2013年7月13日 星期六

Orson Welles, Nick D’Aloisio



雅虎千萬美金攬入少年編程奇才

BRIAN STELTER 報道 2013年03月26日
Nadine Rupp/Getty Images
英國高中生尼克·達洛伊西奧開發新聞閱讀應用Summly時年僅15歲。

雅虎的最新員工包括一位來自英國的17歲高中生。截至周一，他也是該公司最富有的員工之一。
雅虎創建於1994年，當時這位名為尼克·達洛伊西奧(Nick D’Aloisio)的學生還沒有出生。周一，這位編程奇才將自己編寫的新聞閱讀應用Summly出售給雅虎，據稱交易金額達到了數千萬美元。雅虎表示， 在達洛伊西奧的幫助下，該公司會將他的創新算法併入雅虎自己的移動應用中，該算法能為那些使用智能手機的讀者精簡長篇新聞報道的篇幅。
周一，達洛伊西奧在接受電話採訪時表示，“我還有一年半才能高中畢業。”但部分因為要遵守雅虎備受爭議的新政策——禁止在家辦公，他將會作出安排，進行遠程考試，並在雅虎的倫敦辦公室工作。
達洛伊西奧拒絕就雅虎的出價發表評論（技術類網站All Things D稱交易金額約為3000萬美元[約合1.86億元人民幣]）。他沒有以Summly多數股權擁有者自居，稱自己是其最大股東。
令人難以置信的是，Summly的其他投資商包括鄧文迪、艾什頓·庫徹(Ashton Kutcher)和小野洋子(Yoko Ono)。其中最重要的要數香港的億萬富翁李嘉誠(Li Ka-shing)，他在這款應用還沒有被稱為Summly前，就通過自己的投資基金為達洛伊西奧提供支持。
達洛伊西奧說，“在我15歲的時候，他們就冒險支持我。”他們提供了啟動資金，讓達洛伊西奧聘請員工，租用辦公室。
該基金在硅谷(Silicon Valley)新聞網站TechCrunch上看到了有關達洛伊西奧早期應用程序的新聞，並找到了他的郵箱地址，給他發郵件表示對此感興趣，這讓達洛伊西奧感到吃驚。
後來，其他投資者也紛紛加入。他說，“由於這是我第一次嘗試，人們只是想幫忙。”
對於那些幻想自己成為企業家的青少年及其父母來說，有關此次交易的新聞讓他們產生了一種力不從心的感覺，同時也感到敬畏。21歲的黃鐵峰(Brian Wong)是移動獎勵公司Kiip的創始人，他的反應非常搞笑，“我感覺自己好老！”
幾年前，媒體稱黃鐵峰是有史以來最年輕的風投資金獲得者。但後來出現了幾個更年輕的創始人，黃鐵峰在周一表示，“尼克打破了我們所有人的紀錄。”
他表示，使達洛伊西奧獲得成功的因素之一就是，他具有一種不可思議的能力，能夠清晰的表明他想要Summly成為什麼樣的應用。黃鐵峰說，“他沒有嗯，沒有啊，沒有猶豫不覺，沒有惶惶不安。”
而就達洛伊西奧本人而言，他周一聽起來似乎不太願意回答關於年齡的問題。他承認這在一些推介會上是個優勢，在媒體方面當然也是如此，“但這個創意本 身也頗為不凡”。他更願意談論他的新僱主雅虎。該公司正在努力轉型為一家科技公司。自從去年瑪麗莎·梅耶爾(Marissa Mayer)擔任首席執政官以來，雅虎就不再說自己是數字媒體了。
他說，“人們有點低估了它的潛力和這個領域的機會。”
對於一家極其希望被貼上創新標籤的公司而言，這些話價值千金。
達洛伊西奧的父親是大宗商品交易員，母親是律師，他們都對科技不甚了解。但是，他們卻培養了兒子對科技的熱愛。達洛伊西奧從12歲開始編程，後來， 他決定利用他所謂的“自動摘要算法”來開發一個應用程序，這種程序“針對現有的長篇內容自動生成摘要”。換而言之，它試圖解決一個經常縮略為“TL, DR”的問題，即“篇幅過長，沒有閱讀”(too long, didn’t read)。
去年11月，Summly正式上線。到12月時，達洛伊西奧便開始與雅虎等公司展開商談。
雅虎在一項聲明中稱，雖然Summly應用程序即將下線，“我們將獲得這項技術，你馬上就會看到，它將在雅虎的移動服務中重生。”
近來，為移動設備設計的其他新聞閱讀和新聞瀏覽應用也引起了新聞媒體和科技公司的注意。據稱，社交網絡LinkedIn本月早些時候曾試圖買下一個 叫做Pulse的應用程序。儘管如此，這位少年企業家周一獲得八位數報酬的事實還是讓有些人感到震驚，人們還由此猜測，為了“酷”，雅虎幾乎願意付出任何 代價。
達洛伊西奧將有很長的時間來證明他自己和他的算法的價值。而對於雅虎的巨額報酬，他說他對這筆從天而降的錢財還沒有任何特殊計劃。他說，“這筆錢會被存進信託基金，我的父母將幫我進行管理。”
不過，他也說，“天使投資應該會很有趣。”當他不在雅虎工作的時候，就會把時間花在自己的嗜好上，尤其是板球。而他的目標則是進入牛津大學(Oxford)，他打算將來攻讀哲學專業。
翻譯：許欣、陳柳


