NEW YORK TIMES: …Mr. [Nick] D’Aloisio’s father, who works at Morgan Stanley, and his mother, a lawyer, had no special knowledge of technology. But they nurtured their son’s fascination with it and he started coding at age 12. Eventually he decided to develop an app with what he calls an “automatic summarization algorithm,” one that “can take pre-existing long-form content and summarize it.” In other words, it tries to solve a problem that is often summed up with the abbreviation tl;dr: “too long; didn’t read.”
Other news-reading apps have attracted corporate attention as of late, reflecting the scramble by media companies to adapt to skyrocketing traffic from mobile devices. The social network LinkedIn was said to be pursuing an app called Pulse earlier this month. Still, the eight-figure payday for a teenage entrepreneur on Monday struck some as outlandish and set off speculation that Yahoo was willing to pay almost any price for “cool.” …
He did say, however, that “angel investing could be really fun.” When not working at Yahoo, he will keep up with his hobbies — cricket in particular — and set his sights on attending college at Oxford. His intended major is philosophy… (more)
EDITOR: Considering that D’Aloisio, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg come from wealthy families and their skills were nurtured at an early age by devoted parents, how much additional innovation and progress would be made if the vast population of disadvantaged youngsters had their talents recognized and supported through adequate educational opportunities, starting pre-kindergarten? We should start by providing each youngster a lap top by the third grade.
