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Yahoo! makes Brit teen app maker VERY RICH with Summly buy
Mobe! News! Scraper! In! Inspirational! Goal!
Yahoo! has agreed to buy Summly - an app created by a 17-year-old Londoner that summarises news stories for smartphones, which only launched last November after Nick D'Aloisio spent two years raising over $1m in funding.
Register readers have probably heard quite enough about Stephen Fry in these pages over the last few days, so we will briefly merely mention that the national voiceover treasure was among the small gathering of celebs who funded or advised the young D'Aloisio.
Yoko Ono, Ashton Kutcher, Facebook's Joanne Shields and Zynga's Mark Pincus also offered support to Summly.
The app disappeared from Apple's online store immediately following Yahoo!'s decision to buy the British startup for an undisclosed sum.
On making presumably oodles of cash from the buyout, entrepreneurial teenager D'Aloisio said of Summly's soon-to-be new home at the Purple Palace:
After spending some time on campus, I discovered that Yahoo! has an inspirational goal to make people's daily routines entertaining and meaningful, and mobile will be a central part of that vision. For us, it's the perfect fit.
When I founded Summly at 15, I would have never imagined being in this position so suddenly. I'd personally like to thank Li Ka-Shing and Horizons Ventures for having the foresight to back a teenager pursuing his dream.
Also to our investors, advisors and of course the fantastic team for believing in the potential of Summly. Without you all, this never would have been possible. I'd also like to thank my family, friends and school for supporting me.
Summly claims to have had 90 million "summaries" read in the past few months since the app first launched. The software he developed will now be baked into "multiple" Yahoo! goods, according to D'Aloisio's expectations. ®