17歲少年成千萬富翁 引領閱讀變革

UPON HEARING, IN MARCH of this year, reports that a 17-year-old schoolboy had sold a piece of software to Yahoo! for $30 million, you might well have entertained a few preconceived notions about what sort of child this must be. A geeky specimen, no doubt. A savant with zero interests outside writing lines of code. A twitchy creature, prone to mumbling, averse to eye contact.

當你聽說今年3月份，一個17歲的學生把自己設計的一款軟件以3,000萬美元賣給雅虎公司(Yahoo! Inc., YHOO)的時候。對於這孩子的形貌，你腦海裏或許已勾畫出一個搞笑的形象了吧：不用說，肯定是個極客。一個除了一行一行寫代碼之外對什麼也不感興趣的學霸。一個不敢正眼瞧人還老小聲兒嘀咕着什麼的神經質。

Thus it's rather a shock when you first encounter Nick D'Aloisio striding into London's Bar Boulud restaurant, firmly shaking hands and proceeding to outline his entrepreneurial vision. To imagine him in person, picture a Silicon Valley CEO blessed with an easy manner and 97th percentile media skills. Picture a guy who can confidently expound (while maintaining steady eye contact) on topics ranging from Noam Chomsky's theories to the science of neural networks to the immigrant mind-set to the Buddhist concept of jnana. And now picture this fellow trapped inside the gangly body of a British teen who might easily be mistaken for a member of the pop boy band One Direction-clad in a hipster T-shirt beneath a fitted blazer, hair swooping over his forehead, taking bites of a cheeseburger between bold pronouncements.

那麼，當你看到17歲的尼克?達洛伊西奧(Nick D’Aloisio)意氣風發地走進倫敦巴爾?布魯(Bar Boulud)餐廳，與人堅定地握着手，描繪他未來事業藍圖的時候，你應該會驚訝得合不攏嘴了吧。他就像是個來自硅谷的首席執行長(CEO)，應對媒體時從容不迫，技巧上可以打97的高分。聊天時，他眼神堅定地注視着你，從諾姆?喬姆斯基(Noam Chomsky)的理論、神經網絡科學，到移民心態乃至佛教瑜伽，他一切話題都能自信地暢所欲言。但他又像是個One Direction男孩組合的成員，修長的身材配着嬉皮T恤和修身小西裝，頭髮凌亂地搭在腦門前，一邊咬着吉士漢堡，一邊發表着讓人瞠目結舌的見解。

The app D'Aloisio designed, Summly, compresses long pieces of text into a few representative sentences. When he released an early iteration, tech observers realized that an app that could deliver brief, accurate summaries would be hugely valuable in a world where we read everything-from news stories to corporate reports-on our phones, on the go. The app attracted the interest of investors around the world, ranging from Hollywood celebrities to Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, the wealthiest man in Asia.

達洛伊西奧設計了一款名叫Summly的應用軟件，該軟件能夠將繁冗的文章精簡成幾行關鍵句子。早一代Summly軟件發佈後，技術觀察家意識到在這個無論資訊還是財報，一切新聞都快速閱於掌上的時代，這樣一款簡潔、精準的摘要軟件蘊含着巨大的價值。該應用吸引了包括好萊塢明星和亞洲首富李嘉誠在內的全世界投資者的興趣。

In 2011, at age 15, D'Aloisio closed a seed round of funding from Li Ka-shing. A year later, Summly launched, and within a month it had attracted 500,000 users and became the number-one news app in 28 countries. The Yahoo! sale capped off a remarkable run for someone not yet out of high school. But it's not mere technological savvy that sets D'Aloisio apart. Since long before he could shave, he has been driven by an intense curiosity and a desire to make some sort of mark on the tech world. Not just to create but to build and, yes, to monetize.

2011年在達洛伊西奧15歲時，他就曾獲得來自李嘉誠的種子投資。一年之後Summy發佈，並在短短一個月內吸引了500,000名用戶，在28個國家登上了新款應用軟件熱度榜的首位。對於一個連高中都還沒畢業的人來說，雅虎的收購可謂意義深遠。不過，達洛伊西奧的過人之處可不只是技術知識豐富這一點。在他連鬍子都不用刮的時候，他就強烈嚮往、渴望著有朝一日能在科技領域做出一番大的成就。不僅要創新，還要有所成就，當然，還要大把賺錢。

He's lately begun taking meetings with the likes of Marissa Mayer and Rupert Murdoch. (Murdoch is chairman of News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal.) Though D'Aloisio's net worth at this point is merely eye-popping, not obscene, in his own youthful way he seems every bit as formidable as relative gray-hairs like 27-year-old Tumblr founder David Karp or 29-year-old Facebook wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg. 'He captivates a room,' says Joshua Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital, an early backer of Summly. 'He is incredibly self-aware for his age.'

