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SUCCESS STORY: D'Aloisio
Tuesday 28th May 2013 | Pierre
The effect of the economic crisis has been felt. But if you have ideas, are creative, and can bring something new, you can become important (and rich by the way). A prime example of this is Nick D'Aloisio, a south London schoolboy who has become one of the world’s youngest tech millionaires after selling his mobile app to Yahoo!
He developed the app - called Summly - a news summarisation service. It pulls in news from a variety of sources and uses a computer algorithm to boil it down to a couple of key sentences, with users choosing the subjects most relevant to them. This app was bought by over one thousand users, and soon after was sold to Yahoo due its roaring sucess (for the grand sum of $30 milliion!)
But don't think this success story is a random one. You have to work hard to become somebody and Nick is proof - he created his first application when he was twelve years old. He'd work on a new one each summer, and in 2011 he created Trimit - an app that cut down longform web content into tweet-sized bites. For that he recieved 300,000 carefully-spent dollars. He's just as passionate about Summly as a business though, and what he loves most about it is its concept.
Nick still lives with his parents, Lou and Diana, and his brother, Matthew, 13, in Wimbledon. He still plans on attending a university - preferably Oxford - to study philosophy, politics and economics. But despite these academic plans he is still planning different applications for the near future; for example Facemood is in the works... an application for predicting the mood of a user based on their Facebook status updates!
