Hi everyone.
I'm Hugh Jones, I'm a sophomore here at Wayland,
I want to thank you guys so much for coming today.
There's a lot of things you can be doing on a beautiful Saturday afternoon,
I appreciate that you're spending it here.
I love technology.
Ever since I was little, I've been fascinated
by the ways that technology has allowed us to communicate with each other,
share valuable information,
and ultimately, change the world, more efficiently than ever before.
I have a question for you guys.
How many of you in this room today have a smartphone?
Raise your hand if you have a smartphone.
Right, that's everyone.
(Laughter)
If you're like me, you bring your smartphone wherever you go,
and you use it a lot every day.
I'm going to be talking about an app I wrote called Points
that summarizes texts from news articles and webpages
into a few bullet points for easy reading.
If you all have a smartphone, you've opened an app before.
There are these amazing portals by which we access information,
communicate with each other, and like I said, change the world.
My story starts in fall of 2014.
I'm taking honors history this year,
and I found that we were frequently doing long readings.
I noticed a trend.
They typically came from web pages that had been changed into PDF files
so we could print them out and annotate them.
That was great when you had the time to do that,
but I was rowing crew, and other classes worth of homework,
and these readings would typically get crammed at the end.
I'd have trouble, because I'd read through a lot of this content,
and I'd have to make assumptions based on what it was about.
Having written computer programs before,
I began to wonder: was there any way that I could write a computer program
that would figure out which text matters most
out of a lot of text,
and it would simplify it down to just the key points?
I was taking AP computer science, and we were learning this language, Java.
I opened up a new Java program on my computer,
and I typed a few lines.
I wrote this program, incredibly basic,
that would take the first four lines from any text I gave it,
it would attach an ellipsis, a dot dot dot,
and it would present me with that as a summary.
That was incredibly cool for me. I know it's really basic.
But I read the news a lot on my phone
and whenever I use these apps they preview the content
by giving you the first sentence or so, along with an ellipsis.
It quickly occurred to me that's not a great way to preview content
because the first four sentences may not be relevant at all to the topic,
and you'd still see them.
I started thinking about writing a program
that would go through everything and figure out what matters.
That's how I stumbled across a field of computer science
called natural language processing.
Natural language processing basically talks about
how we can program our computers
to identify trends and patterns in our human natural language.
Using natural language processing,
I was able to write an algorithm that determines which text matters.
About two months ago,
I released the first version of my app Points on the App Store.
It was this really basic app. All it was was this white text box.
You'd open up your phone,
and you'd be reading an email or browsing the web,
and you'd had to copy it,
- you know, drag the finger across all the text you wanted to see, copy it -
and then, you'd open Points and it would show you a summary.
That was great,
but I quickly received feedback from the people who were using it
that it was very cumbersome,
because copying text on an iPhone or on a touch screen in general,
is pretty cumbersome itself.
That led me to the version of Points that you see above me today.
This version of Points takes a URL from any web page,
you hit the forward arrow,
and you receive a concise summary of that article.
This way, you don't have to read through the entire text,
you can just see the sentences that matter most.
I assume at this point in my talk you're probably wondering,
"Does this thing work? Can we see a demo?" I've got that right here.
Here's an article that I'm reading about SpaceX,
a company founded by Elon Musk.
They recently launched a spacecraft to dock at the International Space Station
and the goal is for it to be reusable.
Here's part of the article. It's a pretty long article.
"Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX launched an unmanned Falcon 9
on a resupply mission to the International Space Station,
but narrowly missed a second attempt to recover its first stage.
The rocket, carrying its Dragon cargo spacecraft and 4,300 pounds ..."
Blah blah blah.
I'm getting tired of reading this. I don't know about you guys.
I'd rather see a summary of this. A few sentences that really matter.
Here's what you see with Points.
A clean slide,
"Billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched an unmanned Falcon 9
on a resupply mission to the International Space Station,
but narrowly missed a second attempt to recover the rocket’s first stage.
SpaceX, in January, first tested
the ability of the Falcon 9 to touch down its legs on a landing barge.
'This was a historic attempt to recover the booster
by landing on this drone ship in the Atlantic today,'
Steve Jurvetson, a SpaceX director, said in a statement."
Wow. This is what Points is all about.
If I want to really learn more about this I can always read the full article,
but if I'm on the go, and I want to understand what this is about,
I know right here with Points.
A few thoughts always occur to me whenever I'm creating an app.
I ask myself three key questions:
how many iterations on the product do I have to make?
How many different prototypes am I going to develop
before I'm ready to release this?
I'm a perfectionist, and I find it very hard sometimes
to get to a point where I can just put this out there.
But the reality is that there's no such thing as a perfect app.
There is a point where it has to be good enough.
and you have to get it out there to get the feedback you need.
For Points, I reached this point where I had a good enough product,
I got it out there and the feedback led me to the version that's at today.
The next question is who is the target audience?
It's great to think that everyone with a phone is going to use your app.
The reality is certain people benefit more from it than others.
In doing this, you have to think through
who's really going to benefit from this app the most?
And then, how can you market this app to that audience?
What you guys may not know
is there are more than 1.4 million apps currently available on the App Store.
With so many apps out there, it can be hard to get yours discovered.
You could launch, and no one would know about it.
There's this key question as to how you're going to take advantage
of all the amazing things technology does for us,
social media, traditional media even,
and market your app to the audience who would benefit from it.
A final thought is that the best apps and tools solve a problem
that either you or someone else faces on a daily basis.
This problem may have been tried before, but these apps try it in a unique way.
They don't stop there. They continue to evolve.
They update, take advantage of users' feedback,
and they strive to make this app
that really does benefit someone every day in their regular life.
Thank you so much for your attention.
(Applause)