他最近已開始和瑪麗莎?梅耶爾(Marissa Mayer)、魯伯特?默多克(Rupert Murdoch)這樣的產業大亨進行會面（默多克正是《華爾街日報》(The Wall Street Journal)所屬新聞集團(News Corp.)的董事長）。目前達洛伊西奧的資產淨值已經很高，但還沒多到令人眼紅的地步。但正如輕博客(Tumblr)創始人大衛?卡普(David Karp)和29歲的Facebook神童馬克?扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)一樣，達洛伊西奧已非常值得欽佩。Summly早期投資方之一、興盛資本(Thrive Capital)創始人喬舒亞?庫什納(Joshua Kushner)評價道，他的氣場能震住整個房間的人，他這個年齡自我意識能如此之強，實屬難得。

D'ALOISIO BEGAN designing iPhone apps nearly the moment the app store opened in 2008. He was 12 years old, working on a Mac in his bedroom in the London district of Wimbledon. Because he was too young, he signed up for the Apple developer's license using his father's name. He'd taken no formal computer science classes at school, and neither of his parents (Diana and Lou, a lawyer and a business executive, respectively) knew much about tech. Instead, he learned how to program almost entirely by himself, scouring websites and watching instructional videos.

自從2008年智能手機應用商店開始運營以來，達洛伊西奧就着手設計iPhone手機應用軟件。那時12歲的他住在倫敦的溫布爾頓，用臥室裏的Mac電腦來工作。因爲年紀太小，他在填寫蘋果(Apple)開發執照申請時用的都是他爸爸的名字。這之前他沒在學校受過正式的電腦培訓，他的父母（一個是律師，一個是商界管理人士）也都不從事技術行業工作。他幾乎是完全靠刷網頁、看教程來自學編程的。

His first coding effort resulted in an app that played audio snippets from speeches by his idol, Steve Jobs, whose unauthorized biography he'd recently devoured. 'It was rejected by Apple for every reason,' D'Aloisio says now, laughing. 'Copyrighted audio, poor functionality, too simple.' Another early design allowed users to touch a picture of wood, producing a knocking sound. A third transformed a smartphone screen into a treadmill for your fingers. That one earned about $120 in sales on its first day.

他編寫出的第一款軟件是個音頻播放器，可以播放他偶像史蒂夫?喬布斯(Steve Jobs)演講的音頻片段，而音頻來自一個喬布斯的傳記，內容沒有經過授權。如今達洛伊西奧笑着回憶道，軟件因爲音頻受版權保護、性能不流暢、過於簡單之類的各種原因，被蘋果拒絕了。他早期設計的另外一個應用軟件能讓用戶觸摸一張木頭的圖片時發出敲擊的聲音。第三個應用則將智能手機的屏幕變成一個鍛鍊手指的跑步機，這一次，軟件第一天便賺了120美元。

When he wasn't programming or doing schoolwork, D'Aloisio began to fill his spare time reading about natural language processing. He'd studied languages as diverse as Latin and Mandarin, and became fascinated by concepts like grammatical frameworks, morpheme parsing and the 1960s work of the linguist Richard Montague. 'He's my favorite,' D'Aloisio enthuses. 'He theorized that natural language could be described like a syntactical programming language.'

除了編程和寫作業，達洛伊西奧開始抽時間來閱讀自然語言處理(natural language processing)方面的文章。他還學習了拉丁文和中文，並且對語言學理念產生了濃厚的興趣，例如語法框架、語素解析，以及上世紀60年代語言學家理查德?蒙塔古(Richard Montague) 的理論。達洛伊西奧熱情地說道，他是我最喜歡的語言學家，根據他的理論，自然語言可以被視作遵照一定句法寫出的編程語言。

As he scanned the Internet for knowledge, D'Aloisio decided that what he really needed was a better way to determine, at a glance, what was worth reading. He envisioned a summarization tool that used language theory to give a meaningful synopsis in fewer than 400 characters.

隨着他不斷運用網絡來蒐集知識，達洛伊西奧意識到，他急需一個能讓他快速確定文章閱讀價值的方法。於是他構想了一個摘要工具，能運用語言學理論來編寫低於400字的內容提要。

'There are two ways of doing natural language processing: statistical or semantic,' D'Aloisio explains. A semantic system attempts to figure out the actual meaning of a text and translate it succinctly. A statistical system-the type D'Aloisio used for Summly-doesn't bother with that; it keeps phrases and sentences intact and figures out how to pick a few that best encapsulate the entire work. 'It ranks and classifies each sentence, or phrase, as a candidate for inclusion in the summary. It's very mathematical. It looks at frequencies and distributions, but not at what the words mean.'

