Yahoo! snaps up British teen Nick D’Aloisio’s Summly app for tens of millions

The 17-year-old from Wimbledon, South London, is the founder of Summly, an app that summarises news stories from media websites. Yesterday he announced that he had sold the start-up to Yahoo!, turning him into one of the world’s youngest self-made multimillionaires.

Though the two sides have not disclosed the terms of the deal, the acquisition is thought to be worth about $30million. But Mr D’Aloisio does not feel ready to spend his fortune. “It’s in a trust fund,” he said. “I’m not thinking about the money. That wasn’t my motivation. With the deal, it was about what’s the best company to take Summly to the next level. I think that’s Yahoo!”

Summly condenses long webpages into text bullet points, which can be read easily on phones. The company’s huge valuation comes despite its small size. The free app has been downloaded about one million times, a relatively low number compared with other bestsellers. Summly has a staff of about five but has no way of making money.

But Mr D’Aloisio has built his start-up like a veteran. A student at King’s College School in Wimbledon, he had to ask teachers last year to delay his mock GCSE exams to travel to California to seek investors. He secured more than $1.4 million funding, picking up prominent backers such as Li Ka-shing, one of the world’s richest men, the actors Ashton Kutcher and Stephen Fry and, in Silicon Valley, Mark Pincus, of Zynga, and Brian Chesky, of Airbnb.

The investment allowed Summly to create a more sophisticated app; the company had deals with about 250 online publishers, including News Corporation, parent company of The Times and The Australian.

Mr D’Aloisio toured television studios yesterday. He said that he had been inspired to create Summly aged 15 while studying for history exams, seeking a better way to absorb large amounts of information. The only moment he betrayed nervousness was in contemplating his fame. “I realised that when we became one of the trending topics on Twitter today,” he said. “If anything comes of this, I just want to see more young entrepreneurs.”

Mr D’Aloisio is studying for his A levels and hopes to go to university. He lives with his father, Lou Montilla, who works at Morgan Stanley, and mother, Diana D’Aloisio, a lawyer. “I’d like to do another company in the future,” he said. “But for now, I want to take Yahoo!’s content and make it really beautiful and great.”

He does have one new purchase in mind. “It’s a bit of a esoteric one, but I want a shoulder bag,” he said. “It’s more that I’ve not had time to buy one yet. It’s been a hectic week.”

 

The Times

Zynga loosens Facebook ties

Online game publisher Zynga has relaunched its website, allowing users to play its games without first signing on to Facebook, a significant step toward establishing its independence from Facebook.

The relaunch of Zynga.com is the latest step in the slow dissolution of a special partnership that once bound two of the most influential players in the social Internet industry.

Tim Catlin, general manager of Zynga.com, told Reuters he believed Zynga’s players wanted to create unique player names that were not tied to their Facebook accounts, which displays their real names.

“You had to use your Facebook account to play previously, but this is going to change going forward,” said Catlin, who added that existing players will still be able to log in with their Facebook accounts.

New players, however, will be able to easily sign up without using Facebook credentials – long a hallmark of many Zynga games.

“We’ve been able to greatly streamline that process,” Catlin said of the new Zynga.com website, which has been in the works for the past year.

Founded in 2007, Zynga achieved a searing growth rate in its early years by exclusively tapping Facebook’s network to gain new users while offering games directly within Facebook.com web pages.

For several years the companies enjoyed a lucrative and symbiotic relationship, with Zynga deriving close to 90 per cent of its revenues from Facebook games, while Facebook received roughly 15 per cent of its income in the form of fees from Zynga.

But Zynga’s competitive advantage on the world’s largest social network gradually shrank as other publishers entered the market, and the company’s leadership has been faulted for not diversifying away from Facebook’s platform earlier.

Last year, Facebook and Zynga announced that they agreed to amend a long-standing deal that had given Zynga special privileges on the Facebook platform.

Rather than relying on Facebook’s communications features, Zynga has focused on building out features of its own such as its “social stream,” a bar that is displayed within games to connect players to each other.

– Reuters