Ka-Shing
Ka-Shing
Ka-Shing
Ka-Shing
I love the sound of money rolling in.
A 17-year-old Londoner has launched a new app that summarises news stories for smartphones after getting over $1m in funding. The Summly app started out life as TrimIt, getting 100,000 downloads last year before private equity firm Horizons Ventures spotted it. The firm, run by Li Ka-Shing - the eleventh wealthiest person in …
If I recall correctly, newspaper copy is written to be trimmed. If another story needs more column inches, it's trivial to remove paragraphs from the end of the story without substantially changing the meaning (the story loses detail and colour instead). I don't know if the same writing style is applied to online copy, but it doesn't sound completely implausible.
Hmmm.... Even without the legals, it'd not probably work. I want to know where my summarised news is coming from (trusted sources and all that), so the app would have to tell me. So if I see an interesting summary from the BBC on Chinese politics I can either:
a) go to my BBC app and if it's not on the front page find it in the 'China' section - three clicks max
b) click on the 'go to source' button, and probably have to click 'yes' to a 'we're going to charge you' box.
I'd not be willing to pay very much to save me 1 click.
facebook paid 1 billion for the app equivelent of smearing vasaline on a camera lens....
i suspect the whole "its an app" catchphrase will do as well as "we have a website" in 99/2000. At least until everyone works out its all a load of nathan barley self congratulating circle jerkery and the whole thing collapses ala first dotcom crash
Good luck to him, no doubt he'll rake it in just as quickly as an investment banker has money thrown at him.
I'm sure I know people that have regularly made perl scripts far more complicated than his news "algorithm".
It will be popular as people have become so lazy then are unable to source multiple newsfeeds. The problem is, will it create a section of people that don't care if all of the summary news feeds are from a certain biased news source? Murdoch supporting it is always worrying.