English teenager makes £20 million from an app

He's the 17-year-old boy genius who this week sold Summly, the smartphone app he created from his bedroom while revising for his GCSEs, to Yahoo! for a rumoured 20 million pounds. He is friends with Stephen Fry, has hung out at Ashton Kutcher's house, worked with Yoko Ono, and even done a deal with Rupert Murdoch. But there's only one question I want to ask Nick D'Aloisio: has he got a new shoulder bag yet? During a recent radio interview, the bag topped the list of things he wanted to buy with his new fortune.

He laughs. "The whole of Twitter is talking about my bag. I couldn't believe it. Mine is broken; it's old and the strap's not working. Someone asked me what I was going to buy now that I have all this money and I said, 'Well, I really need a new shoulder bag.' It wasn't like, 'What shall I get myself to celebrate? Oooh, I know, a man bag!'?"

The young tech millionaire also wants to buy a shiny pair of Nike trainers. Like any London teenager, looking good is a priority for D'Aloisio. Unlike his peers, however, so are computer coding, investor portfolios and the multimillion-pound deal he has just brokered with one of the world's biggest technology companies.

Tousle-haired D'Aloisio, dressed in magenta trousers and a white T-shirt emblazoned with a question mark, turns up to our meeting an hour late. It's not his fault - he's been up since 5am, politely sitting his way through back-to-back interviews, radio slots and international TV appearances. Halfway through our chat, he dashes out to speak to an Australian television company, all the while slugging a lurid orange energy drink from a can to help him stay awake.

When the Daily Telegraph's Saturday Magazine first interviewed D'Aloisio, over a month ago, the Yahoo! deal was just a rumour - and his free?to?download app was still in its infancy. Has he changed, now that he's a multimillionaire? "No way," he blurts, between gulps. "I don't feel like a different person. My motivation has always been to do technology apps and companies, not making money. Just because the money's come, nothing's changed."

D'Aloisio (full name Nicholas D'Aloisio-Montilla, although he drops the double-barrelled part because D'Aloisio is just, well, cooler) was born in London to expat Australian parents - Lou, a commodities trader, and Diana, a lawyer - in 1996. The family moved back to Melbourne shortly after Nick was born. When he turned seven (and his brother, Matthew, was three), the D'Aloisios relocated to Wimbledon, south-west London, where they have been ever since.

It was here, at the desk in his bedroom, aged 15, that D'Aloisio came up with the idea for Summly, a news summarisation application that shortens longer web articles into three concise paragraphs, making them easier to read on the screen of a smartphone. The app, which has been downloaded a million times and summarised 90 million articles since its launch in 2011, claims to save users enough reading time every day to take a long, hot bath.

The idea came to D'Aloisio when he was revising for his mock history GCSE. Frustrated by the number of irrelevant articles that kept coming up in web searches, he began experimenting with ways to filter information. "I'm impatient," he explains, "like a lot of my generation. If this or that isn't interesting to me, I'll stop reading. I don't have the tolerance. I want to know what content is appropriate to me - and I want to know quickly. That's what Summly does."

It's easy to forget you're talking to a 17-year-old when D'Aloisio gets going. Constantly shifting, almost bouncing, in his chair, he's endearingly passionate about technology - and what the future holds for start-ups like his. Intelligent without being geeky, he throws phrases like "3D rendering" and "product road maps" into conversation, stopping to explain with great patience when my eyes glaze over in confusion.

He's interested in more than just computers, too. At school (he's on sabbatical from King's College School in Wimbledon, having stopped full-time classes last year to concentrate on Summly), he's studying for A-levels in maths, physics and philosophy. He's learning Russian and Mandarin, and one day hopes to read PPE at Oxford. His Yahoo! deal involves a full-time job at the company's London office, with schoolwork confined to the evenings. Too much for a teenager to handle?

"Education is something that naturally interests me, so I'll be OK," he insists. "If it doesn't work out with school, I can go back when I'm 20 - or whenever." And your parents didn't mind you giving up classes? "I talked about it with them and my headmaster and we decided it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and it would be silly not to run with it. Now, looking back, I can say it was a massive gamble. But it was a good gamble."

D'Aloisio's interest in technology started young. "I've always liked small details; weird, esoteric things," he reveals. "I'm quite obsessive so I really go into depth. Computers became one of those passions." Aged five, he became mesmerised by galaxies and the solar system, memorising entire constellations by heart. At nine, he got his first computer - and aged 10, he was trying out cutting-edge movie software, in a bid to emulate the programmes he watched on TV. He taught himself coding at the age of 12.

Before Summly, he came up with other smartphone apps, including SongStumblr, a music discovery program, and Facemood, which predicted the mood of a user through Facebook status updates. Summly, first called Trimit, appeared in Apple's App Store in November 2011. It was downloaded 30,000 times and quickly came to the attention of Hong Kong investor Li Ka-shing, the world's eighth richest man, who offered D'Aloisio $300,000 for a share. When the money came through on his 16th birthday, D'Aloisio became the youngest person ever to receive venture capital investment.

"Li Ka-shing was the dream investor," says D'Aloisio. "It's a credit to him that he took a gamble on a kid and it worked out OK."

Wealthy backers including Kutcher, Fry and Ono came on board within months. Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation was one of 250 online publishers to sign up. A year down the line, he still giggles at the mention of his celebrity backers. "It is a bit weird. Meeting Rupert Murdoch was definitely scary." He falters. "I don't say they're my friends - I don't know if they'd call me a friend. They've all been great."

Famous friends aside, D'Aloisio's life is normal - ish. He hangs out with schoolfriends at weekends, plays rugby and cricket ("I was on the A-team when I was 14, but I'm not so good now") and has time for a girlfriend, whom he's been seeing for 10 months. His mother accompanies him on business trips to Hong Kong, Korea and New York. None of this stops comparisons to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, or hides the fact that he has been named one of Forbes magazine's "30 Under 30" entrepreneurs to watch. Does he feel pressure to succeed?

"I've never thought, 'Oh God, I'm a failure if I don't sell my company'," he says. "When I was 15, I was naive. There is a story that when Li Ka?shing phoned up, I asked when we should meet - before or after school. People ask me if my age has helped me do well, but Summly has been subjected to so many due diligence tests. The technology works."

D'Aloisio's hopes for the future are as ambitious as you'd expect. He wants to invest the bulk of his money; he likes the idea of "angel investing" - that is, giving financial backing and expertise to another tech start-up. He plans to raise awareness of the importance of computer coding - a subject he hopes will one day be taught in schools. He'd like to expand Summly (which has now closed down, before being integrated into Yahoo!'s software) beyond news - "We've looked at summarising Wikipedia, books, blog posts; you name it," he reveals.

These are all long-term goals, however. Like most of his generation, D'Aloisio is enjoying right now. When he and I part, he'll tear off to catch a flight to New York, for yet another packed day of press appearances and publicity. What's next, after that, for the whizz kid from Wimbledon? "I'm really looking forward to starting at Yahoo!. It's exciting. Ten years from now, I might still be there. I might be at university. I might be in a totally different industry."

He looks down at the question mark on his T-shirt and grins. "In other words, I have absolutely no idea."