17-year-old Londoner, Nick D’Aloisio sold his Summly app to Yahoo last year for $30 million and announced last week that he is currently working on their new Yahoo News Digest. Speaking at the Consumer Electronic Show on January 7, D’Aloisio was the spokesperson to announce the news app, revealing he had been working on the project for the last nine months.
The Yahoo app will incorporate elements of Summly, an app designed to summarise news stories in three paragraphs in order to be viewed on an iPhone screen. D’Aloisio came up with the idea whilst studying for his mock exams, citing the problem of flitting between Google articles as his inspiration. Labelling it ‘inefficient and time-wasting’ his idea was to create an app that could neatly summarise a number of stories in one place and in one easy-to-read screen.
The search giant picked up the inventive app for $30 million last year, making Wimbledon-based D’Aloisio a teenage millionaire. Rather than simply use Summly in its previous form Yahoo took the decision to use it as their own branded product and by getting D’Aloisio to work on it with them.
Talking through the product at the CES keynote D’Aloisio explained:
“Today I announced the product I’ve been working on for the last 9 months called Yahoo News Digest. It’s been good to work with a great team at Yahoo on the project and this is the next iteration of what we started with Summly.
“The product provides a definitive summary of all the important, need-to-know news in a highly visual and ‘atomized’ manner. We wanted to give users a sense of “‘completion’ that they have caught up with the day’s news.”
Because of his collaboration on the project D’Aloisio currently splits his time between his home with his lawyer mother and city energy financier father and at the Yahoo Headquarters in San Francisco.
Summly was downloaded 1 million times before Yahoo snapped it up last year. Celebrity fans included Stephen Fry, Ashton Kutcher and Yoko Ono.