Nick D’Aloisio, the 18-year-old tech entrepreneur behind the Summly news app, has joined with Yahoo! to launch the Yahoo! News Digest App in the UK.
As Yahoo!’s product manager, mobile and emerging products, D’Aloiso told CBR from Mobile World Congress that he built on his premise with Summly, but has delivered the news in an even more concise way.
"The digest is a summary of all the summaries and the goal behind this was to me there’s a whole generation of people who want to be informed and intelligent when it comes to current affairs and information but don’t necessarily have the time, so we’re trying to make that process as efficient as possible," he told CBR.
As the trend to share news on social media grows, the news space is becoming more crowded. D’Aloisio hopes to address the issue of information overload with the new app.
"I think there’s definitely a redundancy [of news] there’s so much news coming through social networks that its harder and harder to decide what to read," he said.
"That does allow for a product like News Digest to thrive, probably more so this year than in any other year today on the internet."
This proves to be working as after just a day of being available in the UK, the app has already climbed to the top of the App Store news chart.
The app works on the premise of using ‘atoms’ of information to give readers an end-to-end view of the news, with bi-daily updates, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Push notifications to your mobile to let you know when the digest is ready.
D’Aloisio describes it as being like reading the front three pages of a newspaper to gain an overview of the day’s news.
"The premise behind this product was to allow for the user experience to be as good as possible when it comes to consuming information. So the motive behind the product has been to really perfect that consumption model. However, over time, it could be quite interesting potentially if we were to increase the social element into it."
He added: "I’m very proud to roll this product out to the home market. I love working in the ecosystem here in the UK here, so it’s very fulfilling to have all my friends in the UK being able to use the product now."
