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Nick D'Aloisio

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Nicholas D'Aloisio (born 1 November 1995) is a British computer programmer and internet entrepreneur. He is the founder of Summly, a mobile app which automatically summarises news articles and other material, which was acquired by Yahoo for $30M, according to allthingsd.com, but the price wasn't officially disclosed.[1] D'Aloisio is the youngest person to receive a round of venture capital in technology, at the age of 16.[2][3] D'Aloisio was more recently the founder of a startup called Sphere that was acquired by Twitter in October 2021 for an undisclosed sum, and received $30M of venture capital investment from Index Ventures and Mike Moritz.[4][5][6] He is also a student at Oxford University, where he graduated from the BPhil in Philosophy in July 2021 and now is undertaking the PhD (DPhil) course.[7] D'Aloisio has had seven papers accepted for publication or revision & resubmission in peer-reviewed journals.[7]

Nick D'Aloisio
Nick D'Aloisio in his offices, 2021
Born
Nicholas D'Aloisio-Montilla

(1995-11-01) 1 November 1995 (age 29)
Melbourne, Australia
NationalityAustralian
EducationKing's College School, University of Oxford
Occupation(s)Computer programmer, Internet entrepreneur, philosopher, student (Hertford College, University of Oxford)
Known forSummly

Early life and education

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D'Aloisio was born in Melbourne, Australia. Having spent some years there, D’Aloisio left Australia for the United Kingdom at the age of 7 with his lawyer mother and banker father.[8] When he was seven, they returned to London. D'Aloisio was educated at King's College School, an independent school for boys in Wimbledon, south west London.[9] In the summer of 2014, he took A-level examinations at King's College School, Wimbledon. From 2014, D'Aloisio studied his undergraduate degree in philosophy and computer science at Hertford College, Oxford University.[10] In 2019, he commenced the BPhil graduate programme in Philosophy at Oxford University, and then advanced onto the DPhil (PhD) course in 2021.[7]

Since 2017, D'Aloisio has published a number of academic papers in peer-reviewed journals.[11] One of them, titled "Imagery and Overflow: We See More Than We Report", was published in Philosophical Psychology[11][12] He presented a second paper at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp.[13] A third paper was published in the philosophy journal Ratio, and three more papers were accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed journals Philosophia, Disputatio and Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.[14][15]

Career

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Summly

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In March 2011, D'Aloisio launched an iOS app named Trimit, which used an algorithm to condense text such as emails and blog posts into a summary of 1000, 500, or 140-character text.[16] With 100,000 downloads,[17] the app was featured as on the Apple App Store.[18] Shortly afterwards, Trimit attracted the attention of business magnate Li Ka-Shing, who provided 16-year-old D'Aloisio with US$300,000 in venture capital investment.[19][20] After gathering feedback, D'Aloisio re-designed the app and renamed it Summly in December 2011.[21]

Summly aimed to solve perceived problems with the way news articles are presented on smartphones,[19] with the initial version of Summly being downloaded by over 200,000 users.[22] He hired a team from Israel, including a scientist named Inderjeet Mani, who specialised in natural language processing, to improve the app.[23][24] With corporate support,[25] in November 2012, D'Aloisio received US$1 million in new venture funding from celebrities such as Yoko Ono, Ashton Kutcher and Stephen Fry, in addition to Li Ka-Shing.[26] In March 2013, D'Aloiso sold Summly to Yahoo! for approximately US$30 million, according to allthingsd.com, but price wasn't officially disclosed.[1][27] He joined Yahoo! as a product manager the same month.[28]

The Summly algorithm first decides whether a document is summarizable by using a classifier model that is trained on a dataset of summarizable documents and unsummarizable documents (such as works of fiction). Then, a scoring system is used to identity and prune uninformative and incoherent sentences until the summary drops below the word limit. The coherence score is obtained by assigning weights to the presence of features in the sentence. For short summaries, the informativeness score of a sentence is determined by language-independent features such as its position or length. For longer summaries, a support vector machine learns to detect sentences with the highest ROUGE-1 scores. For other summaries, a random walk is used to determine salient nodes in a graph (a la PageRank) where sentences are represented as nodes with exponentially decreasing weights for those that appear later.[29]

Yahoo News Digest

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In January 2014, D'Aloisio announced the launch of Yahoo News Digest at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.[30] An evolution of Summly, Yahoo News Digest provides mobile users with a summary of important news of the day in the form of a twice-a-day digest.[31] The articles are automatically and manually curated, as well as summarised into key units of information, known as "Atoms", which include maps, infographics, quotes and Wikipedia extracts.[32] The Verge praised the app, stating, "Yahoo! News Digest is the boldest and most visually impressive app the company has released since Yahoo! Weather last year."[33] It was the winner of the 2014 Apple Design Award.[34] D'Aloisio resigned from Yahoo! in October 2015.

