Nick D'Aloisio

Nick D'Aloisio is an English computer programmer and internet entrepreneur. He is best known as the creator of Summly, which is a summarization, artificial intelligence technology developed with SRI International. D'Aloisio has been recognised as the youngest person to receive a round of venture capital in technology from Hong Kong Billionaire Li Ka-Shing, at just 15 years of age.^[1][2] As of March 2013, Summly was sold to Yahoo for a reported $30 million US dollars making him one of the youngest self-made millionaires ever.^[3] D'Aloisio was awarded "Innovator of the Year" in New York City by the Wall Street Journal for his work on Summly and at Yahoo.^[4] D'Aloisio was also included in TIME Magazine's 'Time 100' as one of the world's most influential teenagers,^[5] as well as being profiled in their "Secrets of Genius" Publication.^[6] D'Aloisio currently leads the critically acclaimed Yahoo News Digest, which launched at CES 2014 and won the 2014 Apple Design Award at WWDC for its technological and product excellence.^[7] He is also an undergraduate student at Hertford College, Oxford University where he is studying Computer Science and Philosophy.^[8][9]

Personal life

D'Aloisio was born in London, England in 1995 to Australian expatriates Lou Montilla, a vice president at Morgan Stanley and Diana D'Aloisio, a lawyer.^[10]

Shortly after D'Aloisio was born the family returned to Australia where they resided in Melbourne and Perth. The family returned to the United Kingdom when D'Aloisio was seven and he grew up in London. He was a student at the predominantly male, particularly high achieving private school King's College School^[11][12] in Wimbledon, London, where he received an academic scholarship. He lives in London, with his mother, father and younger brother Matthew, 15.

Having completed his A level exams in Summer 2014, he now is a student at Oxford University, whilst still fulfilling his duties as Product Manager on Yahoo News Digest on the side.^[8]

Summly

D'Aloisio created the Trimit application for iOS in March 2011, which used an analytical tool to condense text content into 1000, 500, or 140-character summary text.^[13] The app caught the attention of Apple who featured Trimit as a new and noteworthy application on the App Store at the same time.^[14] The potential of Trimit attracted the attention of Hong Kong based billionaire Li Ka-shing, who provided D'Aloisio with US$300,000 in venture capital funding.^[15] D'Aloisio used the feedback and criticism from Trimit to completely re-design the application, and re-launched it in December 2011, as Summly.^[16]

Summly aimed to solve perceived problems with the way news articles are presented on smartphones,^[15] with the initial version of Summly being downloaded by over 200,000 users.^[17] As a result of the corporate support,^[18] in November, 2012, D'Aloisio received US$1,000,000 in new venture funding for Summly from several international celebrities such as Yoko Ono, Ashton Kutcher and Stephen Fry, in addition to Hong Kong business mogul Li Ka-shing.^[19] As of March, 2013, Summly was sold to Yahoo for a reported $30 million US dollars.^[3]

Summly's cover page images were created by world-renowned visual artist/photographer Kevin Abosch.^[20]

Investment

D'Aloisio completed a first round of venture capital funding for Summly from Li Ka-Shing's investment firm, Horizons Ventures; he is the youngest person in the world to raise venture capital.^[21]

According to Wall Street Journal, ".. he contracted a team of Israeli coders who specialize in natural language processing...". He also hired scientist Inderjeet Mani, "a retired professor living in Thailand who'd written seminal books on the topic. He became our main scientist", said D'Aloisio.^[22][23][24]

Reception

D'Aloisio and Summly have been covered by several major publications, including ReadWrite,^[25] Business Insider,^[26] Wired,^[27] Forbes,^[28][29] The Huffington Post^[15] and TechCrunch.^[30] D'Aloisio has also made numerous television appearances on CNBC, Bloomberg, BBC, ITV, been written about in the British Metro newspaper, and been interviewed on BBC Radio Five Live. D'Aloisio also appeared on CBS This Morning in an interview with Charlie Rose, CNBC Squawk Box, Bloomberg and appeared on CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight in December 2012. Summly has had critical acclaim in receiving Apple's Best Apps of 2012 award for "Intuitive Touch" and currently has a 4.5/5 star rating on the App Store.

Awards

In addition to WSJ Innovator of the Year and appearing in Time Magazine's Most Influential; D'Aloisio was named a Top 1000 Influential Londoner by Evening Standard in 2012 and 2013. He appeared in the 30 under 30 list for Forbes Magazine, GQ Magazine's 100 Most Connected Men of 2014 and the Mail on Sunday Top 100 things to watch in 2013. D'Aloisio was included in the Sunday Times' 100 Makers of the 21st Century. D'Aloisio was placed #30 on the 2014 Silicon Valley 100 by Business Insider. D'Aloisio also won a Spirit of London Award in December 2012 as Entrepreneur of the Year. D'Aloisio received one of the British Inspiration Awards for Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2013. He was also placed 1st in Evening Standard's Top 25 under 25 for 2013. D'Aloisio has also received a Spear's Wealth Management for Entrepreneur of the Year 2013, as well as a Merton Business Award.^[31]

Yahoo News Digest

D'Aloisio announced on 8 January at CES in Las Vegas his new product, Yahoo News Digest.^[32] This product is a direct evolution of Summly and D'Aloisio is the Product Manager for the new initiative. Yahoo News Digest provides users with a definitive summary of all the important, need-to-know news of the day in the form of a "digest".^[33] These digests are provided twice a day - once in the morning and once in the evening. The stories themselves are algorithmically and editorially curated.^[34] The presentation of information is also unique with news articles being summarized into key units of information, known as "Atoms", which vary from maps to stock tickers, infographics, key quotes and others. The product has been critically acclaimed, with the Verge stating: "Yahoo News Digest is the boldest and most visually impressive app the company has released since Yahoo Weather last year."^[35]

See also

• Automatic summarization
• News aggregator
• Multi-document summarization
• Text mining

References

External links

• BBC article (Jane Wakefield)
• WSJ article