Summly

[yasockie]

Summly: Teenager launches top-selling news app pretty neat idea, to be honest - he's taking someone elses content, much like google does and tries to play nice with them, hoping no one sues?

Either way he's got his first £1 milion already so not bad...

[fckvwls]

Seems to me things like Google Currents or Pulse already do this and better. Are you saying he has made 1m dollars or just that some investors have spent loads of money having this built and hyped?

[Clippy]

A smartphone app which provides summaries of news stories soared to number nine in Apple's app store just two hours after its release in the US.

The free-to-download app uses algorithms to process news stories into summaries which users can then swipe to see in full if they wish.

"We can really become the de-facto format for news on mobile. People are not scrolling through 1,000-word articles - they want snack-sized information."

In the longer term Mr D'Aloisio would like to see users make micro-payments to read some stories in full should they choose to view the entire article.

"Traditionally publishers have been confined to a paywall system," he said. "You can either give away the headline or the full article. But we can really sell the summary level."

I read this article earlier in the week and the above elements made me wonder whether he would, legally, be able to monetise content which isn't his.

Unless his algorithms are completely re-writing the articles and then summarising the re-writes, in which case he runs the risk of, amongst other things, losing the context of the article, I don't see how he can turn this into a commercial venture without rights to the content.

This then begs the question as to what is to stop a large news organisation offering such a service for free.

Or have I mis-interpreted this?

[realityhack]

Fair play to him, but he needs to sort out his user interface, it's really annoying and error prone. Gimmicky is acceptable provided you don't break deeply-rooted mobile interaction patterns.

[SimonMac]

I will gloss over the fact that you can't have a "fastest selling app" when you give it away for free.

Its "OK" no more no less, the UI is fine for the type of person who only wants a 10 second brief of the news, I am not sure how the big media vendors will like the fact that it takes their content but not their advertising

[vetran]

"We worked hard on an interface that looks like nothing else on iPhone,"

hmm

[AtW]

It probably would not be "top selling" if he did not get into the news around the world and he would not get there if he wasn't so young which was backed by some people who buy a lot of positive publicity for little effort.

[Paddy]

It probably would not be "top selling" if he did not get into the news around the world and he would not get there if he wasn't so young which was backed by some people who buy a lot of positive publicity for little effort.

+1

Also I cannot see thap app working without running into copywrite issues when relaying news.

[AtW]

+1

Also I cannot see thap app working without running into copyright issues when relaying news.

More importantly - he raised $1 mln investment, let's say for 50% of his business, so he'd need to make profit of $2.6 mln before corp tax (unless he does "Apple" on it) to just return money back to shareholders.

This does not take into account any costs that he'll most likely have - some of investors claw back some of their money by charging fee for consultancy etc

It's making business profitable enough to return money to shareholders that's the challenge, not raising money for a free app...