CYPRUS MAIL Wednesday, March 27, 2013
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Britain Lecturer soars to fame on Chinese TV
Just do it says Yahoo’s teen app millionaire
A BRITISH university lecturer has become a must-see TV celebrity across China with an array of renditions of red revolutionary songs. Cardiff-born Iain Ingles shot to fame after appearing on China’s Got Talent and delighting millions with his novelty act. Dressed in a Red Army uniform and singing songs extolling the virtues of chairman Mao and socialism, he reached the show’s semifinal. Now he is riding a lucrative wave of celebrity appearances and pocketing £5,000 a time for singing on local and national TV in China. When Ingles opens his mouth his efforts are often met with laughter. “I’m a tall, white foreigner from Wales singing songs about Communism in Chinese,” he told the WalesOnline website. “It was a bit of fun to start off with but the more performances I did, the more I was hooked. “For some reason the Chinese people seem to find it quite hilarious.” Despite the reaction, the 30-year-old has captured the hearts of Chinese TV audiences and is in demand across the country. Ingles, a Russian and German language graduate, lives on the tropical Chinese island of Hanya with his wife, Yu Yanling. His unusual choice of singing material stems from a CD of red songs bought while on holiday in China and which he later learned. He went on to reach the last 16 on China’s Got Talent and boosted the show’s already high ratings in the process.
More trust PM on econ than rivals DESPITE a stagnating economy, an austerity drive, and a squeeze on living standards, more of the British public trust Prime Minister David Cameron to make the right economic decisions than his opposition rivals, a poll showed yesterday. Public perceptions about the economy and how it is being managed are closely tied to Cameron’s political fortunes as the Conservative party is banking on a slow but steady economic revival to help it win the next election in 2015. Support for Cameron and George Osborne, the finance minister, to make the right decisions on the economy is low, at 29 per cent, the poll by ComRes for The Independent newspaper found. The main opposition Labour party - which has long enjoyed an overall lead of about 10 per cent in polls - does not appear to be winning the economic argument. The poll found only 22 per cent of voters trusted Ed Miliband, its leader, and Ed Balls, its financial spokesman, to make the right decisions on the economy.
17-year-old is paid $30 million for app By Paul Sandle
A photographer takes a picture of a wax figure of British actor Emma Watson at Madame Tussauds in central London yesterday during a photocall to unveil her waxwork (AFP)
GOT a tech idea and want to make a fortune before you’re out of your teens? Just do it, is the advice of the London schoolboy who’s just sold his smartphone news app to Yahoo for a reported $30 million. The monkey is there, just waiting for clever new moves, said 17-year-old Nick D’Aloisio, who can point to a roster of early backers for his Summly app that includes Yoko Ono and Rupert Murdoch. “If you have a good idea, or you think there’s a gap in the market, just go out and launch it because there are investors across the world right now looking for companies to invest in,” he told said. The terms of the sale, four months after Summly was launched for the iPhone, have not been disclosed and D’Aloisio, who is still studying for school exams while joining Yahoo as its youngest employee, was not saying. But technology blog AllThingsD said Yahoo paid roughly $30 million. D’Aloisio said he was the majority owner of Summly and would now invest the money from the sale, though his age imposes legal limits for now on his access to it. “I’m happy with that and working with my parents to go through that whole process,” he said. D’Aloisio, who lives in the prosperous London suburb of Wimbledon, highlights the support of family and school, which gave him time off, but also, critically, the ideas that came with enthusiastic finan-
Just a normal teenager: Nick D’Aloisio cial backers. He had first dreamt up the mobile software while revising for a history exam two years ago, going on to create a prototype of the app that distils news stories into chunks of text readable on small smartphone screens. He was inspired, he said, by the frustrating experience of trawling through Google searches and separate websites to find information when revising for the test. Trimit was an early version of the app, which is powered by an algorithm that automatically boils down articles to about 400 characters. It caught the eye of Horizons Ventures, a venture capital firm owned by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, which put in $250,000. That investment attracted other celebrity backers, among them Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher, British broadcaster Stephen Fry, artist Ono, the widow of Beatle John Lennon, and News Corp