Sphere

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In late 2015, D'Aloisio co-founded a new startup called Sphere Knowledge with Tomas Halgas, who he met at Oxford. Whilst yet to be made public, Sphere is said to be knowledge-sharing service where users can swap information via instant messaging.[6] As of March 2019, the Financial Times reports that the company has raised US$30 million.[6] In October 2021, multiple news outlets including TechCrunch, The Telegraph, The Times and BBC reported that Sphere had been acquired by Twitter, and that the majority of the 30-person team would be joining the company.[4][5][35][36]

Awards and recognition

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D'Aloisio garnered media attention for being a young entrepreneur. He has been covered by major publications, including ReadWrite,[37] Business Insider,[38] Wired,[39] Forbes,[40][41] The Huffington Post[19] and TechCrunch.[42] D'Aloisio has also made numerous television appearances.[43]

In 2013, The Wall Street Journal awarded D'Aloisio "Innovator of the Year" in New York City for his work on Summly and at Yahoo.[44] He was included in Time magazine's Time 100 as one of the world's most influential teenagers.[45] He also appeared in the 30 Under 30, an annual list of top entrepreneurs by Forbes, and appeared in GQ magazine's 100 Most Connected Men of 2014.[46] D'Aloisio was placed No. 30 on the 2014 Silicon Valley 100 by Business Insider.[47] He won a Spirit of London Award in December 2012 as Entrepreneur of the Year.[48] In addition, he was placed No. 1 in London's Evening Standard Top 25 under 25 for 2013.[20] D'Aloisio also received 2013's Entrepreneur of the Year by Spear's Wealth Management, as well as a Merton Business Award.[49]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b "Yahoo Paid 30 Million in Cash For 18 Months of Young Summly Entrepreneur's Time".
  2. ^ Rainey, Sarah (26 March 2013). "Nick D'Aloisio: 'It was a massive gamble but a good one'". The Daily Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235. Archived from the original on 27 March 2013. Retrieved 17 January 2020.
  3. ^ Lomas, Natasha (3 August 2010). "True Ventures Invests in 19 Year Old Entrepreneur Brian Wong". TechCrunch. Retrieved 28 October 2013.
  4. ^ a b "British entrepreneur sells company to Twitter". BBC News. 21 October 2021. Retrieved 21 October 2021.
  5. ^ a b "Twitter acquires group chat app Sphere". 21 October 2021. Retrieved 21 October 2021.
  6. ^ a b c Bradshaw, Tim (15 March 2019). "Tech prodigy Nick D'Aloisio stumbles with secretive Q&A app". Financial Times. Archived from the original on 18 April 2020. Retrieved 16 March 2019. (subscription required)
  7. ^ a b c "Nick D'Aloisio | University of Oxford - Academia.edu". oxford.academia.edu. Retrieved 16 March 2019.
  8. ^ Grubb, Ben (26 March 2013). "Teen's multimillion-dollar Yahoo payday before 18th birthday". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 15 March 2019.
  9. ^ Frean, Alexandra (6 October 2017). "Summly founder Nick D'Aloisio raises £12m for new app". The Times. ISSN 0140-0460. Retrieved 16 March 2019.
  10. ^ Clark, Liat (23 September 2014). "Exclusive: Nick D'Aloisio to combine Oxford studies with Yahoo role (Wired UK)". Wired UK. Retrieved 16 October 2015.
  11. ^ a b "Nick D'Aloisio, Academic Profile".
  12. ^ d'Aloisio-Montilla, Nicholas (2017). "Imagery and overflow: We see more than we report". Philosophical Psychology. 30 (5): 545–570. doi:10.1080/09515089.2017.1298086. S2CID 151734484.
  13. ^ d&#39, Nick. "Two Seeming Successes of Introspection Workshop". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  14. ^ d&#39, Nick (2017). "A Brief Argument For Consciousness Without Access". Ratio. 31 (2): 119.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  15. ^ d'Aloisio-Montilla, Nicholas (2018). "A Brief Argument For Consciousness Without Access". Ratio. 31 (2): 119–136. doi:10.1111/rati.12183.
  16. ^ Lomas, Natasha (15 July 2011). "Trimit Summarizes Emails, Blog Posts, And More with a Shake of Your iPhone". TechCrunch. Retrieved 28 October 2013.
  17. ^ Wakefield, Jane (28 December 2011). "Teenage app prodigy hits jackpot". Retrieved 16 March 2019.
  18. ^ "trimit for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch on the iTunes App Store". Itunes.apple.com. 12 August 2011. Retrieved 28 October 2013.
  19. ^ a b c Grandoni, Dino (2 November 2012). "17-Year-Old Summly Founder Nick D'Aloisio's Immodest Goal: Change The Way You Read News". Huffingtonpost.com. Retrieved 28 October 2013.
