World's Youngest VC-Funded Entrepreneur?

The idea isn't particularly unique and it wasn't particularly well executed when the first version was built but with the investment he was able to hire some talented people and from what I've seen the application (as is available now) is excellent, however it seems that he is now primarily their advertising vehicle. He's being used to market the app and it's certainly working, it's getting them huge amounts of press compared to the other companies in the same space.

Stephen Fry is in the advertisement video for Summly, he tweeted it to his ~5 million followers: https://twitter.com/stephenfry/status/264066858225905664

The Summly team: http://summly.com/about.html

edit: oh apparently Stephen Fry is an investor, that explains the "free" video.

edit edit: I wonder how he feels about his age being such a huge part of the stories now, back in August 2011 he said this:

    So he kept it under wraps. "It was a conscious decision 
    to not disclose my age to Apple and the media," he says, 
    because he wanted "Trimit to be judged on its own merit, 
    and not the story of its creator being 15." 

From: http://www.fastcompany.com/1772823/15-year-old-creator-trimi...

The Summly app doesn't create summaries and I don't think algorithms will ever create good summaries.

Nick D’Alosio deserves a ton of credit. He's smart, creative, young, ambitious, pulled together a good team and created a great looking app but I don't believe this will solve the problem.

Before I created Skim That[1], a human powered news summarizing website, I looked into how Summly and other TL;DR algorithms worked to decide which direction I wanted to go in. I concluded that, even if you create the best algorithm that takes the best sentences from a story, you're still going to end up with a poorly written and out of context paragraph.

Try it yourself. Read a story and try to manually find a few sentences that best summarize it. Then, without rewriting anything, try to put those sentences into a paragraph or two. You'll find that you end up with a confusing summary that's difficult to read.

The amount of words Summly limited itself to (one iPhone screen worth) is brilliant. It keeps things simple and easy to skim through but what's produced by the service is so short that it should be called a "tease" not a "summary".

Of course, the Summly app does hit the nail on the head with a summary every once in a while but this hit or miss style makes for a bad experience.

Summarizing algorithms aren't the automation challenge, those will never work right as demonstrated by the "try it yourself" challenge above. The real automation challenge is rewriting the important sentences in such a way that they make sense together and provide proper context.

On Skim That, I'm trying to solve the problem by crowd sourcing the summarizing process and asking readers to summarize a story. I've gotten a few people to give it a shot and several of those continue to summarize stories every once in a while. My challenge is how to get people more interested in participating and how to get search engine traffic to a website that goes against many SEO principals.

[1] http://skimthat.com

Edit: Human or machine, I think the summary race is great for readers and helps people be more informed. I wish Nick a lot of luck and hope that one of us solves this problem soon.

I may be cynical but show me a 16yr old who made a business with a million dollar in revenue. Then I'll be impressed.

First off, good luck young man! You've built something and attracted people to your work, and it's paying off. Additionally, you realized your own limitations and used the resources provided to build a better product by hiring skilled developers and engineers, that should be commended.

Now.

The algorithm works by selecting words from a given article to build a summary that will perfectly fit onto the screen of your iPhone--no more scrolling to read or waiting to load.

I have a serious problem with this. On The Verge he made the statement that the activity of scrolling was "horrific"[1]. Why? This is mainly personal bias-as someone who carries serious nerdboners for long-form journalism-but I don't think the problem with news on mobiles is something you solve by shrink wrapping content so you don't have to move your finger a few inches on an iPhone.

IMO the problem with reading content on mobile has already been addressed by XKCD [2].

I have no problem with D'Aloisio wanting to change media for the better, to make it more accessible, easier to digest and syndicate written content. I do have reservations however about algorithmically summarizing news articles because of a perceived notion that there is something wrong with reading long articles.

Again, this is personal opinion.

---

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/1/3583720/summly-nick-d-aloi...

[2] http://xkcd.com/869/

I like Summrly. It came in to my attention when it was featured in the Appstore as Editor's Choice.

I have been poking around Circa for the last two week as well and I prefer this format better.

It's more playful, more to discover. It took a little bit to get used to the gestures, but I like it.

I like this approach more than getting pushed updates on my pre-selected news stories (how Circa works). Problem with Circa is that you have to make a decision right then and there. You have to decide if you care to hear about this story in the future or not. And the result is a) i subscribe to very little subject or b) I over subscribe to many subjects and get overwhelmed with updates, and this dilutes my interest in all of the subject.

But that's not how we generally read the Newsaper or any content for that matter. We often read the side lines. the news before and after, or the surrounding industries. That's the reason why I think Circa will have a hard time converting me to a daily user of their app. Summrly on the other hand, i load it 5 times a day.

Anyway, Hearing that a young entrepreneur is behind this is even more impressive. Fantastic work!

I love that the age for starting such endeavors is getting lower and lower. If more and more people are exposed to the possibility of creating their own solutions (and fostering their own interests) from a younger and younger age, it will become the kind of culture that will change the world.

I actually downloaded and tried out the app for myself, and I liked it. While an algorithm cannot best a human, this app seems to do a pretty good job at summarizing the news. I think it's feasible - a large portion of any given news article is typically spent expanding on a few main ideas that are typically expressed in one or two sentences. Your typical 1000 word news article follows a predictable narrative structure.

That being said, I found the whole user flow of swiping through sections to be terribly unintuitive and confusing.

As an aside it would be interesting to see the legal structure of this transaction. At that age you can't (iirc) enter into a contract, at least not in the US.

Obviously his parents would need to be involved in this. It's possible also that one of the big draws for the investor was the obvious publicity potential (for the venture) of funding someone 15 yrs old vs. someone who is (ho hum) 20. This type of angle plays well in the media.

While it's good that building technology is becoming so much more accessible at a young age, you can see the ramifications and consequences of funding this early when the entrepreneur in question says that he doesn't really know how to build this into a company and, more importantly, he has other ideas that he will probably much rather pursue.

This is awesome, I am surprised someone this young hasn't received VC funding previously. Whatever you think of the idea it isn't important, the person is important and he is one to watch. Ideas change all the time, and if this doesn't work he will have to change it. If it does work then all the negative commenters can eat their words.

having other ideas doesn't disqualify him from being a successful entrepreneur. successful companies were built by a team, not a single person. as long as the kid is able to gather bright people around he will sell this eventually to facebook for $1b. it looks like some smart and much older folks agreed on that. otherwise they wouldn't have invested.

I wonder if there's issues with his age and owning a business? Can anyone speak to this? Would his parents have to be involved?