Nick D’Aloisio became a millionaire at 17 after selling a mobile-phone application he came up with at home in London two years ago to Yahoo! Inc.
The largest U.S. Web portal announced on its blog yesterday a deal to acquire Summly, an app which makes it easier to read news on smaller screens, without disclosing financial details. Yahoo agreed to pay $30 million, according to a person familiar with the transaction.
D’Aloisio, who will join Yahoo along with some members of his team, has been building applications for handsets since he was 12, creating “gimmicky games” like a program that turned a phone into a treadmill for your fingers, he told Bloomberg Television today in an interview. His parents will keep the money from the sale in a trust fund for him, he said.
Summly, founded in 2011 as Trimit, counted Zynga Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Pincus, Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka- shing, as well as actors Ashton Kutcher and Stephen Fry among its early backers. Summly’s technology generates summaries of news items and helps users search for topics based on keywords. The company partnered with SRI International, a nonprofit research institute, to come up with the algorithm that automatically generates its blurbs.
“I was very agnostic in terms of talking to these companies,” D’Aloisio said. “I wanted to do what’s right for the technology. Yahoo is going to offer us the scale.”
The program has now been removed from Apple Inc.’s store and will be worked into multiple Yahoo products, according to a statement on Summly.com.
“Most articles and Web pages were formatted for browsing with mouse clicks,” Yahoo said on its blog. “The ability to skim them on a phone or a tablet can be a real challenge. We want easier ways to identify what’s important to us.”
Sara Gorman, a spokeswoman for Yahoo, and D’Aloisio declined to comment on the price.
Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer is focusing Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo on providing Web services that are customized for individual users, and aims to add engineers by buying small technology startups, she said on a conference call last year. Yahoo has acquired at least six such teams — including Jybe Inc., Stamped Inc., OntheAir, Snip.it and Alike – – since Mayer took over in July.
“Yahoo in my mind is one of these classic Internet companies and there is so much opportunity now that they have new leadership with Marissa Mayer,” D’Aloisio said. “There’s a massive opportunity in what they’re doing, which is taking technologies like Summly and allowing them to become used by hundreds of millions of people.”
Yahoo gained 0.3 percent to $23.45 at 10:53 a.m. in New York. The shares have risen 18 percent this year.
D’Aloisio said he’d like to continue building companies after a stint at Yahoo and is particularly interested in artificial intelligence technology, such as Apple Inc.’s Siri.
Mayer has said she sees the company building sites and technologies for daily activities such as checking e-mail and stock tickers. In January, she said she’s focused on technology that will personalize content from the Web and deliver it to people on their handheld devices.
“We think about how do we take the Internet and order it for you,” Mayer said.
