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The popular Summly app summarises news stories of interest to users in 90 words or less created by British teen Nick D’Aloisio two years ago, has been purchased by Yahoo! The deal with Yahoo!, who are desperately looking to focus on mobile services, is rumoured to be worth GBP £18M (A$26m), could be worth as much as £40, others suggest, reports Guardian. Neither side has confirmed the value of the deal. The teenager, who has a place in Forbes 30 under 30, began creating apps in 2007 when Apple opened the App Store, and Summly got a nod from the tech giant for Intuitive Touch! App Awards 2012, which he created aged 15. It was nominated the No. 1 news app of the week in 28 countries including UK, Italy and US on iPhone App Charts in Dcember last year, according to Summly’s Blog. The 17 year old Londoner said he was “delighted” to announce Summly was acquired by Yahoo!, which was backed by venture capital firm, Horizon Ventures in Hong Kong (also behind Siri, Spotify and Facebook investments) as well as other notable tech investors including Stephen Fry, Ashton Kutcher and Yoko Ono, the report states. D’Aloisio will work at Yahoo!’s Soho offices in London and also studying for his A Levels at night. Summly was said to have been subject to other offers from interested companies, but Yahoo! won out in the end. “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. For us, it’s the perfect fit,” D’Aloisio wrote on Summly’s website. |
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| “When I founded Summly at 15, I would have never imagined being in this position so suddenly”
Summly was pulled from the Apple App Store yesterday, and expect the summarization technology to hit multiple Yahoo! products – “see this as a ‘power nap,” said D’Aloisio. Over 90 million Summly news summaries have been read by users so far. “This is just the beginning for our technology,” says the young app creator. |
