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.
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."