達洛伊西奧解釋道，自然語言處理有統計學和語義學兩種方法，語義學系統試圖解析文章的真實含義並對其進行簡潔的譯介。而統計學系統──設計Summly所採用的方法──無需這一過程；該系統保留詞彙和句子的完整性，並通過運算從全文挑選出最具概括力的內容。它將每個句子或詞彙進行分類、排序，以便挑出編入摘要的內容。這一過程極依賴數學計算，考量的是頻率和分佈，而非詞語的含義。

An early iteration of Summly, called Trimit, was featured in Apple's app store in July 2011 on a list of new and noteworthy offerings. There it was noticed by the influential Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch and quickly came to the attention of an investment group led by Li Ka-shing. When D'Aloisio was approached over email by Li's people at Horizons Ventures, he was only 15-and so far mostly managed to conceal that fact. He'd never met with anyone in the tech world face to face, and the information he'd listed when he registered Trimit spoke only vaguely of a London technology company. It failed to mention that the company's management and technology teams-in fact, its entire workforce-consisted of a single kid in a suburban bedroom who wasn't yet old enough to drive.

Summly的一個早期版本──Trimit，於2011年7月出現在了蘋果app store“新品推薦”欄目中。正是在這裏，它被極具影響力的硅谷《科技博客》(TechCrunch)所關注，並迅速引起了李嘉誠的投資集團的注意。當達洛伊西奧收到李嘉誠的維港投資(Horizons Ventures)發來的電子郵件時，他只有15歲，並且基本沒讓什麼人知道他所做的事情。在那之前，他從未與科技領域內的任何人物見過面，而他在Trimit的登記信息中也只是粗略形容自己是“倫敦的一家科技公司”。僅靠這一信息，誰也不會想到這家公司的管理和技術團隊──事實上，它的全部職員──竟然是住在郊區臥室裏的一個連車都不能開的小孩。

'I thought I was going to sell the app in the Apple store for a pound or two each, and then I'd use the money to buy a new computer,' says D'Aloisio. 'I'd never had any contact from an investor before. And now here's an email supposedly from a Hong Kong billionaire. It sounded dodgy. I didn't respond the first time. They had to email me again.' D'Aloisio was accompanied by his mother and father ('they were a bit bewildered, it was kind of insane') as he took a meeting with Horizons Ventures's representatives in London in August 2011. The meeting ended with D'Aloisio receiving a seed investment of $300,000.

達洛伊西奧說，我本來只是打算在蘋果app store用一兩英鎊的價格出售這個軟件，然後用賺來的錢給自己換臺新電腦。我之前從沒聯繫過任何投資商。而如今一個香港的億萬富翁竟然給我發電郵了，這太詭異了。第一封郵件我沒有回覆，於是他們又給我發了第二封。2011年8月份，他的父母帶着不可置信的心情陪他一同與維港投資的代表進行了會面。會談結束後，達洛伊西奧獲得了30萬美元的種子投資。

As fall arrived and school began, D'Aloisio felt immense pressure to deliver for his backers. He needed to whip his algorithm into better shape, so he contracted a team of Israeli coders who specialize in natural language processing. Searching on Google, he found and hired a retired professor living in Thailand who'd written seminal books on the topic. 'He became our main scientist,' says D'Aloisio. 'He now works at Yahoo! in the Sunnyvale office.'

當年秋天開學後，達洛伊西奧開始感覺到肩上揹負起了來自投資方的巨大壓力。他需要改善軟件的運算法則，於是他找到了以色列一個從事自然語言處理的編程團隊，並簽訂了合同。他還用谷歌(Google)搜索找到了一位居住在泰國、在該領域有過重要著作的退休教授。達洛伊西奧說，他成了我們的科研主管，他現在在雅虎的森尼維爾辦公室工作。

Meanwhile, he was being ferried around the globe to tech conferences, getting introduced to other potential investors. D'Aloisio made a remarkable impression on everyone he crossed paths with. 'He has an eerie maturity,' says Andrew Halls, headmaster of the King's College School in Wimbledon, which D'Aloisio has attended since he was 11. 'He has an extraordinary articulateness in the face of situations that, for me, even as a 54-year-old, might be terrifying.'

