Many this week celebrated the latest tech wunderkind, a British teenager who made a fortune selling an app that boils down news reports, no matter how important or complex, into a pithy 400 characters. But for some of those who prefer heartier servings of news, the development carried at least a whiff of the apocalypse.
For perspective: On Summly, the app that Yahoo bought from 17-year-old Nick D'Aloisio for $30 million, this article would already be done, having ended midway through the word "D'Aloisio."
His fortune-making insight was that people on the go — in line for coffee or killing time between innings of a baseball game — may want no more information than can fit on the screen of a typical smartphone. The service is made possible not by underpaid workers in their 20s, as was typical for earlier generations of news aggregators, but by an algorithm designed to cull the essence of reports from traditional news sources.