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Up until now, not many people had ever heard of Nick D’Aloisio, a 17-year-old school-aged teenager from the U.K. But now, he’s seemingly all over the news radar, and for ample good reason, too. Over the past week, Aloisio completed a deal that nobody ever saw coming. He sold his news app, Summly, to Yahoo mobile for millions of dollars.
Summly was created to help summarize headline news for mobile phones. It captures news stories and then summarizes them for users in an easy to read mobile display format that is paramount to the yahoo embodiments of mobile news. So much so, that the tech giant not only purchased the full app exclusive rights from Aloisio, but also hired on the world’s newest and one of its youngest tech millionaires.
“I’m hoping to stay [at Yahoo!] as long as it takes to get the technology integrated,” Aloisio explained of his new position. “We were approached a few months ago and what really excited me was their mobile strategy. I think this is an amazing opportunity and I didn’t want to miss it.”
According to inside sources that were familiar with the deal, Yahoo purchased the app from Aloisio for the hefty sum of $30 million. The app is extremely popular, having been downloaded more than 1 million times over the past year.
A statement that was released by Yahoo said:
“We’re excited to share that we’re acquiring Summly, a mobile product company founded with a vision to simplify the way we get information, making it faster, easier and more concise. At the age of 15, Nick D’Aloisio created the Summly app at his home in London. It started with an insight – that we live in a world of constant information and need new ways to simplify how we find the stories that are important to us, at a glance.”
Just two years later, nobody could have predicted that Aloisio would be worth $30 million for his efforts.
As far as his plans to invest the money, he’s rather humble. “I’m planning to invest it – my parents are in control of it. I want to buy a shoulder bag,” he said in a recent interview.
Summly helps condense news stories into three paragraph format that’s ideal for the iPhone screen. Users are able to customize categories as they see fit.
When asked why he created the app, Aloisio answered, “I was using Google and Bing and there were so many results to scroll through it [sic] was really inefficient. So I built an algorithm that shared them and trimmed them. Then it just transformed into the idea of: ‘why not just summarise news in general?’”
The primary app features will be removed from the iTunes marketplace as Yahoo integrates this app as a mobile product.
