masterwordsmith-unplugged

The Telegraph reported that a south London schoolboy has become one of the world’s youngest tech millionaires after selling his mobile app to Yahoo!

Excerpt:

Nick D’Aloisio, 17, developed the app, called Summly, while revising for his mock GCSEs in 2011. The app, which summarises news stories, will now close and its features will be used in mobile products at Yahoo!. Nick will also start a full-time job at the web giant while he studies for his A-levels. He said: "I'm hoping to stay [at Yahoo!] as long as it takes to get the technology integrated. "We were approached a few months ago and what really excited me was their mobile strategy. "I think this is an amazing opportunity and I didn't want to miss it."



Sources familiar with the deal indicated that Nick received almost $30 million for the app, which has been downloaded around one million times since its launch last year.

Yahoo! said in a statement: "We're excited to share that we're acquiring Summly, a mobile product company founded with a vision to simplify the way we get information, making it faster, easier and more concise."

"At the age of 15, Nick D'Aloisio created the Summly app at his home in London. It started with an insight – that we live in a world of constant information and need new ways to simplify how we find the stories that are important to us, at a glance." MORE HERE


According to the Summly website:

Nick D'Aloisio launched Summly in December 2011 as a tech summarization prototype that garnered significant interest worldwide. With backing from Horizons Ventures, and help from many natural language processing and artificial intelligence experts around the world, Nick and the Summly team have been able to further develop summarization technology, the first result being the new Summly mobile news app.

Angel Investors and Advisors include; Ashton Kutcher, Betaworks, Brian Chesky, Hosain Rahman, Jessica Powell, Joanna Shields, Josh Kushner, Mark Pincus, Matt Mullenweg, Seb Bishop, Shakil Khan, Spencer Hyman, Stephen Fry, Troy Carter, Vivi Nevo, Yoko Ono and many more. We are also working closely with News Corporation on the summarization of their content. MORE HERE

Check out Mark Sutherland's interesting article about Nick AT THIS LINK.

Incidentally, one of my former students, Chin Xin-Ci,  recently launched her smartphone application 'Watch Over Me' for personal safety.

This feisty young lady escaped from abduction at The Curve last year. Back in 2005, I could see her resilience and never doubted her tenacity to succeed. She is very intelligent and talented and I am very proud of her. I hope she achieves much success too! Read about it AT THIS LINK.