Nick D'Aloisio, Britain's 17-year-old app entrepreneur
Tuesday 26th March 2013 | Jonathan
Hey guys, have you heard that this 17 year old kid just put full pockets? Yeah, this kid just won just over 30 million pounds through a simple application on the iPhone. – Summly, a news summarisation service that he describes as 'a completely novel way of consuming content on mobile'. Essentially, 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. If you're interested, you can click through to a longer summary, or the entire, original article. The latest version, which is free, has already been downloaded more than 750,000 times since it launched in November 2012, with its summaries being read more than 75 million times.
Not that D'Aloisio was some kind of pre-teen Branson wannabe with a hard-nosed business brain – he still describes his success as 'a hobby that's gone crazy'. Each summer he would work on a new app during the school holidays.
In your opinion, what will be the next successful application? Maybe the application "Facemood", which is an application that allows to determine the mood of the user according to his Facebook status and posts? Or "SongStumblr" which will allow to discover new music and share it on all social networks. Will it shadow applications such as Deezer and SoundCloud? We'll see what will happen, but this kid has to be a good entrepreneur!
By John Brèche.