A news summary app, developed by a 17-year-old Brit, leapt in to the App Store top ten just hours after it was launched.
The new
Summly app, built by teenager Nick D'Aloisio, uses neat algorithms to condense trending news stories into one-screen summaries.
The
iPhone app works on the premise that people do not have the time or the inclination to read full news articles on a mobile screen and would rather have the basic gist of a story, rather than skim headlines.
The 'painstakingly' developed algorithm means that despite all of the chopping, the story still translates into a readable summary, while users can still double-tapping the screen for a more detailed 'Summly'.
The length of the
Summly is also determined by the size of the iPhone model, so
iPhone 5 users will see more text on their 4-inch screen than users of the 3.5-inch iPhone 4S.
"What we believed is news on the iPhone-sized screen is currently broken," D'Aloisio said.
"So people are just skim-reading the headlines and no one is actually standing in line or on the phone and going, 'I want to read this whole story,' scrolling through a 1,500-word article."
Summly, which D'Aloisio took a year out of school to develop, has received over a million dollars in funding from the likes of actor Ashton Kutcher and Zynga CEO Mark Pincus.
News Corp. is also on board after signing a deal to have the Wall Street Journal, The Times and other publications appear within the app.
This is the second version of Summly. D'Aloisio says the first version was a demo, but this new iteration is ready for the mass market. Judging by the initial flood of downloads, it looks like he may be right.
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