Wimbledon Whizkid

Not every teenager finds inspiration whilst studying for exams but Nick D’Aloisio is not your average teenager.

Nick D’Aloisio is 16 years old, the son of a lawyer and an oil and gas commodities trader. His family moved from Australia over 9 years ago and he currently attends King’s College in Wimbledon.

Like most teenagers, Nick has to study for exams and whilst revising for his history exam, he found it quite frustrating and inefficient to click in and out of search results using Google - ‘I thought there must be a better way to simplify and summarise the web searches. Googles offers instant preview which is just an image of the page, but what I wanted was content preview’. So what did he do about it? Well, he wrote his own app to summarise and simplify the content of web pages and search results.

The first iteration of the app, called Trimit, clocked 100,000 downloads and caught the eye of Horizons Ventures, which is the private equity firm controlled by Li Ka-Shing, the Chinese billionaire. Horizons invested USD250,000 into the project and Trimit evolved into Summly.  Summly has been downloaded ten of thousands of times since launch in mid December. It  is currently available as an iPhone app but there are plans to launch Android and web versions this year.

Summly summarises text using algorithmic technologies allowing for simplified bullet point summaries of anything on the web. It can condense reference pages, news articles and reviews. Nick believes that it has scope for so much more such as summarising emails, social networking posts and product descriptions.

Nick’s backstory is an earnest one. He begged his parents for six months for a Macintosh laptop in the very early Apple days and that fuelled an interest to create things rather than just video watching or web browsing.  In 2008, when Apple’s iTunes store was unveiled Nick aged 12 began teaching himself animation software, iMovie, Final Cut Express and Pro and finally how to write apps in the comfort of his own bedroom. ‘I taught myself to program and just experimented. My first app FingerMill was awful but there weren’t alot of apps around then and I was still learning. FaceMood was better and analysed keywords in Facebook statuses to suggest what mood a person was in at a given time. My most notable app was Songstumblr in 2010 - it was an app that allowed iPhone users in the same room to find out what songs they were listening to instantly. I thought that was pretty cool’.

By this stage Nick had discovered the power of algorithms, a series of step by step instructions that carried out procedures to achieve an end goal, enabling you to filter out mass irrelevant information on the internet. The algorithm behind Summly recognises by way of ontological detection and provides consolidated summary of its text.

Since being discovered by Horizons, Nick has been to the Silicon Valley to meet with executives and he smiles when he tells me that Horizons had no idea of his age, he takes pride in the fact that his technology merited itself in its own right. ‘I didn’t want the app sparking interest because of my age, I wanted people to be interested in the app for its quality and technology’. 

Nick considers the discovery by Horizons and the media attention since then to be a completely surreal experience. ‘I don’t think its quite hit me that I’ve been to the Silicon Valley earlier this month, was in Munich yesterday doing an interview on German TV and have had all this attention. Given the rate of apps available it is really difficult to innovate but I just happen to be in the right place at the right time. My lucky break came when Horizons found me - before that I was completely unknown’.

Nick has had to defer his mock GCSEs with the blessing of King’s, to work on Summly but has every intention to finish school and read philosophy at Oxbridge. In many ways he is just another teenager who enjoys school, playing rugby and cricket and seeing friends on weekends. When I asked him if he would describe himself as a ‘techy geek’ he just smiled and said he didn’t even take computing at school. ‘I have freedom to do what I want and I really enjoy humanities, arts and philosophy. I also study mandarin and would like to visit Asia. I’m just going to take one step at a time and finish school first’.  He does have further ambitions for Summly and is also working on a number of other projects. He also hastens to add that he finds the design of a product more interesting than the programming and is not driven by money. He is so polite, earnest, eager and well-spoken that you can’t help but like him. He is a genuinely nice kid and well grounded.

Nick’s advice to other teenagers - ‘If you have a good idea, run with it. Some of my earlier apps failed but you learn from it. All you really need is a good idea. When you are completely unknown, you have nothing to lose, you just go forth and take a risk’.