Yahoo! Pays $30 Million For 17 Year Old’s iPhone App

By

Summly-iPhone

Yahoo! has today announced that it’s acquiring Summly, an iPhone app developed by Nick D’Aloisio when he was just 15, for $30 million. The app is designed to provide users with “pocket sized news” by condensing long articles into just a few paragraphs of text that are easy to consume on the go.

With Summly, you select your favorite news sources by entering your favorite sites, or by giving it keywords for topics you’re interested in. It then finds the news, and summarizes the stories to make them easier and quicker to read. It uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to generate its content so everything it outputs is understandable.

Summly is so impressive it was chosen by Apple as one of the Best Apps of 2012, and the app has provided over 90 million summaries in just a few short months. That’s quite an achievement for a service built in a 15-year-old’s bedroom.

D’Aloisio and the rest of the Summly team will now join Yahoo! in the coming weeks. Unfortunately, the Summly app as we know it now will be closed, but the technology will “come to life throughout Yahoo! mobile experiences,” according to the company’s press release.

On the Summly website, D’Aloisio announced that he is “delighted to announce Summly has signed an agreement to be acquired by Yahoo!. Our vision is to simplify how we get information and we are thrilled to continue this mission with Yahoo!’s global scale and expertise.”

“After spending some time on campus, I discovered that Yahoo! has an inspirational goal to make people’s daily routines entertaining and meaningful, and mobile will be a central part of that vision,” he added. “For us, it’s the perfect fit.”

Source: Yahoo!

Newsletters

Daily round-ups or a weekly refresher, straight from Cult of Mac to your inbox.

  • The Weekender

    The week's best Apple news, reviews and how-tos from Cult of Mac, every Saturday morning. Our readers say: "Thank you guys for always posting cool stuff" -- Vaughn Nevins. "Very informative" -- Kenly Xavier.