to turn D’Aloisio from plain teenage nerd to newly-minted asset.
Boy wonders
Of course, Nick D’Aloisio is but the latest in a long line of boy wonders. Warren Buffett, America’s most prominent investor, bought his first shares at the age of 11. Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the richest Americans in history, established a ferry service between Staten Island and Manhattan when he was 16. The Sewdish business magnate Ingvar Kamprad started Ikea at 17.
Then there’s Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and Tumblr’s David Karp. Internet millionaires in their second decade, they became fodder for those essentially cheesy “20 in their Twenties†features that are stock-in-trade of lifestyle magazines.
In hindsight
All of this has got me thinking: That I was 21 when I became section editor of a leading magazine is looking pretty damn last century. What the hell was I doing when I was 15? All those days and nights I devoted to underage partying could’ve been spent in my room coding. In hindsight, Spanish history and Japanese architecture are all very worldly and interesting subjects, but they’re not going to build genetic algorithms.
To catch up, perhaps I could try to develop an app that recharges any device by harnessing the jealousy of Internet trolls. That should be easy and useful, right? I bet that somewhere, however, an eight-year-old has already beat me to it.
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