media mogul Murdoch. That all added up to maximum publicity when Summly launched in November 2012, but the backers brought more than just cash for an app that has been downloaded close to a million times. “It’s been super-exciting, (the investors) found out about it in 2012 once the original investment from Li Ka-shing had gone public,” said D’Aloisio. “They all believed in the idea, but they all offered different experiences to help us out.” His business has worked with around 250 content publishers, he said, such as News Corp’s Wall Street Journal. People reading the summaries can easily click through to the full article, driving traffic to newspaper websites. “The great deal about joining Yahoo is that they have a lot of publishers, they have deals with who we can work with now,” D’Aloisio said. He taught himself to code at age 12 after Apple’s App Store was launched, creating several apps including Facemood, a service which analysed sentiment to determine the moods of Facebook users, and music discovery service SongStumblr. He has started A-levels in maths, physics and philosophy, and plans to continue his studies while also working at Yahoo’s offices in London. He aims to go to university to study humanities. Although he has created an app worth millions, D’Aloisio says he is not a stereotyped computer geek. “I like playing sport,” he said. “I’m a bit of a design enthusiast, and like spending time with my girlfriend and mates.”
Battle rages over bones of England’s Richard III By Michael Holden KING Richard III is at the centre of a new fight over the location of his final resting place, just weeks after the remains of the last English king to die in battle were found underneath a council car park. Archaeologists announced one of the most remarkable finds in recent English history last month when they confirmed the discovery of the body of Richard, who was slain at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, during excavations in Leicester. The discovery generated massive interest internationally as the monarch was famously cast by William Shakespeare as a deformed tyrant who murdered his two nephews, known as the princes, in the Tower of London. He has long been one of the
most controversial characters in English history, with passionate supporters claiming he was wrongly maligned after his death and was in fact an enlightened ruler. Now, more than 500 years after his death, he is still generating division. The University of Leicester,
which led the project to find and exhume Richard, was given permission to reinter the king’s remains at the cathedral in Leicester, which is close to Bosworth in central England. But descendants of the monarch, who was the last king of the Plantagenet dynasty,
are seeking a legal challenge to have his body laid to rest instead in York, the northern English city with which he had close links during his life. “We have now written officially to the Ministry of Justice and University of Leicester, notifying them that we plan to issue these claims,”
‘ALFRED’ BONES EXHUMED AT CHURCH BONES that could belong to King Alfred the Great have been exhumed from a churchyard over fears that they might be stolen or vandalised. Archaeologists carried out the exhumation of an unmarked grave at St Bartholomew’s Church in Winchester, Hampshire, yesterday morning on church orders. There has been speculation the bones of the legendary 9th-century king - who is said to have burnt the cakes and defeated the Danes - could be buried there and the church felt there was a heightened risk of theft. No permission has been given to analyse the
bones to see if they are those of the Saxon monarch and they are now in safe storage. “Following the completion of work we can confirm that skeletal remains were discovered and have been exhumed from the grave,” Winchester Diocesan spokesman Nick Edmonds said. The whereabouts of the remains of Alfred has long been a mystery. It is thought the exhumed grave may hold the bones of the king after a possible earlier burial of him under the nearby ruined Hyde Abbey was dug up in the 19th century and then reburied in the churchyard.
said Matthew Howarth, the lawyer representing the Plantagenet Alliance which is spearheaded by 15 of Richard’s descendants. “We will follow up by issuing the judicial review and other proceedings as soon as possible, but certainly within the next few weeks.” They will argue that the Ministry of Justice failed to consult them over the exhumation and the licence allowing the university to rebury the king, and this failure breached the European Convention on Human Rights. “We have every hope that Matthew and his colleagues will succeed in these cases and help us significantly in our quest to have Richard’s remains buried at the most appropriate site, York Minster,” said Stephen Nicolay, a 16th great-nephew of the monarch.