Wavii: Express your views in five words

NEW YORK, USA: The fast advancing technology is reducing the word count to morsels. Five years after Twitter made expressions possible in 140 words, now even that seems more. Adrian Aoun thinks it can be done in just five or six words.

Aoun, a 29-year old entrepreneur in Seattle, unveiled on Wednesday an automated, algorithm-driven news aggregator called Wavii that strips articles down to its bare essentials -- who did what -- and presents them in a customized, Twitter-like feed.

In most news articles, Aoun said, "The 'what happened' and the analysis of what happened is coupled. I want to separate that a little," he said.

At a time when readers increasingly consume news as morsel-sized commodities, the start-up has shown interest in Silicon Valley to attract investers like Ron Conway,  Mitch Kapor, the co-founder of Lotus Software, Keith Rabois, Max Levchin and Scott Banister -- three entrepreneurs with deep ties to Paypal.

The app combs mainstream outlets and hunts for similar news stories on any topic selected by the user -- be it Shah Rukh Khan or the Indonesian earthquake. It then crunches the similar stories through a "natural language processing" algorithm, spitting out a threadbare headline devoid of adjectives, context or detail. The resulting item is interactive and tagged by topic, so clicking on a story about a Justin Bieber sighting in Manhattan could, in theory, produce a list of where else Justin Bieber has been sighted recently, Aoun said. The item would also have a link back to a full-length news article.

In many ways, Aoun said he believes Wavii sits at the intersection of Google News, Twitter and Facebook. It scales the Web for news but also applies tags to people, events and actions in news developments, much like what Facebook does with friends' activities.

"We're making Facebook out of Google, and we're taking Google data and Facebook-izing it," he said.

Aoun, a former software developer at Microsoft, is not new to the field. "We have to teach a computer to read language, which is astronomically difficult," Aoun said. "A lot of linguists have tried and failed."