Charlie Rose Talks to Yahoo! Teen Tycoon Nick D'Aloisio

What is Summly, and how did you come to create it?
Summly is a technology I’ve been developing for about the last two years, and what it does is it automatically condenses and summarizes long-form text into summaries and snippets. When you’re on a phone—you’re rushed for time, you’re busy—you just have to look down and see the gist of something. So Summly provides this medium where you can skim and get an idea of what’s happening. Over the last three, four years, I’d been teaching myself to program and was very fortunate to have worked with the Stanford Research Institute over a period in 2012 to develop this algorithm, and that’s what Yahoo’s buying.

You’re self-taught?
Well I’m still in the process of kind of self-teaching. I always had a fascination for technology and design, and so when I was 12, the App Store was announced, and this is a true story, I went into an Apple Store a few days later and was like, “I want to learn how to program.” The people at the store said, “We don’t even know what a program language is.” So I was a bit disheartened, and I spent six months waiting for the App Store. And when it went public, there were enough resources online to teach myself the basic level of programming. I released my first app that summer, and it was one of the first 3,000 apps on the App Store.