與此同時，達洛伊西奧開始環遊世界，到處參加會議，並結識其他潛在的投資人。他給每一位結識的人都留下極深的印象。溫布爾頓國王學院中學(King’s College School)的校長安德魯?霍爾斯(Andrew Halls)評價道，他成熟得可怕，他在各種狀況下仍保持着清晰的思維，這令我這個54歲的人都覺得驚訝。

'I was blown away by him,' Kushner recalls. 'The first time I interacted with him was at News Corp, when he was meeting with Murdoch, and I was looped in to provide perspective. Nick described the vision of what he was trying to accomplish. And he was providing insight to Rupert.' D'Aloisio's stage presence, coupled with the deep-pocketed credibility brought by Li, attracted a large group of benefactors to Summly, including Ashton Kutcher, Yoko Ono and Stephen Fry.

庫什納回憶道，我當時被他深深折服了。他到新聞集團去見默多克時，我與他有了第一次接觸，當時我被一同叫去提提意見。達洛伊西奧在會上描述了他想要實現的遠景。他幫助默多克加深了對一些事物的見解。達洛伊西奧在臺上的優異表現，加上背後李嘉誠的雄厚財力，爲Summly招來了包括艾什頓?庫奇(Ashton Kutcher)、小野洋子(Yoko Ono)、史蒂芬?弗萊(Stephen Fry)等許多人的捐贈。

D'ALOISIO HAS BEEN quoted opining that 'time is the new currency.' It's the driving notion behind Summly. It's also a strangely wise observation from a 17-year-old. At that age, many of us had more time on our hands than we knew how to fill without plummeting into severe boredom. It's easy to forget-conversing over lunch in a London caf鉬 or strolling through the Tate Modern-that D'Aloisio was born in 1995 and has not yet graduated from high school. Or that he still lives in his childhood bedroom, in a cozy upper-middle-class home. As I chat with his parents, he excuses himself to work on his computer. Slouching down the hall in his stocking feet, hems of his skinny jeans brushing the hallway carpet, it is the most kidlike you will ever see him.

達洛伊西奧常喜歡說“時間是新的貨幣”。這是一個17歲男孩對人生的睿智洞察，也是Summly軟件背後的發展理念。而我們多數人在他那個年齡，時間多得都不知道該怎麼做纔不會荒廢。我很容易就忘了這樣一個事實：達洛伊西奧在1995年出生於一箇中上層階級家庭，連高中都還沒畢業，還住在小時候住的那個舒服臥室裏。在我和他父母聊天的時候，他離開房間去在電腦上幹活。只見他穿着襪子下樓，牛仔褲腿掃過大廳的地毯──此時此刻是他最像個孩子的時候。

D'Aloisio's parents came to England from Australia. His father, Lou, has worked in commodities for BP and Morgan Stanley, while his mother, Diana, is a corporate lawyer who also serves as her son's contractual representative. They always knew D'Aloisio was an extremely inquisitive child. 'But he was our first, so we didn't think it was anything out of the ordinary,' says Diana. (D'Aloisio's brother, Matthew, is 14.) They stress that despite his impressive accomplishments, he remains a normal kid. Or at least as normal as a kid can be when he's making offhand references to Markov models and stochastic processes. 'He still goes out on weekends, still goes to parties,' says Diana. 'He's got a girlfriend. All the things you do at 17.'

達洛伊西奧的父母從澳大利亞搬到英國，他的父親盧(Lou)曾在英國石油(BP)和摩根士丹利(Morgan Stanley)工作，而母親戴安娜(Diana)是一位企業律師，同時也是兒子的合同代表。他們向來都知道達洛伊西奧是一個非常好學的孩子。但戴安娜說因爲他是長子，他們本以爲他不會做出什麼超出尋常的事情來（達洛伊西奧有一個14歲的弟弟）。他們強調，儘管達洛伊西奧成就非凡，儘管他聊天時會聊起馬爾科夫模型(Markov models)和隨機過程(stochastic processes)，他仍只是一個再普通不過的孩子。戴安娜說，他週末仍要出去玩，仍要去參加派對。他還有個女朋友。17歲孩子會做的事情，他都會做。

D'Aloisio himself strives to maintain a bubble of normalcy. He dates the same girl he did before the whirlwind hit. And though he's stopped attending school-he's too busy to sit in class while overseeing Summly's development-he still gets his work from his teachers and meets with them regularly. He cherishes the fact that his circle of friends knows little of his life as a budding industrialist. When I met him, he was about to head to Greece for a weeklong vacation with a pack of high school pals.

