尼克•阿洛伊西奥 软件神童成百万富翁

    Nick D’Aloisio, a 17-year-old British entrepreneur, just sold his popular news-reading app to Yahoo Inc. for close to US$30 million, instantly becoming one of the world’s youngest self-made technology millionaires.

    D’Aloisio lives in the prosperous London suburb of Wimbledon. He taught himself to write software at the age of 12 and built the free iPhone app Summly that automatically summarizes news stories for small screens in his London bedroom in 2011. He was just 15.

    He had first dreamt up the mobile software while revising for a history exam two years ago, going on to create a prototype of the app that distils news stories into chunks of text readable on small smartphone screens.

    He was inspired, he said, by the frustrating experience of trawling through Google searches and separate websites to find information when revising for the test.

    D’Aloisio agreed to join Yahoo’s London office while continuing his studies and living at home with his parents. “To me, Yahoo is the best company to be joining right now because it’s one of these classic Internet companies. With new leadership from Marissa Mayer, Yahoo has a strong focus on mobile and product, and that’s the perfect fit for Summly,” D’Aloisio said in an interview.

    He says Yahoo plans to integrate Summly into all sorts of mobile experiences, and his parents — his dad is an energy financier, his mother is a lawyer — will help him manage the financial windfall but that he was not driven to the deal by dollar signs.(SD-Agencies)