Real reason why Yahoo blew $30m on teen's Summly app
LONDON teenager Nick D'Aloisio was the toast of bedroom developers the world over when he sold his news aggregation app, Summly, to tech giant Yahoo for $30m last month. The application condenses news stories into bite-sized summaries that make them easier to read on small smartphone screens.
Now it has come to light that the technology used in the app was created by a company called SRI International, which licensed it to Summly in return for equity, and that the app itself was built not by anyone at Summly or SRI but by a company called Somo, described as "the UK's largest independent mobile marketing agency".
The revelations have left website Business Insider looking for answers. "Buying Summly, Yahoo bought a start-up with an app that not many people used, made no money, employed no technical geniuses or design mavens," it states. "So why, exactly, did Yahoo buy Summly?"
The answer, says Business Insider, has little to do with the talents of D'Aloisio. Instead, it argues that Yahoo was most interested in the "summarisation technology" developed by SRI and that the outlay on Summly was "an almost incidental side effect of a deal Yahoo made with SRI".
Most Yahoo products were designed for desktop computers, but the rise of smartphones and tablets, which have much smaller screens, makes summarisation technology vital.
All of which explains why D'Aloisio is still at school in London – and not moving to Silicon Valley – and why the job of implementing the new technology at Yahoo is being given to the California company's head of mobile, Adam Cahan, rather than anyone from Summly.
Business Insider insists that the teenager still deserves credit "for outsourcing technology development and app development to the right firms, and coalescing their work into a product that made him millions. Plenty of brilliant entrepreneurs before him rode a similar skill for curation to the top of the industry." ·
Read more: http://www.theweek.co.uk/technology/52420/yahoo-reason-bought-summly-app-nick-d%27aloisio#ixzz2kV4xJEtm
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