This article was taken from the April 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Nick D'Aloisio is hitting back at information overload. "There's so much stuff on the web," says the 16-year-old. "Search engines are fine, but I wanted to make an intermediate layer between them and the final reading." The result is Summly<span
class="s1">, a free iPhone app that summarises web pages into three or four bite-sized sentences and some keywords.
"So, you can see if you want the page first," he says. "That's useful for smartphones -- you can wait ages for a page to load and then not want it."
D'Aloisio, a pupil at King's College School in Wimbledon, south London, started his app career at 12. He downloaded the Apple developer kit, "learnt by trial and error", and quickly produced his first app, Fingermill<span class="s3">, a treadmill for fingers, which he admits was "awful".
The inspiration for Summly <span class="s3">came when he was revising for his history GCSE. He found himself frustrated by thousands of web search results. "There had to be a faster way of summarising content," he says. He wrote Trimit<span class="s3">, an app that summarised long text into 140, 500 or 1,000 characters. Trimit then morphed into the more powerful
Summly, which could reduce entire pages to bullet points.
D'Aloisio has raised "more than $250,000 [£159,000]" from Horizons Ventures, Ltd: when an investor called for a meeting after being impressed by the business plan, he was surprised to be told that it would need to be before or after school. By February Summly <span class="s1">had been downloaded more than 100,000 times; requests were being processed every five seconds. He's now working on a web-app version, but he doesn't see himself as a coder. "I'm interested in app design and where the business is going," he says, "but philosophy is my thing"
-- ideally reading politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford.
So why did friends learn about <span class="s2">Summly only from a BBC item? "I want to keep my life balanced. I like coming from a different place than most tech people."
Short on time? Here's what Summly made of this profile: -- D'aloisio, a pupil at King's College School, London, started his app career at 12. -- "There's so much stuff on the web," says the 16-year-old. -- Keywords: Aloisio, Horizons Ventures, Summly, BBC, Oxford.
Name: Nick D'Aloisio
Occuptation: Creator, Summly
Location: London, UK
Need to know: His app sits between your search results and your click-throughs, to make browsing faster.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
