Kevin Bostic
Internet giant Yahoo continued its acquisition push on Monday, bringing iOS news summarization app Summly into the fold for an undisclosed sum.
Yahoo announced the acquisition Monday in a post on the company blog, and Nick D'Aloisio confirmed the buy on Summly's home page. Neither site has given specifics regarding the price paid for Summly, but AllThingsD puts the price at around $30 million.
Summly uses a natural language algorithm to summarize news stories into bits of fewer than 400 characters. Using its minimalist interface, users can swipe through stories and topics quickly and navigate to stories of interest just by tapping them. The app began as a prototype called Trimmit, which attracted seed funding from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing's investment firm, as well as other investors later.
D'Alosio and the Summly team will be joining Yahoo in the coming weeks, according to Yahoo's announcement. The announcement also notes that the Summly iOS app will be shutting down, but that Yahoo users can expect to see it integrated into Yahoo's mobile technology in the near future. D'Alosio says users can look forward to seeing the summarization technology in "multiple Yahoo products," describing the app's shutdown as "a 'power nap' so to speak."
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13 Comments
Its still nice to hear the word "giant" added after Yahoo!
Hope, Marissa brings up good fight with Google.
God idea. Maybe this will help improv Yahoo's standing in the iOS market. Currently it suck.
This D'Alosio is a pretty smart kid. Even more important is he is very well spoken. Congratulations on his success on becoming a millionaire at 17! I bet this kid will be CEO of one of the tech giants one day if he doesn't create his own.
According to news reports, the price was $30 million. http://www.forbes.com/sites/connieguglielmo/2013/03/25/yahoo-buys-mobile-news-app-summly-from-teen-entrepreneur/
Not bad at all!
$30m seems like a lot of money for a text truncating app even assuming the use of natural language processing as you'd expect a major search engine provider like Yahoo to have algorithms to do that but I guess reconstructing content in summarised form must be beyond what they already have and the description in the following video makes perfect sense as to why it would be used by a search engine provider: [VIDEO]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z3l8h3bbr4[/VIDEO] If you think about it from the point of view of how Google works just now, you type in a phrase and you get links with a snippet of text that is close to your search terms. Very rarely can you determine from that snippet of text if the article at the link is going to give you the info you need. What Summly could do instead is rewrite the article on the page in a shortened form so that it would be clearer to see at a glance which links are the most useful. No doubt the algorithms will help get better results too, which may explain why he works for Yahoo now as they can use it a number of products. Now Google just needs to figure out a way to copy it and call it innovation.