Yahoo buys news-summarizing app Summly for $30 million

Yahoo makes 15-year-old a millionaire overnight by acquiring his app, Summly.

Published
Updated
55 seconds read time

Yahoo are on a continued mission to revamp their digital news and media business, with their latest acquisition of Summly, a startup that specializes in summarizing web content into a format made easier to consume media on a mobile device.

AllThingsD reports that the transaction saw Yahoo shifting $30 million to acquire the startup, 90% of it in cash with the remaining 10% in stock. The news gets better; with the iPhone app first designed by London-based Nick D'Aloisio, who was just fifteen years old when he created Summly.

What exactly does Summly do? Well, it allows you to choose your news sources from a bunch of pre-packages categories, or from your favorite websites. From there, it will let you enter keywords for topics that might be of interest too. Summly will also show you the latest stories that it has summarized in up to 400 characters, presented with a beautifully clean interface.

Yahoo buys news-summarizing app Summly for $30 million | TweakTown.com

Summly is also said to use artificial intelligence and natural language processing in order to generate the content provided to the user, so that you can see sentences that matter the most. Yahoo has said that the Summly team would be joining Yahoo "in the coming weeks." D'Aloisio posted about the acquisition on the Summly blog, saying that the iPhone app would be retired, but their "summarization technology will soon return to multiple Yahoo! products."

NEWS SOURCES:techspot.com, summly.com

Anthony joined the TweakTown team in 2010 and has since reviewed 100s of graphics cards. Anthony is a long time PC enthusiast with a passion of hate for games built around consoles. FPS gaming since the pre-Quake days, where you were insulted if you used a mouse to aim, he has been addicted to gaming and hardware ever since. Working in IT retail for 10 years gave him great experience with custom-built PCs. His addiction to GPU tech is unwavering and has recently taken a keen interest in artificial intelligence (AI) hardware.

Newsletter Subscription

Related Tags