If you recall Nick D'Aloisio, it's likely because of the time he spammed Gizmodo to the point of tears, and then sold his dinky app company to Yahoo! for millions of dollars. Then we all forgot about it. Now, the Wall Street Journal says he "has changed the way we read." Really!

The D'Aloisio odyssey began and ended quickly—noteworthy almost entirely because Marissa Mayer paid a large heap of money for an app no one really used, created by a clever teen who'd simply licensed text summarization tech from a third party and passed it off as his own project. Kids! So what exactly about this marks a British 18-year-old as examplary in this year of our lord 2013? The Journal explains it like this:

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.

Wait—that doesn't really explain anything! I guess when the financial paper of record asks us to "meet the 18-year-old WSJ Magazine Technology Innovator of 2013 who became an overnight millionaire by inventing an app that may revolutionize how we read on the go," we'll have to take it on faith.