Yahoo! makes Brit teen app maker VERY RICH with Summly buy

Yahoo! has agreed to buy Summly - an app created by a 17-year-old Londoner that summarises news stories for smartphones, which only launched last November after Nick D'Aloisio spent two years raising over $1m in funding. Register readers have probably heard quite enough about Stephen Fry in these pages over the last few days, …

[sugerbear]

How much

That is all that matters.

[Chris G]

Good on him

I can't imagine just how difficult it must be for a teenager to get people to take him seriously when trying to raise a million.

He must be an exceptional guy.

On a side note if he wants to come to Ibiza, I would be happy to show him the Hot Spots and how not to get ripped off here like the other rich kids.

[Justice]

Re: Good on him

The app isn't that great IMO.

But I agree. Good on him!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Good on him

His dad is an investment banker. It's probably easier to raise investment capital if your dad does it for you.

[ecofeco]

Re: Good on him

Oh ho.

Once again it's about connections. Shocking.

[K]

Like to thank... Ka-Shing ...

In other news.. "a newly minted teenager has embarrassed himself by referring to one of his benefactors as a Cash Register.."

[Captain Hogwash]

Li Ker-Ching?

That is all.

[Bobthe2nd]

Fair play

Good luck to the guy, though what was special about the App? (I dont have a smartphone so genuine question)

[Rob 21]

The boy done good

Nice one. Though I seem to recall using a good summarizing tool that Lotus shipped in the early 90s, ran on Win 3.x and did concordances and indexing too. Can'

[Anonymous Coward]

Shame, his app seemed quite cool. We'll never see it again now that it's a Yahoo service. It will end up being cluttered with adverts and Yahoo junk.

[Anonymous Coward]

Register readers have probably heard quite enough about Stephen Fry in these pages over the last few days

presume that's why you didn't warn us that if you go to the summly website you're confronted by the option to watch a video where he helps Nick explain how it works (I assume that's what the video does as its on the "technology" page but as I couldn't be bothered to which and failed to find a brief 1 line summary of its contents I've no idea what he's doing with the teen)

[Anonymous Coward]

How much?

He's a teenager - a four pack of Tesco's Lager and he'd be happy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo! makes Brit teen app maker VERY RICH

Surely its more likely to be "Yahoo! makes Brit teen app maker quite rich while making the investors who were eventually persuaded to stump up $1million EVEN RICHER THAN THEY WERE BEFORE"

[Wpgwill]

Re: Yahoo! makes Brit teen app maker VERY RICH

And Yahoo shareholders much poorer. Although in fairness they did invest in Yahoo, so they should of seen that coming.

[CraPo]

I'm incredibly jealous...

and to prove it I have two words to say after watching the demonstration video on the website:

"inundayded" and "cudding" :-P

[Senior Ugli]

Summlys interface was nice, however it seemed like a repackaged Flipboard. I found flipboard has better support and search, and ended up deleting it.

Shame its at yahoo, as someone previously mentioned it will get lost in loads of junk. I dont use anything by yahoo, and dont know anyone that does.

[kode]

Flickr is from Yahoo, and I'm sure it's still very successful.

[Rob]

Thanks

You've saved me the effort of installing it to see if it's any different to Flipboard.

Well done to the lad for milking stupid corporate directors by selling them a run of the mill app.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I discovered that Yahoo! has an inspirational goal to make people's daily routines entertaining and meaningful, and mobile will be a central part of that vision. For us, it's the perfect fit."

If a 17-year-old wrote that on his own, I'm the pope.

[John Brown (no body)]

"If a 17-year-old wrote that on his own, I'm the pope."

Having heard the young lad being interviewed on BBC R4 today, I probably should refer to you as "Your Grace" then. Nice to see a dictatorial old fart in charge of a huge medieval institution reads El Reg.

[Gavin King]

It's "Your Holiness", if we're going to be all formal.

Although I'd have thought he'd be too busy settling in to his new digs to be here.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I was just checking up on the forums since the DSL got installed right away.

.

.

.

.

...hey, there's gotta be some kind of perks with a direct line to the man upstairs.

[Gordan]

Meltwater News Scraper vs. Summly News Summarizer

One is deemed illegal and the other gets bought out for a huge amount of money.

