Movie star Ashton Kutcher and Yoko ono are among the celebrities and high-profile investors who have backed a 17-year-old entrepreneur’s idea for a free app that can instantly summarise relevant news.
Called, ‘Summly’ ,the app is based on an algorithm that instantly analyzes text and summarizes the most relevant pieces of news, providing the user with a concise summary. Readers can then choose to click through to the publisher’s site if they want to delve deeper.
Summly founder Nick D’Aloisio is the youngest ever entrepreneur to raise venture capital. In 12 months, he has sourced funding from major corporate investors like Horizons Ventures (owned by Hong Kong billionairre Li-Ka Shing), as wel known figures such as Stephen Fry, Ashton Kutcher, Bruno Mars, Wendi Murdoch and Yoko Ono.
D’Aloisio he designed Summly because he felt his generation wasn’t consuming traditional news anymore.
“We’ve created an app that will benefit anyone who loves reading news on the go.v. We’ve been able to build an industry-leading app that performs even better than human summaries in our tests. We think this is just the tip of the iceberg of what can be done with symmetrisation technology,” he said.
Mary Meeker, venture capitalist added : “Nick and team have cleverly re-imagined how content will be consumed on mobile devices. With the Summly app, not only does the ‘who, what, when, where and how’ of content rise to the top, Summly has the potential to create an ecosystem for the best content to be distributed more broadly.”
