
Yahoo  Acquires News Gathering And Delivery Startup Summly - richardv
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/25/yahoo-acquires-information-gathering-startup-summly/
======
notlisted
This thing didn't work well at all. Strange acquisition. What's the dealio?
Yahoo assisting not-so-smart investors from waking up with egg on their faces?

I worked on auto-summary-generation in the late 90s (I know I know, lawn, get
off you shall) When I ragged on Summly elsewhere ("yet another example of
people claiming genius inventions by under-18s that fall short upon closer
inspection of the claims") I came across <http://skimzee.com> in a comment of
an older guy who complained about the attention Summly generated.

Skimzee.com lacks the web 3.0 design finesse, and hipp-ly name, but does a
very admirable job summarizing articles in various languages. Tried it out and
was very impressed, simple interface, works on non-English languages as well.
Deserving your attention/feedback.

(disclosure: have nothing to do with the site, but did communicate with the
creator a couple of times. very smart older guy.)

~~~
brador
There's always <http://skimfeed.com> if you just want a tech news firehose.

~~~
petercooper
Although, ultimately.. I think the technology-assisted human curation angle
works best: <http://techmeme.com/>

This makes me wonder what TechMeme would be worth actually.

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defen
I remember when this launched and people on here were ragging on it, because
it seemingly used the most naïve NLP imaginable and seemed to be getting hype
simply because the founder was 15. I never used the app, so I'm curious what
the story behind this acquisition is. Did it get a lot better? Did Yahoo! get
snowed (seems unlikely)? Talent acquisition?

~~~
ronnier
This?

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4727321>

~~~
notahacker
HN certainly wasn't the only one ragging on Summly.
[http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15+year+old-app-
deve...](http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15+year+old-app-developer-
cry)

d'Aloisio seems to have a attracted disproportionate mainstream press coverage
and and unusually _critical_ tech press attention considering his app's
relatively low budget and short life, even for a youngster. Being expensively
acquihired by _Yahoo_ might not change that, but I guess the monetary reward
at 17 gives him the last laugh

------
dictum
Congratulations, Yahoo! Now you own a slice of the smartphone apps pie.

Remember when you bought Geocities and Broadcast.com to have a slice of the
dot com bubble pie? Remember when you bought Flickr and Delicious to have a
slice of the Web 2.0 pie?

* * *

Good news for D’Aloisio: post-acqhiresition, founders of companies bought by
Yahoo always seem to do well.

------
xianshou
Young genius, hot technology, insufficient adoption, clever acquihire, gentle
disappearance. It's the circle of life...

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX07j9SDFcc>

~~~
freyr
Young programmer showing a glimmer of promise, overhyped technology, no
adoption, acquihire, a tree falls in the woods.

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unreal37
And it will be removed from the App Store today too. Another interesting
technology killed and users crushed. Yay Yahoo!

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highace
Some of the articles surrounding this seem to hint that the app was failing.
Is this true?

Furthermore, kudos to the founder for creating this thing at such a young age,
but is he really going to have a space at Yahoo?

~~~
ancarda
Not sure about other people's experiences however the app consistently
produced inaccurate results for me and often had several nasty bugs. i.e. I
would see HTML in bullet points because it wasn't parsing the page properly.

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citricsquid
Although money isn't everything it's pretty note worthy in this case that the
sale price was apparently around £30 million[1] which means he's now worth 8
figures, self-made money that he's too young to access. Heh.

[1] [http://www.standard.co.uk/news/techandgadgets/exclusive-
summ...](http://www.standard.co.uk/news/techandgadgets/exclusive-summly-app-
created-by-london-schoolboy-sold-to-yahoo-for-millions-8548506.html)

~~~
nanoman
Well, it seems he has gathered capital from a number of investors, which may
want to be paid back:

"Angel Investors and Advisors include; Ashton Kutcher, Betaworks, Brian
Chesky, Hosain Rahman, Jessica Powell, Joanna Shields, Josh Kushner, Mark
Pincus, Matt Mullenweg, Seb Bishop, Shakil Khan, Spencer Hyman, Stephen Fry,
Troy Carter, Vivi Nevo, Yoko Ono and many more. We are also working closely
with News Corporation on the summarization of their content."

Source: <http://summly.com/about.html>

But sure enough the kid is rich now.

~~~
throwaway129921
> But sure enough the kid is rich now.

Fair play to him for doing this himself, but he wasn't exactly poor to begin
with. A bit of googling shows the jobs his parents hold and an address on
Parkside SW19 (which is one of the most expensive roads outside central
London).

------
ericcholis
Slightly related, but I'm ecstatic about young developers building things like
this. It shows a great aptitude for engineering, i.e. identifying and solving
a problem or a need. It's even better that his product got acquired.

I hope that this can serve as yet another example of how important software
and product development can in education.

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fmd
Does this have anything to do with LinkedIn purchasing Pulse? A competitive
move on Yahoo!'s part?

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nicholassmith
It's an interesting purchase from Yahoo, I've used the app a few times on and
off since it was released. It's fun, not sure how good it is at what it
promises but it can always be tweaked up. Maybe it's a sign of Yahoo's slow
realisation that there's money to be made in them thar mobile delivery
platforms.

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HunterV
In my honest opinion Yahoo! acquired Summly for their launch video:
<https://vimeo.com/52014691> It's simply so cool. Yahoo! is nowhere near that
cool. The experiment now is if buying cool makes you cool.

~~~
HunterV
Can I just say I called it before Wired posted this:
<http://www.wired.com/business/2013/03/yahoo-summly/>

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patrickmandia
AllThingsD pegs the price at $30M

[http://allthingsd.com/20130325/yahoo-paid-30-million-in-
cash...](http://allthingsd.com/20130325/yahoo-paid-30-million-in-cash-
for-18-months-of-young-summly-entrepreneurs-time/)

------
rayiner
Is there something about these "ly" startup names that escapes me?

~~~
nwzpaperman
They rare.ly last

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zacharyvoase
More evidence that overnight success takes at least a couple of years :) a
hearty congratulations to Mr. D'Aloisio.

