An interesting one from Washington post Social reader.
Nick O’ Time
Let
me share his story. Nick’s dad is an investment banker and his mother’s
a lawyer. He grew up in Perth, Australia, where he fell in love with
rugby and cricket. The clear, big night skies made stargazing a fun
activity and before you know it, he was learning everything about stars
and galaxies and black holes. He was not even 5. At age 7, his family
moved to London. A year later, he annoyed his parents into buying him a
MacBook Pro.
Why? He wanted to learn how to replicate videos he saw on television.
He figured out iMovie, Final Cut Pro and some Autodeskprograms. Of
course, he couldn’t recreate the commercials he saw, but started getting
close enough. In 2007, he got an iPhone and a year later when the App
Store launched, he went out to learn the iOS SDK.
A couple of months later, he created an app, SoundStumble — a
geo-local music discovery app that allowed you to see what people were
listening in your vicinity. Encouraged by that app, he came up with
Facemood, an app that looked at your friend’s Facebook timeline and
summarized what kind of mood they were in. Facemood was followed
by TrimIt, an iOS app that was downloaded and used by 100,000 people.
His logic for developing the app? Information overload.
“Seven months ago I got into Twitter and was getting a lot of URLs,
but being on a slow phone network it would take 15 seconds to load up a
page and I couldn’t view the content ahead of time,” he recalls. It was
frustrating. The situation on Google is even worse. ”I don’t have enough
time whilst on the go to click in and out of every article and story on
the web,” he says. What he wanted was to figure out a way to skim-read
its entire content before deciding to read through its entirety.
Sentiment is everything
D’Aloisio confesses that he is obsessed with sentiment analysis and
each app is a step forward into his obsession with making sense of large
data sets. He reads paper on natural language processing and machine
learning in order to pick up the best techniques and learns from the
masters. He uses iTunes University. And what he doesn’t know, he asks.
He is not shy. He has emailed experts, without making them aware of his
age or background.
The success of TrimIt didn’t go unnoticed. A few press mentions
caught the attention of Solina Chao, a key investor with Horizons, the
private equity investment vehicle of of Li Ka-Shing, the Chinese
billionaire and owner of the 3 Group. Their previous investments include
Skype, Facebook and Spotify. She convinced Nick and his parents that it
was time for him to take the next step and turn TrimIt into a company.
Of course, Horizons’ made the seed investment in what is now known as
Summly, a service that allows webpages and news articles to be
automatically compressed into succinct summaries.
Summly uses a text-summarizing algorithm that has been trained with
sample pages from across the web and has trained itself to use optimized
metrics when formulating a summary of any article or webpage. The
service uses an ontological detection so that the “algorithm detects
what kind of webpage has been entered into Summly e.g. a technology
article, and applies our appropriate technology article summarizing
metrics accordingly.” The algorithm’s preliminary evaluation showed that
it outperformed other text summarizers by a factor of 40
percent, D’Aloisio claims. And it supposedly works across many different
languages.
I have no idea of knowing whether his claims are accurate. Being on
the road, I have not even had time to do my due diligence. All I know is
that the early version of the app (that is going live sometime later
today) works quite well. It allows me to get summaries of articles from
publications like The Guardian. I get summaries of news items via News
APIs of Google and Bing. Smart tagging allows me to discover more
information. It just seems to work.
“This is the right time for us to be tackling this product,” he says.
Nick points out that even Google knows that something needs to be done.
It has launched Google Previews, but again it is not the ideal
solution. “Google’s UI hasn’t kept up with the changing nature of the
web and the Internet,” says D’Aloisio and is of the opinion that the
click-centric web behavior is going to soon be a thing of the past.
Whether it is video, text or photos, there will be a lot more automation
in how the information is surfaced to us, Nick says, arguing that it is
a journey that has only just begun. “I think of artificial intelligence
as applied to everyday life,” he adds.
Best is yet to come
We walk over to the train station, looking for sustenance. There
aren’t many options, so we settle on a German version of a diner. I have
currywurst, Nick tucks into another kind of sausage. But we mostly talk
about his “tech” life and how he reconciles it with his other life, one
that of a student and a teenager. “I enjoy school and being with my
friends, and I do indeed have to work hard at school,” Nick explains.
“School is a lot of work.” He is learning Russian, Mandarin and a
smattering of other languages. As our conversation progresses, Nick,
being a little impatient points out that “It is the project that has got
me here and not being a kid.” He doesn’t want to be seen as a kid with
an app. Instead, it is an app with a kid behind it.
When I ask if he will get a CEO to help him out, D’Aloisio says of
course, in time. For now he wants to focus his tiny little company on
the product. He points out that most founders have a vision of the
product and they can see it and when that vision isn’t brought to
fruition, it causes irritation. It is one of the reasons he is still
obsessive about controlling every aspect of the product. “I want to
ensure it is my true vision,” he emphatically states.
From design to coding, D’Aloisio is obsessive about controlling the
product — much like one of his idols, Steve Jobs. He is currently
reading Jobs’ biography and we discuss it for a bit before both of us
concluding, thank god for Macs. A minute later we are discussing
typography and the importance of design and user experience. We talk
cricket and how the current Australian team sucks. We talk some more
about design and typography.
After a while we shake hands and part ways. As a parting comment I
tell Nick that this might not be his last company for his quest to make
sense of data is still a journey incomplete. He smiles, he says. “I
know.” I will hazard a guess — the world and all of us who believe in
technology will be hearing about the exploits of this young man for a
very long time.
