Oz teen expected to revolutionise web gets $250k backing from billionaire

An Australian boy recently scored 250,000 US dollars in an investment from a billionaire for a technology that could change the way of reading emails, news articles or any other text document on the computer.

Nick D'Aloisio, a former Perth and Melbourne and living in London, is among the many other teenagers making it big online and attracting the attention of big name search engines, news aggregation websites and shopping sites.

The 16-year-old's technology summarises text using algorithmic technologies, allowing for simplified dot point summaries of anything on the web such as search results. D'Aloisio believes that in the future it could be used to summarise emails, social networking posts and product descriptions.

According to D'Aloisio, his technology uses a technique called "machine learning".

"So it trains itself over time, taking human summaries of content and trying to emulate . . . the machine summary to be as close as possible or as similar as possible to the human one," the Sydney Morning Herald quoted him as saying.

After scooping such a large investment at an early age, D'Aloisio has also organised for Micha Breakstone, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to research his summarisation technology, which he said was in a "patent-pending" state.

Breakstone, manager of MIT's experimental syntax and semantics lab and founder of ExceLingo, said in an email that tests he conducted proved that the boy's technology outperformed industry summarisation standards by 30 per cent.

He said he was independently contracted to do the evaluation and that a summary paper of his findings was written but not published.

D'Aloisio began his journey with computers when he was eight and his family moved to London, using Apple's movie making software iMovie before progressing to the more professional video software, Final Cut Pro.

"I basically begged my parents for six months to get an Apple computer.

"And when I finally got it, instead of using it for just watching videos or browsing the web, I kind of had an interest to create things," D'Aloisio said.

Then, in early 2008 when Apple's iTunes app store was unveiled, he began to teach himself how to create apps.

"They weren't anything special. They were just kind of almost test apps but at the time, because there weren't enough apps available on the store, they actually did all right," D'Aloisio said.

It wasn't until mid-2010 when he created what he describes as his first "serious" application, Songstumblr, a geo-social music discovery service. It meant users with it on their iPhones in the same room could find out what songs they were each listening to instantly via a Bluetooth connection.

Then, early last year, after he finished making the music app, he began to create a more sophisticated app that has since received about 250,000 million dollars in investment from the 11th richest person in the world, the Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing.

"I began kind of looking into algorithmic technologies and natural language programming," he added.

The technology is now integrated into D'Aloisio's latest app, formally known as Trimit and now known as Summly.

He's currently in San Francisco to talk with executives interested in his latest app, which is free and has had 100,000 downloads since launch. (ANI)