News App Summly Launches to Simplify News on your iPhone or iPod Touch

NEW YORK, Nov. 1, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Summly, the new mobile app for browsing and consuming automatic summaries of the news on your iPhone or iPod Touch, launched today on the App Store aiming to dramatically improve the mobile news reading experience.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20121101/NY03828 )

The new, free app, currently available on iPhone, makes it possible for users to easily browse and read condensed summaries from their favorite news outlets, as well as discover new stories from hundreds of sources.

Existing news apps can leave users dissatisfied and overwhelmed: wanting more: it's difficult to quickly browse multiple stories; full articles take a long time to load; stories aren't always optimized for the mobile screen; and "snippets" pulled from the first sentence of an article often provide an incomplete picture of the article's subject matter.

In contrast, Summly's easy-to-use app -- which is optimized for the mobile screen -- automatically determines the most relevant facts in a story and automatically generates short summaries that help the reader quickly grasp the main points from diverse news sources, from The Wall Street Journal to ESPN. To read the full story, readers can then click through to the original article.

Summly enables users to:

• Quickly browse summaries of articles from hundreds of news sources as well as news in Twitter streams.
• Customize news to the topics, keywords, and news sources that most interest you.
• Read summaries (or in this case, summlies) through the app both on and offline.
• Share summaries with friends through social channels, SMS, and email.
• See summaries regardless of what iPhone device they are using, as summlies adjusts to dynamically fill the screen size of the mobile device.
• Easily navigate through innovative design and gestures

Summly was founded by Nick D'Aloisio, whose early prototype of a web summarization app (also called "Summly") attracted the attention last year of various experts in the artificial intelligence, NLP, and machine learning fields. To build today's fully-fledged mobile news app Nick partnered with several experts in the fields of artificial intelligence and design.

"I designed Summly because I felt that my generation wasn't consuming traditional news anymore," said D'Aloisio. "In designing for the mobile generation, I believe we've created an app that will benefit anyone who loves reading news on the go."

"We've been able to build an industry-leading app that performs even better than human summaries in our tests. We think this is just the tip of the iceberg of what can be done with summarization technology," he said. 

Daniel Ek, Founder of Spotify said, "Summly is an amazing piece of technology which easily summarizes the world news into a bite-sized format. Perfect for people like myself who are constantly in a rush, but want to be in the know."

Mary Meeker, venture capitalist said, "Nick and team have cleverly re-imagined how content will be consumed on mobile devices. With the Summly app, not only does the 'who, what, when, where and how' of content rise to the top, Summly has the potential to create an ecosystem for the best content to be distributed more broadly.'

Summly is backed by several investors, including Horizons Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, Betaworks, Brian Chesky, Hosain Rahman, Joanna Shields, Josh Kushner, Mark Pincus, Matt Mullenweg, Stephen Fry, Troy Carter, Yoko Ono and many more.

The Summly app is available for free from the App Store for iPhone or iPod Touch or at www.itunes.com/appstore. For more information please visit www.summly.com.

About Summly:
Nick D'Aloisio launched Summly in December 2011 as a tech summarization prototype that garnered significant interest worldwide. With backing from Horizons Ventures, and help from many NLP and AI experts around the world, Nick and the Summly team have been able to further develop summarization technology, the first result being the new Summly mobile news app.

SOURCE Summly