We covered the launch of Summly an application that summarises text last year, but I recently caught up with Nick D’Aloisio, the16 year year-old programmer who came up with the application for a video interview.
Its sounds almost boringly simple but the sheer amount of online content means the eco-system for these apps is rising. Formerly known as Trimit (which we covered back in July), Summly was developed by D’Aloisio from his bedroom in South London over a Summer break from school.
Nick then managed to attract the attention of billionaire Hong Kong investor Li Ka-shing and his investment vehicle, Horizons Ventures and secured a $300,000 seed round. The boy Om Malik calls “the Internet’s new boy genius” has now built a startup team to exploit Summly’s potential.
Summly can condense content into 1,000, 500, or 140-character summaries, offering a world of simpler browsing and search experiences. Indeed, researchers at MIT, D’Aloisio says, found Summly outperformed the “highest academically published results” by a factor of 30 percent.