I worked on auto-summary-generation in the late 90s (I know I know, lawn, get off you shall) When I ragged on Summly elsewhere ("yet another example of people claiming genius inventions by under-18s that fall short upon closer inspection of the claims") I came across http://skimzee.com in a comment of an older guy who complained about the attention Summly generated.
Skimzee.com lacks the web 3.0 design finesse, and hipp-ly name, but does a very admirable job summarizing articles in various languages. Tried it out and was very impressed, simple interface, works on non-English languages as well. Deserving your attention/feedback.
(disclosure: have nothing to do with the site, but did communicate with the creator a couple of times. very smart older guy.)
The best way I've found to test this out is installing the bookmarklet (which for some odd reason is hidden in the settings page... see http://skimzee.com/settings.html )
This makes me wonder what TechMeme would be worth actually.
The .ly domain name for startups has become somewhat of a fun fad, there isn't much rhyme or reason to it.
Recently, .io has been fairly popular as well.
d'Aloisio seems to have a attracted disproportionate mainstream press coverage and and unusually critical tech press attention considering his app's relatively low budget and short life, even for a youngster. Being expensively acquihired by Yahoo might not change that, but I guess the monetary reward at 17 gives him the last laugh
[1] http://www.standard.co.uk/news/techandgadgets/exclusive-summ...
"Angel Investors and Advisors include; Ashton Kutcher, Betaworks, Brian Chesky, Hosain Rahman, Jessica Powell, Joanna Shields, Josh Kushner, Mark Pincus, Matt Mullenweg, Seb Bishop, Shakil Khan, Spencer Hyman, Stephen Fry, Troy Carter, Vivi Nevo, Yoko Ono and many more. We are also working closely with News Corporation on the summarization of their content."
Source: http://summly.com/about.html
But sure enough the kid is rich now.
Fair play to him for doing this himself, but he wasn't exactly poor to begin with. A bit of googling shows the jobs his parents hold and an address on Parkside SW19 (which is one of the most expensive roads outside central London).
Furthermore, kudos to the founder for creating this thing at such a young age, but is he really going to have a space at Yahoo?
Remember when you bought Geocities and Broadcast.com to have a slice of the dot com bubble pie? Remember when you bought Flickr and Delicious to have a slice of the Web 2.0 pie?
* * *
Good news for D’Aloisio: post-acqhiresition, founders of companies bought by Yahoo always seem to do well.
I hope that this can serve as yet another example of how important software and product development can in education.
http://allthingsd.com/20130325/yahoo-paid-30-million-in-cash...
