He followed it up with FaceMood - an app which analysed keywords in Facebook statuses and profiles to suggest what mood someone was in at any given time.īy this point Mr D'Aloisio's hobby had set him upon an important path. "It was awful but at the time there was only a few thousand apps on the App store and it did manage a couple of hundred downloads," remembers Mr D'Aloisio. Next came FingerMill, which was basically a treadmill for your finger.
He downloaded the iPhone development kit and designed his first piece of software when he was 12.Ĭalled SongStumblr, it was a geo-social music discovery tool which allowed people to share music both with those in the same room and globally. He was doing it for fun - "I hadn't pushed out anything commercially," he says - which is somewhat reassuring given his age.īut it was only a matter of time before he started experimenting with apps.
He was nine years old when he was given his first MacBook - "one of the old ones," he says with a wry smile - and set about teaching himself animation software before progressing through iMovie, Final Cut Express and Final Cut Pro in his Wimbledon bedroom. Mr D'Aloisio is part of a generation of programmers who struggle to remember a time before iTunes, YouTube and mobile internet. I find the product and the design of the product much more interesting than the programming," he says. "I want to do philosophy at university and I'm studying Chinese and Russian at school.
He does not even study computing at school - you get the impression there would be little point anyway. He enjoys the humanities, cricket and rugby. But it would be misleading to pigeon-hole him as a geek. Mr D'Aloisio is by no means a typical teenager - he is polite, highly motivated and enthusiastic. Mr D'Aloisio's app subsequently evolved into Summly, and since launching in mid-December has been downloaded tens of thousands of times. Nick D'Aloisio at home Nick D'Aloisio developed the app in his Wimbledon bedroom His previous investments include Skype, Facebook and Spotify. The private equity investment firm is controlled by Li Ka-Shing, the Chinese billionaire who ranks as the eleventh wealthiest person in the world according to the Forbes rich list.
The first iteration of the app, called TrimIt, clocked up 100,000 downloads and caught the eye of Horizons Ventures. What I wanted was a content preview," he says. Google has Instant Preview but that is just an image of the page. "I thought that what I needed was a way of simplifying and summarising these web searches. If I found myself on a site that was interesting I was reading it and that was wasting time," he said.
"I was revising for a history exam and using Google, clicking in and out of search results, and it seemed quite inefficient. Mr D'Aloisio - the son of a lawyer and an investment banker - had the brainwave for it while studying. Currently it can condense reference pages, news articles and reviews but has the potential to go a lot further. Summly is an iPhone app which summarises and simplifies the content of web pages and search results. But 16-year-old South Londoner Nick D'Aloisio's excuse is better than most he has been busy developing an app which has made international headlines and attracted a big investment from a Hong Kong-based billionaire. Most teenagers will find any reason under the sun not to do their homework.