  20. ^ a b "London's top 25 under-25s: they're young and successful – deal with it". Evening Standard. 28 March 2013. Retrieved 16 March 2019.
  21. ^ Heesun Wee (16 November 2012). "Meet the 17-Year-Old Who Is Reinventing News". CNBC. Retrieved 28 October 2013.
  22. ^ "Teenager receives $1 million for creating app". Digitaljournal.com. 5 November 2012. Retrieved 28 October 2013.
  23. ^ Stevenson, Seth (11 November 2013). "How Teen Nick D'Aloisio Has Changed the Way We Read". The Wall Street Journal.
  24. ^ "What Does $30 Million Buy You?". The Wall Street Journal. 26 March 2013.
  25. ^ Bradshaw, Tim (8 November 2012). "The savvy network behind Summly". FT.com. Retrieved 28 October 2013.
  26. ^ Lomas, Natasha (1 November 2012). "Backed With $1M in Fresh Funding, Summly's 17-Year-Old Founder Shows Off His App's New Look [TCTV". TechCrunch. Retrieved 28 October 2013.
  27. ^ "Yahoo acquires mobile news start-up Summly". Stuff.co.nz. 26 March 2013. Retrieved 28 October 2013.
  28. ^ Luckerson, Victor. "Q&A With the 17-Year-Old Who Sold an App to Yahoo for $30 Million". Time. ISSN 0040-781X. Retrieved 16 March 2019.
  29. ^ US patent 10599721B2, Mani, Inderjeet; Ciurana, Eugenio & D'Aloisio-Montilla, Nicholas et al., "Method and apparatus for automatically summarizing the contents of electronic documents", published 2018-03-08, issued 2020-03-24 
  30. ^ McCracken, Harry (8 January 2014). "Yahoo's News Digest App: The Least Overwhelming News Source Ever". Time. Retrieved 16 October 2015.
  31. ^ "Yahoo News Digest: Get in the Know in No Time | Yahoo". Yahoo.tumblr.com. 7 January 2014. Retrieved 16 October 2015.
  32. ^ "Science Powering Product: Yahoo News Digest | Yahoo Labs". Yahoolabs.tumblr.com. 30 June 2014. Archived from the original on 30 October 2015. Retrieved 16 October 2015.
  33. ^ Newton, Casey (7 January 2014). "Yahoo's sleek News Digest app swims against the stream". The Verge. Retrieved 16 October 2015.
  34. ^ "Yahoo Wins Another Apple Design Award For News Digest". TechCrunch. 2 June 2014. Retrieved 16 October 2015.
  35. ^ Odell, Michael (21 October 2021). "Nick d'Aloisio, the British tech whizz kid who's sold two apps to Silicon Valley". Retrieved 21 October 2021.
  36. ^ Field, Matthew (21 October 2021). "Meet the tech prodigy who's sold a second app to Silicon Valley". Retrieved 21 October 2021.
  37. ^ "Summly: New App Helps You Read All Your Bookmarked Links in Minutes – ReadWrite". Readwriteweb.com. Archived from the original on 5 September 2012. Retrieved 28 October 2013.
  38. ^ Boonsri Dickinson (19 December 2011). "This 16-Year-Old Genius Scored Funding From A Hong Kong Billionaire for an iPhone App – Business Insider". Articles.businessinsider.com. Retrieved 28 October 2013.
  39. ^ Bonnington, Christina (13 December 2011). "Teen's iOS App Uses Complex Algorithms to Summarize the Web | Gadget Lab". Wired.com. Retrieved 28 October 2013.
  40. ^ Olson, Parmy (13 December 2011). "Teenage Programmer Backed By Hong Kong Billionaire Li Ka Shing". Forbes. Retrieved 28 October 2013.
  41. ^ Carr, Coeli (15 September 2011). "10 Tips From A 15-Year-Old App Developer on the VC Fast Track: How Parents Can Nurture Their Teenage Tech Prodigies". Forbes. Retrieved 28 October 2013.
  42. ^ Lomas, Natasha (13 December 2011). "16-Year-Old Programmer Raises Seed Round From Billionaire Li Ka Shing To 'Summarize The Web'". TechCrunch. Retrieved 28 October 2013.
  43. ^ Summly creator Nick D'Aloisio: 'I try to maintain a level of humbleness' The Guardian, 29 March 2013, retrieved 29 March 2013
  44. ^ Stevenson, Seth (11 November 2013). "How Teen Nick D'Aloisio Has Changed the Way We Read". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 16 March 2019.
  45. ^ "Nick D'Aloisio, 18 | The 16 Most Influential Teens of 2013". Time. 12 November 2013. Retrieved 16 October 2015.
  46. ^ GQ (8 December 2014). "GQ and ei's 100 Most Connected Men 2014". British GQ. Retrieved 16 March 2019.
  47. ^ D'Onfro, Megan Rose Dickey, Jillian. "THE SILICON VALLEY 100: The Coolest People in Tech Right Now". Business Insider. Retrieved 16 March 2019.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  48. ^ Burke, Elaine (26 March 2013). "Meet Nick D'Aloisio, the 17-year-old entrepreneur Yahoo! just made a millionaire – Companies | siliconrepublic.com – Ireland's Technology News Service". Silicon Republic. Retrieved 16 March 2019.
  49. ^ "Winners Announced of Spear's Wealth Management Awards 2013 – Spears". Spearswms.com. 31 October 2013. Retrieved 16 October 2015.
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