達洛伊西奧也盡力維持着生活原本的樣子。他的女友還是之前的那個女友。而且儘管他不再去學校了──坐在教室裏就沒空監管Summly的研發──他還是照常去找老師拿作業。他十分慶幸他的朋友不瞭解他企業家的那一面。而當我採訪他的時候，他正準備和一羣高中死黨去希臘玩上一週。

For now, D'Aloisio isn't touching the money. 'I'm too young to appreciate the value of it,' he insists. 'I don't have a mortgage, I'm 17. To me, a hundred pounds is a lot. Take that as a benchmark.' Though he's not allowed to comment on Summly's sale price, when pressed he allows that he might one day like to deploy his newfound riches as an angel investor. No one around him seems to think there's a danger that the money will ruin him or that he'll be tempted to spend the rest of his life dissipating on a beach. 'He's pretty well grounded. You wouldn't believe how frugal he is,' says Diane. 'He's got a great engine,' says Lou. 'He won't stop at this.'

現在達洛伊西奧還不負責管理他的收入。他堅稱說，我太年輕了，還不懂如何發揮其價值。我沒有房貸，我才17。對我來說100英鎊就是個大數目了，這就是我對錢的大致概念。儘管他無法對Summly的售價置評，但當我逼問他未來打算如何支配的時候，他說他在考慮以後也許可以用所發之財來做一名天使投資人。在他身邊，似乎沒人覺得這份錢會毀掉他或者他會揮霍錢財浪費人生。戴安娜說，孩子很踏實，很有衝勁兒，他不會停止奮鬥的。

Perhaps the more interesting question is what drove Yahoo! to shell out that reported $30 million for a single app. To be sure, Summly's text-compression abilities dovetail nicely with Yahoo!'s new focus on mobile utilities. Along with Yahoo!'s $1.1 billion purchase of the blogging service Tumblr and the launch of an acclaimed new weather app, the Summly move marks a commitment to owning the tiny real estate of the smartphone screen-and serving advertising to the youthful eyeballs that tend to gravitate to mobile devices.

而或許更引人關注的問題是，雅虎究竟爲何決定拿出3,000萬美元來收購一款手機應用呢？誠然，Summly的文本精煉能力與新戰略下的雅虎對移動設備的側重不謀而合。伴隨着以11億美元對輕博客的收購，以及廣受好評的新款天氣應用的推出，Summly軟件的加入見證了雅虎佔領智能手機領域的堅定決心，以及爲愛使手機的年輕消費者提供優質服務的不懈努力。

But there's little doubt this was also an 'acqui-hire,' in which the person being bought is just as important as the product. D'Aloisio is now working full time in Yahoo!'s London office, and his youth, his energy and his undeniable it-factor have brought the formerly musty tech giant a much-needed injection of cool. Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer -who lends the company some of her own it-factor-praises his 'commitment to excellence in design and simplicity' and says she is 'inspired by the creativity and tenacity Nick brings to his work.'

不過無需置疑，軟件的收購同時意味着“人才的收購”，雅虎買下的不只是產品，還有產品背後的人。達洛伊西奧如今已是雅虎倫敦分部的全職員工，而他的青春活力以及無可厚非的獨特潛質給這個曾經腐朽老舊的科技巨頭注入了迫切需要的新鮮活力。雅虎CEO瑪麗莎?梅耶爾讚賞他“力求設計的完美和產品的簡約”，並稱自己“被他的創造活力和堅韌精神所感染”。

While D'Aloisio spends 80 percent of his work time retooling and improving Summly (which has already been integrated into Yahoo!'s iPhone app), the other 20 percent is devoted to imagining the expansive challenges he'll take on next. He predicts there will be summarization programs that do for video what Summly does for the written word. He has grand thoughts about using technology to aid learning and would like to help fellow autodidacts while disrupting the old educational models.

目前，達洛伊西奧80%的工作圍繞着Summly的重構和改良展開，而另外20%的工作精力則用來思考今後的挑戰方向。他預測，未來將會有一款如同Summly精煉文字一樣可以精煉視頻的軟件。他設想了許多運用科技來幫助人們學習知識的方法，並希望在舊有教育模式瓦解的同時幫助人們更好地實現自主學習。

As for his own education: He's weighing whether to enroll in university in England or maybe the U.S. to be closer to Silicon Valley. Or perhaps he'll skip college entirely and just focus on his work. 'I absolutely want to start another company,' he says. 'Serial entrepreneurs get addicted to creation. I want to be passionate. I feel really bad when I'm not doing something new.'

而至於他自己的教育問題：他在考慮是留在英國，還是爲了離硅谷更近而去讀美國的大學。再或者，他也許會放棄學業，全然專注於他的事業。他說，我非常想再創辦一家公司，連續創業家們都是對創新上癮的人。我希望能保有熱情。如果我不能嘗試新的事物，我會感覺很糟。