Last month Yahoo paid for a start-up $30 million – Summly was a news aggregator that Nick D’Aloisio, a 17-year old student developed. The U.S. company at the time offered him a job at its office in London’s Soho district. Yahoo then closed the application, and sources quoted by Business Insider says that D’Aloisio was left out of the project.
Nick came up the idea to create such an app for smartphones while studying for exams. It happened in 2011: “I found I kept clicking through to websites that didn’t have the information I was looking for. It was frustrating. People needed a better way to preview information before reading an article,” said Nick D’Aloisio.
This business turned D’Aloisio into one of the youngest millionaires in the world of technology. Many were skeptical on the software purchase by Yahoo, considering that Summly had not brought in users nor money.
Moreover, Summly has not even been created by a genius in IT, but by the British company Somo, “the largest independent agency in the UK for mobile marketing,” Also, the note on the Summly application website reads that the technology used was developed by SRI International, the same company that created Siri, the virtual assistant bought by Apple for the iPhone.
Then what is the real reason Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, would have approved a costly acquisition that does not actually bring any benefit? Sources quoted by Business Insider said Summly is actually a small part of a deal that Yahoo made with SRI International which involved a transfer of information, codes and IP addresses. Basically, Summly came bundled with all these things, and Yahoo has only to profit from the publicity following the deal.
A source close to the talks said that “technology” will be a huge step for Yahoo, helping create custom news feeds on mobile platforms. Marissa Mayer believes in the success of this system, especially because mobile phones have smaller screens and displaying the information in a compact form is really useful.
However, the task of implementing the new technology will not be given to anybody from the Summly team. Nick D’Aloisio might have developed the primary code of the application, but things are not very clear. D’Aloisio could soon be seen competing with industry giants, but, for now, his involvement in Yahoo projects is quite limited.
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