Student designer secures investment for iPhone app Summly

Summary: The Summly application could become the next must-have for students. Its teenage creator has secured a large investment for future development.

British teenager Nick D’Aloisio, designer of the ‘Summly’ app, has secured investment with a Hong-Kong based company.

Summly is an iPhone application that summarises and simplifies the content of web pages. Advertised as ‘a simple way to browse the web’, the 16-year old found inspiration for the app while studying for a history exam.

D’Aloisio found the current search options available online as inefficient, and this provoked the idea for the iPhone app. The developer said:

“I thought that what I needed was a way of simplifying and summarising these web searches. Google has Instant Preview but that is just an image of the page. What I wanted was a content preview.”

Li Ka-Shing, of Horizons Ventures, is the Chinese billionaire who ranks as one of the wealthiest people in the world. He has invested $250,000 (£159,000) in to the Summly project.  Previous investments have included Facebook, Spotify and Skype.

Before founding Summly, the teenage developer created Facemood, a service which used algorithms to determine the mood of Facebook users, and SongStumblr, a geosocial music discovery service.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z3l8h3bbr4&feature=player_embedded