Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo Buys UK Teen's Smartphone News App
judgecorp writes "Seventeen year old Nick D'Aloisio has sold his smartphone app Summly to Yahoo for an undisclosed sum. The app — created when he was 15 — aggregates news stories by topic and condenses them for time-strapped readers. D'Aloisio and his team will go to work at Yahoo when the deal closes. From the article: 'Summly was founded by 17-year old Nick D’Aloisio when he was just 15 from his home in London. The service works by sorting news stories by topic and condensing them into bite-sized chunks for time-conscious readers.
The Summly application will be closed down and integrated with Yahoo’s existing range of mobile applications. D’Aloisio and the Summly team will be joining Yahoo as part of the transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in the second quarter of 2013.'"
That's not necessarily for crack-addled monkeys alone. If the algorithm does a good job then it allows someone to quickly scan through the summaries and decide what is worth reading and what isn't. That's what we all want out of the Slashdot summaries but often don't get.
The Summly application will be closed down
So they just wanted the name and the programmer, but not the app?
He reinvented Slashdot? I don't know because I didn't RTFA which is apparently what this app is all about.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
He was the subject of some news stories a while ago.
As I recall, said stories were very, very careful to dance around the fact that his father had essentially set him up through his connections with some pretty powerful people. The app itself isn't crap, but it isn't good either- it's just a net zero and went absolutely nowhere after he got his initial "investments" through his family. Frankly, given the breadth of the knowledge on the internet and how easy it is to type code into a graphical IDE and click "run", I'm not surprised about the age thing either. My youngest (13 years) has already published his own math game on the iOS store with my help of course, but he wrote the game engine himself while I did the graphics and UI.
I'm not even sure why this is news. Yahoo must have been pretty bored to buy a news aggregator when they could have wrote their own for half the price. Maybe his father pulled a few more strings for him or something.