16-year-old tech prodigy Nick D’Aloisio visits Singapore, new app in the works

Nick hanging out with SGE at Starbucks. Photo: Rusydi

Nick D’Aloisio is a 16-year-old technology prodigy.

But like any ordinary teenager from London, he enjoys rugby and cricket, doesn’t get baseball, and relishes playing sports with his friends on weekends. He loves attending school as well, possessing a deep interest in learning and wishes to do philosophy in university someday.

“I also kinda miss the environment of being in a classroom, like you know, the whole thing?” he says, as we hang out in Starbucks. He orders orange juice while I settle for a cup of cappuccino.

Here in Singapore for a few days with his investment banker dad, he was previously in Japan, where he met up with Nobuyuki Idei, the former Chairman and CEO of Sony. In Singapore, he scheduled meetings with Google, Ubisoft, and other major tech firms, as well as investors and entrepreneurs.

Nick, who grew up in Australia but now lives in London, has not been in school for four weeks, as he was exempted by the British government from attending classes. But he does plan to go back in September, once he has his company “pretty set up and self-sustaining”.

His startup is Summly, now making waves in the tech scene and drawing press coverage from major news outlets. He is quite likely the youngest individual ever, at 15 years old, to get seed funding for his venture, at reportedly over US$250k. His backer is Horizons Ventures, the venture capital firm of Li Ka-Shing, a Chinese billionaire and the 11th richest man in the world.

Nick’s iOS app (downloadable here) has just crossed the 150,000 download mark.

Summly basically summarizes articles on the Internet for easy viewing, through the use of an algorithm. Users can install a bookmarklet on their mobile web browser, and use it whenever they come across an article they want shortened. The condensed content then appears on the Summly app. He claims it outperforms other text summarizers by 40 percent, and works on any language.

He developed much of the technology himself, picking up Objective C and learning the iOS SDK three years ago. He has also read papers on natural language processing and machine learning, emailing questions to the best experts in the world.

He has more in store. He told me that he is in the midst of developing a brand new mobile app, based on Summly technology, but he’s unable to disclose further details, he says, grinning.

The young entrepreneur hopes to launch it around August 2012.

“The underlining technology is very good, there’s going to be a very nice user interface design and experience… we’re very confident that it’s going to do very well.”

He hopes the new app will generate a lot of attention from consumers towards his company. But that’s just one part of his business. Ultimately, his dream is to see Summly technology become ubiquitous on the Internet and in everyday life.