So Yahoo bought Summly yesterday. If you haven't heard of Summly, don't feel bad, I hadn't really either until about six months ago when it started popping up in the App Store "editor's picks," it's a news-summarizing app, condenses articles down to a few hundred characters using some algorithm licensed from SRI International (the same lab that spun out Siri, funnily enough). Reports are saying Yahoo paid somewhere around $30 million for it. Some outlets are saying less, some are hinting it's more once you count retention bonuses, but $30 million is the number sticking.
Here's the part that actually made me sit up: the guy who built it is 17. Nick D'Aloisio, from London, started the thing when he was 15, funded early rounds from Li Ka-shing and Ashton Kutcher's little startup fund, and now he's presumably going to work in Yahoo's New York office while also, presumably, still doing his A-levels or whatever the British equivalent of finishing high school is. I keep trying to remember what I was doing at 17 and it was mostly just being extremely bad at driving stick shift and losing money at half.com trading Magic cards. Not building something a publicly traded internet company would pay eight figures for.
I don't say that to be bitter about it, exactly. Good for him. But it does make me think about what these acquisitions actually are, underneath the press release language. Yahoo isn't buying Summly because millions of people are using Summly. By most accounts the user numbers were fine but not enormous. They're buying it because Marissa Mayer wants engineering talent and a demonstrated ability to ship something people liked, and an app is a convenient wrapper to buy that in. The app itself is apparently getting shut down. So what you're really looking at is a $30 million signing bonus with a nice story attached. That's not new, Google and Facebook have been doing "acqui-hires" like this for years, but it's rare that the story comes with a teenager and a British newspaper's dream headline.
Mayer's been at this for about eight months now and this is at least her fourth or fifth acquisition since she took over, most of them small teams rather than big platforms. It's a pretty clear pattern at this point: pick up little mobile-first teams, fold them into Yahoo's core products, hope some of that energy rubs off on a company that still, in a lot of people's minds, feels like it's stuck being a 2003-era portal with a mail service bolted on. Whether it actually works is a separate question. Buying talent is the easy part. Getting a company the size of Yahoo to actually let that talent build things without fifteen layers of process is the part nobody's cracked yet.
Unrelated tangent, but it's been on my mind all week because of the timing: I'm still annoyed about Google Reader. They announced two weeks ago it's getting killed off July 1st, and I've spent chunks of this week trying out Feedly and The Old Reader as replacements and neither one quite fits yet. Feedly's fine but it wants to be a magazine-style reading experience and I just want my unread count and a list, the way Reader gave it to me for seven years. The Old Reader is closer in spirit but it's clearly a small side project trying to absorb a flood of refugees and it shows — I got a 502 error twice yesterday just trying to mark things read. I don't have a tidy answer here, I'm just going to keep limping along on Reader itself until it actually dies and figure it out then, like everyone else apparently is.
Anyway. Keep an eye on Summly's app — apparently it disappears from the store once the deal closes, so if you've got it installed, that's basically a little piece of tech history sitting on your phone whether you asked for it or not.