He Has Millions and a New Job at Yahoo. Soon, He’ll Be 18.

By BRIAN STELTER March 26, 2013
 
One of Yahoo’s newest employees is a 17-year-old high school student in Britain. As of Monday, he is one of its richest, too.
That student, Nick D’Aloisio, a programming whiz who wasn’t even born when Yahoo was founded in 1994, sold his news-reading app, Summly, to Yahoo on Monday for a sum said to be in the tens of millions of dollars. Yahoo said it would incorporate his algorithmic invention, which takes long-form stories and shortens them for readers using smartphones, in its own mobile apps, with Mr. D’Aloisio’s help.
 
“I’ve still got a year and a half left at my high school,” he said in a telephone interview on Monday, but, partly to abide by the company’s new and much-debated policy that prohibits working from home, he will make arrangements to test out of his classes and work from the Yahoo office in London.
Mr. D’Aloisio declined to comment on the price paid by Yahoo (the technology-oriented Web site All Things D pegged the purchase price at about $30 million), and he described himself not as the majority owner of Summly but as its largest shareholder.
Summly’s other investors, improbably enough, included Wendi Murdoch, Ashton Kutcher and Yoko Ono. The most important one was Li Ka-shing, the Hong Kong billionaire, whose investment fund supported Mr. D’Aloisio’s idea early on, before it was even called Summly.
“They took a gamble on me when I was a 15-year-old,” Mr. D’Aloisio said, by providing seed financing that let him hire employees and lease office space.
The fund read about Mr. D’Aloisio’s early-stage app on the Silicon Valley news site TechCrunch, found his e-mail address and startled him with a message expressing interest.
The others signed up later. “Because it was my first time around, people just wanted to help,” he said.
For teenagers who fancy themselves entrepreneurs — and their parents, too — the news of the sale conjured up some feelings of inadequacy, but also awe. For Brian Wong, the 21-year-old founder of Kiip, a mobile rewards company, the reaction was downright laughable: “I feel old!”
A few years ago, Mr. Wong was described in the news media as the youngest person ever to receive venture capital funding. But a couple of younger founders came along — “and then Nick broke all of our records,” Mr. Wong said on Monday.
Among the attributes that helped Mr. D’Aloisio, he said, was a preternatural ability to articulate exactly what he wanted Summly to be. “There were no umms, no uhhs, no hesitations, no insecurities,” Mr. Wong said.
Mr. D’Aloisio, for his part, sounded somewhat uninterested in answering questions about his age on Monday. He acknowledged that it was an advantage in some pitch meetings, and certainly in the news media, “but so was the strength of the idea.” He was more eager to talk about his new employer, Yahoo, which is trying to reinvent itself as a technology company (having dropped the digital media tagline it used before Marissa Mayer became chief executive last year).
“People are kind of underestimating how powerful it’s going to become and how much opportunity is there,” he said.
For a company that badly wants to be labeled innovative, those words are worth a lot.
Mr. D’Aloisio’s father, a commodities trader, and his mother, a lawyer, had no special knowledge of technology. But they nurtured their son’s fascination with it and he started coding at age 12. Eventually he decided to develop an app with what he calls an “automatic summarization algorithm,” one that “can take pre-existing long-form content and summarize it.” In other words, it tries to solve a problem that is often summed up with the abbreviation T.L., D.R: “too long, didn’t read.”
Summly officially came online last November. By December, Mr. D’Aloisio was talking to Yahoo and other suitors.
Yahoo said in a statement that while the Summly app would be shut down, “we will acquire the technology and you’ll see it come to life throughout Yahoo’s mobile experiences soon.”
Other news-reading and news-skimming apps made for mobile devices have attracted news media and technology company attention as of late. The social network LinkedIn was said to be pursuing an app called Pulse earlier this month. Still, the eight-figure payday for a teenage entrepreneur on Monday struck some as outlandish and set off speculation that Yahoo was willing to pay almost any price for “cool.”
Mr. D’Aloisio, though, will have a long time to prove his and his algorithm’s worth. As for the sizable paycheck from Yahoo, he said he did not have any specific plans for the sudden windfall. “It’s going to be put into a trust fund and my parents will help manage it,” he said.
He did say, however, that “angel investing could be really fun.” When not working at Yahoo, he will keep up with his hobbies — cricket in particular — and set his sights on attending college at Oxford. His intended major is philosophy.


