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.'"
Way to restate the same thing about 5 times to make it looks like there's any real content.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Starting law suits over this.
Cue half a dozen news publishers sueing over aggregating their stories.
Sigh.
First they cancel telecommuting, and now they blow millions on some kid's news aggregator.
..already available in the App Store, or any of these: http://lifehacker.com/5845798/five-best-news-aggregators
"D’Aloisio and the Summly team will be joining Yahoo as part of the transaction..."
Well there goes working from home, kid!
The Summly application will be closed down and integrated with Yahoo’s existing range of mobile applications.
Sounds like they're going to take what was probably a nice, small app with streamlined code, and bloat the everloving piss out of it by integrating it into the godawful nightmare that is anything that Yahoo touches. Seriously, who even USES yahoo any more? I honestly have not heard a single person I know utter their name in at least 5 years.
Well, whoever has this app now, you probably want to look for a replacement, because I'd bet money on the 'integrated' version being a horrendously slow, ad-filled behemoth of an app that eats most of your memory.
Way to restate the same thing about 5 times to make it looks like there's any real content.
That's obviously because you're not reading it with Summly, which would shorten in into just three lines.
Ezekiel 23:20
Is this supposed to revitalize my interest in Yahoo stock? The kid wrote a news app. Not a social media platform.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
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.
This pisses me off more than a nerd who gets a girl! >:-(
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
This got me thinking that Apps and internet companies are a great way to launder money. You buy illegal goods under the cover of publically paying someone for their "app" which turns out to have no value later. Politicians that want illegal direct donations can skip to whole speaking fee nonsense which has reasonable caps and instead author dubious apps and sell these to the Koch brothers for ten million a pop.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It's going to be a heck of a commute, from the UK to Sunnyvale.
His algorithm is actually like a heat pump. It reduces the article's entropy by pumping random redundant text into slashdot.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It's an interesting project with NLP tossed in there.
http://tldrstuff.com/
I've tried it on my tablet and prefer to read the original articles, but meh.
As opposed to a news corporation dutifully maintaining a good RSS feed?
Presumably he already has an office since the company consists of more than just him. So they can either continue working in their existing offices (that will now be Yahoo offices) or they can work in Yahoo's London offices (I'm guessing they do have some.) Either way everything I've seen says that they really bought the company to get this guy more than his app. Apparently they believe that he has good insight into where the social media is going and can help them develop new products that will help Yahoo improve their existing services.
Even if that's so, this is Yahoo, so no one will ever listen to him and they will continue to do all the batshit crazy stuff they do that no one likes or even cares about
Normal people worry me!
Yahoo has mobile applications? o.O
It summarises the stories for you, apparently quite competently (I haven't used it myself - it won't run on a 2nd gen Touch). As far as I could tell, none of those aggregators in the linked article do that.
$30 million for a newsreader app. Really. $30 million.
Apple recently spent, according to estimates, $20 million on a company which allows phones to map indoor spaces. That tech will directly help improve their Maps product. So $20 million for very innovative stuff. Apple will surely get their money's worth out of that purchase.
In contrast, $30 million for Summly, which probably just packaged some open source libraries for summarizing documents. I don't see any secret sauce or innovation in this product. This purchase smells of desperation by Mayer & Co, but I guess if I was Yahoo and had no products anyone cared about, I'd be desperate too.
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.
It summarises the stories for you, apparently quite competently (I haven't used it myself - it won't run on a 2nd gen Touch). As far as I could tell, none of those aggregators in the linked article do that.
That feature sounds nice. But, how long would it take someone to reverse engineer how it works. Why would Yahoo spend more than 1 engineer's annual salary buying this? It sounds like the kind of thing that could be replaced by a pretty small Perl Script.
There are stories that are straight forward, and making an informative summary for that type of stories are no brainers
But for stories that are a little bit complicated, it's not that easy to condense it into an informative summary of that story
I have submitted enough stories to slashdot (and end up with 99% rejection) to know that to do the job well requires much more than a word-selection algorithm
Since Yahoo is paying a hefty sum for that app, perhaps Yahoo knows something that I don't
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Since D'Aloisio, at least, lives in London, will he have to move to California to work for Yahoo once the deal closes?
Yahoo is seriously dead.
They were murdered by an ex Hollywood hack they hired as the CEO - Terry Semel - who probably knew how to massage egos of Hollywood actors but had no idea on science, internet, technology and so on. Remember Yahoo buying broadcast.com - I still don't know what was broadcast.com - other than the fact it was a nice URL. Mark Cuban and a lot of people who brokered the deal got rich by sales commission from Cuban - that's all.
Jerry Yang and David Filo are no Sergey Brin and Larry Page. They are not even a Zuckerberg.
No one can turn around Yahoo. It is like trying to rejuvenate Blockbuster in the Netflix age. Marissa Mayer made a serious error in judgement by signing on to be the CEO of a dead duck. If she does not think of an exit strategy she will be the next version of Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina - seriously boneheaded chief executives whose only qualities are they are excellent in PR and networking (not 'computer networking', they won't know a CAT5 from Pussy Cat.)
Tat Tvam Asi
the money transfer is probably some type of money laundering or tax scam, rather than payment for rights to a technology.
That is a serious accusation based on no evidence or logic whatsoever. It is at times like this that I wish you couldn't post anonymously on the internet, so that this kid and/or yahoo! could sue you for criminal libel and reducing the overall intelligence level of the internet.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Ever heard of venture capital? That pays the bills before any sales are made.