So Yahoo bought a news app made by a 17-year-old today, for something like $30 million, and I've been trying to figure out how I feel about it since about ten this morning.
The app is called Summly. If you haven't seen it, it takes a news article and squeezes it down into a couple hundred characters you can read in the time it takes an elevator door to close. The kid behind it is Nick D'Aloisio, he's from London, and he built the first version of this thing (it was called Trimit back then) when he was fifteen, sitting in his room doing his GCSE revision in between. Now he's seventeen and apparently a multimillionaire, which is the kind of sentence that makes you feel like you've wasted your twenties.
I downloaded Summly last night after hearing the deal was close, mostly out of curiosity, and I ran it on a piece about the Cyprus bank thing that's been eating financial news all week. The summary wasn't bad, actually. A little stiff, reads like a wire report written by someone in a hurry, but it hit the actual points. Whether that's genuinely clever algorithmic work or just a well-tuned extraction script pulling the first and last sentence of every paragraph, I honestly can't tell you, and I'm not sure it matters much for what Yahoo's buying here.
Because here's the thing about this deal that nobody's saying outright: Yahoo isn't really buying a product. Marissa Mayer has been on an acquisition run since she took over as CEO last July, snapping up little startups like Stamped and OnTheAir and Astrid, mostly for the engineers rather than whatever they'd shipped. Summly will probably get folded into Yahoo's mobile stuff and disappear as a standalone app within the year. That's just the pattern. I still remember when Yahoo bought Delicious and basically let it rot for years before finally offloading it, and I don't say that to be mean, it's just what tends to happen once a company this size swallows something small and shiny.
That said, thirty million dollars for a seventeen-year-old is a genuinely wild outcome, and I don't want to be too cynical about it. D'Aloisio apparently had backing from people like Li Ka-shing and Ashton Kutcher (yes, that Ashton Kutcher, who's been doing angel investing under the name Chris Gaines for reasons that still confuse me), and he turned a summer project into a payday most people never see in a lifetime. Good for him. I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a little bit of envy mixed in with the admiration, because I was building nothing more ambitious than a WordPress theme at seventeen.
There's a bigger question buried in here about whether "summarize this for me" is actually a feature worth having, or whether it's a symptom of how we consume news now. Everyone's phone screen is smaller than the article, everyone's attention span is apparently shrinking along with it, so the winning move is to make the article shrink first. I use Twitter for headlines and I still end up clicking through to the full piece most of the time anyway, so I'm skeptical the summary-only reading habit is as widespread as the pitch decks want it to be. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned about it. My RSS situation has been a mess since the Google Reader news dropped a couple weeks back and I still haven't landed on a replacement, so take my media consumption opinions with a grain of salt right now, I'm clearly not the target user for anything efficient at the moment.
One more detail I liked: apparently part of the underlying tech traces back to research done at SRI International, the same lab that helped spin up Siri before Apple bought that too. Small world, or maybe just proof that a handful of the same NLP research groups keep showing up under the hood of half the apps we use.
Anyway. Congratulations to the kid, I guess, and I'll be mildly curious to see if Summly's summarization engine actually shows up baked into Yahoo News or Flickr or wherever it lands, or if it just quietly stops getting updates the way these things usually do.