from Hacker News

Yahoo Acquires News Gathering And Delivery Startup Summly

by richardv on 3/25/13, 1:19 PM with 38 comments

  • by notlisted on 3/25/13, 4:59 PM

    This thing didn't work well at all. Strange acquisition. What's the dealio? Yahoo assisting not-so-smart investors from waking up with egg on their faces?

    I worked on auto-summary-generation in the late 90s (I know I know, lawn, get off you shall) When I ragged on Summly elsewhere ("yet another example of people claiming genius inventions by under-18s that fall short upon closer inspection of the claims") I came across http://skimzee.com in a comment of an older guy who complained about the attention Summly generated.

    Skimzee.com lacks the web 3.0 design finesse, and hipp-ly name, but does a very admirable job summarizing articles in various languages. Tried it out and was very impressed, simple interface, works on non-English languages as well. Deserving your attention/feedback.

    (disclosure: have nothing to do with the site, but did communicate with the creator a couple of times. very smart older guy.)

  • by defen on 3/25/13, 4:10 PM

    I remember when this launched and people on here were ragging on it, because it seemingly used the most naïve NLP imaginable and seemed to be getting hype simply because the founder was 15. I never used the app, so I'm curious what the story behind this acquisition is. Did it get a lot better? Did Yahoo! get snowed (seems unlikely)? Talent acquisition?

  • by dictum on 3/25/13, 4:32 PM

    Congratulations, Yahoo! Now you own a slice of the smartphone apps pie.

    Remember when you bought Geocities and Broadcast.com to have a slice of the dot com bubble pie? Remember when you bought Flickr and Delicious to have a slice of the Web 2.0 pie?

    * * *

    Good news for D’Aloisio: post-acqhiresition, founders of companies bought by Yahoo always seem to do well.

  • by xianshou on 3/25/13, 3:38 PM

    Young genius, hot technology, insufficient adoption, clever acquihire, gentle disappearance. It's the circle of life...

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX07j9SDFcc

  • by unreal37 on 3/25/13, 3:36 PM

    And it will be removed from the App Store today too. Another interesting technology killed and users crushed. Yay Yahoo!

  • by highace on 3/25/13, 3:18 PM

    Some of the articles surrounding this seem to hint that the app was failing. Is this true?

    Furthermore, kudos to the founder for creating this thing at such a young age, but is he really going to have a space at Yahoo?

  • by citricsquid on 3/25/13, 3:41 PM

    Although money isn't everything it's pretty note worthy in this case that the sale price was apparently around £30 million[1] which means he's now worth 8 figures, self-made money that he's too young to access. Heh.

    [1] http://www.standard.co.uk/news/techandgadgets/exclusive-summ...

  • by ericcholis on 3/25/13, 3:32 PM

    Slightly related, but I'm ecstatic about young developers building things like this. It shows a great aptitude for engineering, i.e. identifying and solving a problem or a need. It's even better that his product got acquired.

    I hope that this can serve as yet another example of how important software and product development can in education.

  • by fmd on 3/25/13, 5:06 PM

    Does this have anything to do with LinkedIn purchasing Pulse? A competitive move on Yahoo!'s part?

  • by nicholassmith on 3/25/13, 3:03 PM

    It's an interesting purchase from Yahoo, I've used the app a few times on and off since it was released. It's fun, not sure how good it is at what it promises but it can always be tweaked up. Maybe it's a sign of Yahoo's slow realisation that there's money to be made in them thar mobile delivery platforms.

  • by HunterV on 3/25/13, 9:41 PM

    In my honest opinion Yahoo! acquired Summly for their launch video: https://vimeo.com/52014691 It's simply so cool. Yahoo! is nowhere near that cool. The experiment now is if buying cool makes you cool.

  • by patrickmandia on 3/25/13, 5:10 PM

  • by rayiner on 3/25/13, 2:13 PM

    Is there something about these "ly" startup names that escapes me?

  • by zacharyvoase on 3/25/13, 5:43 PM

    More evidence that overnight success takes at least a couple of years :) a hearty congratulations to Mr. D'Aloisio.