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Documentary on Orson Welles
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=oaYlZdH3tKs



English詳盡版

In the insular world of cineastes there is no more momentous event than the list of the best films of all time, which is curated every 10 years by the redoubtable Sight & Sound magazine of the British Film Institute. This year's list, released in the August issue, represents a seismic shift. After occupying the No. 1 position since 1962, Orson Welles' 'Citizen Kane' (1941) was demoted to second place by Alfred Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' (1958).

For decades 'Citizen Kane' seemed to reign by default. Then a challenger appeared on the horizon. 'Vertigo' made the list for the first time in 1982 and kept climbing.

Movie critics are constantly asked, 'What's your favorite film?' I found it easy to reply 'Citizen Kane,' hoping that my questioner's eyes would glaze over and I could avoid a debate. Now I can say 'Vertigo.' When I am told, 'I've never seen what's so great about it,' I can reply: 'That's fascinating from an autobiographical point of view.'
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 的確YouTube的最考靠譬如說BBC Four的Arena - The Orson Welles Story


Open Book

Orson's Archives

By JOHN WILLIAMS
Orson Welles's frequent TV appearances are one of the more reliable archival pleasures on YouTube.



奧森·威爾斯（英語：Orson Welles，1915年5月6日－1985年10月10日），原名喬治·奧森·威爾斯，是美國電影導演、編劇和演員。1999年，他被美國電影學會選為百年來最偉大的男演員第16名。

目錄

早期生涯

奧森·威爾斯出生於美國威斯康星州的康諾莎(後移居芝加哥)。父親為一名富裕的發明人，母親是一名曾經舉辦過演奏會的鋼琴家。有兄長一名。精通莎士比亞作品。從學校畢業後，曾短暫赴愛爾蘭演戲。其演出生涯開始於位於愛爾蘭首都都柏林的蓋特劇院（Gate Theater)。返回美國後與約翰·赫斯曼（John Houseman）組建水星劇團(Mercury Theate),從事舞台劇和廣播劇的演出。1938年萬聖節憑藉根據英國小說家H·G·威爾斯同名小說(1898)改編的CBS廣播劇星際戰爭一炮而紅。後被當時的著名電影公司雷電華RKO發掘而進入好萊塢。

好萊塢時期(1939年-1948年)

《大國民》(Citizen Kane)拍攝之前

拍攝《大國民》(Citizen Kane)之後

歐洲歲月(1948年-1956年)

返回好萊塢(1956年-1959年)

返回歐洲(1959年-1970年)

回到美國以後(1970年-1985年)

主要作品


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