I don't quite understand what the legal difference is here. Is it that Summly is a mobile app running on the end user's phone and Meltwater was a website that processed the data centrally?

Or is it that, to paraphrase Nixon, if a $MegaCorp does it it's not illegal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Meltwater News Scraper vs. Summly News Summarizer

"Or is it that, to paraphrase Nixon, if a $MegaCorp does it it's not illegal?"

Except until Yahoo bought it, it wasn't done by a $MegaCorp. And the first thing that the $MegaCorp did was to *stop* doing it.

Unless the Illuminati got together in their official smoke-filled room, and were about to lay down the New World Order-style banhammer on Summly, when Gizmondo the Great, their resident psychic, leaped to his feet in a frenzy and bellowed, "WAIT!!! HE IS BUT A CHILD, BUT SOON... HE WILL SELL OUT TO THE MAN! HE MUST NOT BE TOUCHED!!!" then I think your hypothesis is flawed.

[ukgnome]

Even though I am so very very jealous I am also happy that a Brit is triumphant!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yawn...

I see nothing astoundingly novel, new or particularly useful in this app. So it scrapes news articles, so what, there are plenty of places on the web and a couple of other apps that do the same.

Who are Yahoo! anyway?

[Homer 1]

Why! Has! El! Reg! Stopped! Using! The! Yahoo! Headline! Joke!?

See title.

[Rentaguru]

Oh dear

Yahoo that expert spotter of future trends buys an app designed for small screens just as mobile screens get up to hd standards. Just as the sane elements of society realise the net result of 5 second attention spans is the sort of society that weapons of mass destruction were designed to eliminate yahoo buys an app that summarises the daily mail sidebar of shame to the shorter tits oot for t'lad.

As far as I can see this is an app for those with adhd written by some moron with terminal autism bought by a company that has never got anything right. An the idiot has let his parents get their hands on his money through some stupid trust arrangement. To prove his position in the shallow end of the gene pool he thinks it clever to work for yahoo while is parents blow it all on threesomes with teenage russian whores.

The only reason any normal guy would associate with yahoo is to get sufficient money to snort coke while indulging in some traditional english bdsm inflicted on teenage redheaded, green-eyed irish or scots ladies of commercial morality while reading war and peace or some similar long winded mind enriching literature.

Why in an age when 99.999% of the population are quite frankly stupid the media are impressed that some youth mentally crippled by autism can sell an application designed to bring the already stupid to his level of social isolation to a company that burns money like a cypriot bank isn't surprising.

Still this sort of collective stupidity gives me hope that the useless 99.999% of the species will self-destruct and leave the remaining 700,000 of us to live in peace.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Oh dear

"...tits oot for t'lad.... adhd written by some moron with terminal autism... never got anything right....idiot ...stupid... shallow end of the gene pool he thinks it clever... teenage russian whores.

...snort coke... bdsm... 99.999% of the population are quite frankly stupid... youth mentally crippled by autism... stupid... social isolation... collective stupidity ...99.999% of the species will self-destruct..."

I don't want to be presumptuous, but I think you might have some anger issues.

[Rentaguru]

Re: Oh dear

Not half as much as you dear boy. I take it you are one of the moron types that think a three word summary of a serious new article is useful. One of the 99.999% I think. Quite why you view my justified contempt of those with short attention spans as angry is beyond me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Oh dear

When someone replies to your saying, "I think you might be angry" with, "I don't know why you think that my hating people makes me angry, you moron", it's difficult to know whether to rebut, or to consider the reply itself to be a kind of defacto QED.

I've chosen to hedge my bets and do both.

[2Fat2Bald]

I do struggle

To see what Summly does that other services don't. Note that it launched in November, and is bought in March. So it's really been operating for around five months, which is surely too short a time to tell if it's a go-er or not. Not really heard people gasping over it in the way that they did over, for example, Angry Birds.

In fact the only notable thing about it is that it was made my a 17 year old, and sold to Yahoo for a vast sum whilst still unproven. And they immediately shut it down......

Very odd.

[Destroy All Monsters]

Is that actually just a "reality TV" Yahoo addy or what?

In six months, an investigative reporter will show that the lad didn't actually exist and was put together by an "image consultancy"....