At just 17 years old, UK teenager Nick D’Aloisio has just sold an app that he made at the tender age of 15 to US tech giant Yahoo, for a huge $30 million.
Summly is an app that allows users to read news updates from their favourite sites in a summarised three line update, hence the name. It’s available on iPhone and uses a colourful yet simple user interface to bring in news in a Twitter-style feed.
Nick D’Aloisio started developing the app at the age of 15 when studying for his GCSE exams and soon after launching it had attracted $300,000 in funding from the same group that backs the likes of Spotify and Facebook, Horizons Ventures. Incredibly, the likes of Ashton Kutcher and Yoko Ono are also financial backers.
Since then Summly has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and has been featured by Apple as its App of the Week in the App Store.
“I designed Summly because I felt that my generation wasn’t consuming traditional news anymore,” said Nick. The UK resident taught himself to code aged 15 and created several apps before Summly, including one that took people’s Facebook statuses and analysed them to determine the user’s mood.
Yahoo will pay out around $30 million to take on Summly and its staff, although the app itself will close in the coming months. Yahoo wants the technology and will integrate it into its own websites and apps, as part of a huge revamp by newly appointed CEO Marissa Mayer.
Unfortunately the acquisition means that the Android version of Summly that was in the works will be canned. Perhaps Yahoo can bring Summly to Android in some other guise.