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."