Nick D’Aloisio, a 16-year-old iOS developer based in London, England, is the mastermind behind this amazing iPhone app. Summly thrives on a high end algorithm. The Summly algorithm accomplishes this using a number of machine learning techniques and “genetic” algorithms — a search heuristic that mimics evolution.

D’Aloisio says that Summly works best with well-formulated articles that conform to a consistent structure. This lets the algorithm learn what’s important — and where to find that important information — more easily. Tech articles and news articles tend to marry well with Summly’s algorithm, as does the consistently organized content from the New York Times and the BBC. The app doesn’t do quite as well with narrative text written in the third person, but D’Aloisio says that there are no areas that are seriously troublesome to his algorithm.

Future Vision by Erwin Van Lun on this article

Computer try to understand in much more details what we find important and this is a step in this direction. This will immediately be followed by connecting it to social media: what do our friends, our family, our colleagues find important? People want to know about the news before they hear it from others. That’s where news coaching brands tap into.

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• Coaching brands