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Yahoo Buys UK Teen's Smartphone News App

Posted by samzenpus on from the sounds-familiar dept.

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.'"

19 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Summary Fail by OverlordQ · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:Summary Fail by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

      It's just a softball for the algorithm that promises to cut it down for 'time-conscious' readers(seriously, when did having the attention span of a crack-addled monkey get redefined as a good thing?) By repeating approximately one sentence worth of actual information more or less verbatim, it sharply increases the odds that the system will actually work...

    2. Re:Summary Fail by Kenja · · Score: 5, Informative

      And nowhere does it explain how Yahoo has any money... very suspicious.

      --

      "Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
    3. Re:Summary Fail by nanoflower · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Summary Fail by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      It also doesn't say how much Yahoo paid. They probably offered the teenager some Funyons and an official Marissa Mayer signed poster.

    5. Re:Summary Fail by JeanCroix · · Score: 3, Funny

      I propose we define the Crack-Addled Monkey ("CAM") as a unit of measure for attention spans. Those of us older than 40 could probably measure in the hundreds or thousands of CAMs, even reading entire books (on paper, no less) in a single sitting. Whereas those who need their bite-sized news stories further condensed into sub-tweet sized nuggets would measure in the milliCAM range.

    6. Re:Summary Fail by Hal_Porter · · Score: 4, Funny

      Sounds like you have Attention Surplus Disorder. The cure is irregular sleeping hours and meal times.

      Eat more junk food (try to get at least 50% of your calories from Red Bull, Mountain Dew and Cheetos)

      Spend more time on the Internet. Try to avoid slashdot stories unless they the summary is by samzenpus. Don't read the articles, just the summaries. Try to replace your time spent reading books on reddit.

      If you read this far you have a serious and possibly fatal case.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  2. Cue a dozen patent trolls by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Starting law suits over this.
    Cue half a dozen news publishers sueing over aggregating their stories.

    Sigh.

  3. Bye Bye Freedom! by CMYKjunkie · · Score: 2

    "D’Aloisio and the Summly team will be joining Yahoo as part of the transaction..."

    Well there goes working from home, kid!

  4. So.... they plan on killing the app then? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    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.

  5. Summly Fail by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
  6. They wanted the name? by Culture20 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The Summly application will be closed down

    So they just wanted the name and the programmer, but not the app?

  7. Um, so... by TheSkepticalOptimist · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Um, so... by Garridan · · Score: 5, Funny

      No, he reinvented Slashdot editors. There seems to be room for improvement...

  8. Oh come on! by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 2

    This pisses me off more than a nerd who gets a girl! >:-(

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    (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
  9. Dotcom bubble money by petsounds · · Score: 2

    $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.

  10. Hey, I remember this kid. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  11. Re:Another step in Yahoo's demise by kevingolding2001 · · Score: 2

    I'll just spell that out: THIRTY SIX AND A HALF MILLION DOLLARS.

    Actually, spelling it out would be "Tee aitch eye are tee why space ess eye..."

    But yeah, that is a ridiculous sum of money.

  12. Re:Another step in Yahoo's demise by holostarr · · Score: 2

    Whats worse is the kid didn't even do anything special. according to Summly's own website, they partnered with SRI International for the AI: "Summly came to SRI International with a core concept to solve the information overload problem, which is especially challenging for mobile devices because of their limited screen size," said David Israel, Ph.D. So SRI wrote the AI piece which does the heavy lifting, and the kid's company made pretty UI to display the summarized articles. $30 million well spent...