iPhone app

Tecnology   IPhone  Best 2011

A schoolboy from South London raised $1m, or £620,000, from investors in order to create his own iPhone app, and all before his 17th birthday. Nick D’Aloisio, who still lives in the family home and receives a monthly allowance, developed his app which he has named Summly while he was revising for his mock GCSE exams. Summly effectively condenses current news articles into 3 key paragraphs that fit onto the screen of an iPhone.

Users can then customise the categories the news falls into, and link them to the original article if they like the summary and want to read the full piece. A prototype that Nick produced attracted an investment of around $300,000 last November from Horizons Ventures, a private company owned by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing which invests in technology and is also a backer of Siri, Spotify and Facebook.

Nick heard about the investment on his 16th birthday, not only making it one of the best presents ever but also making him one of the youngest ever to attain venture capital funding. Other backers that he has also since acquired are celebrities Stephen Fry, Yoko Ono and Ashton Kutcher. The prototype was downloaded a staggering 150,000 times, and chosen by Apple as their App of the Week in many countries including the UK.

Nick says he created the app as he felt that his generation was no longer consuming traditional news and wanted to change that. A company has been formed behind the app, and Nick has teamed up with experts in London, as well as the Stanford Research Institute, to work on both the design and the technology. His mum, who is a lawyer, has become a director if the company and owns shares on his behalf due to his age.