Yahoo Acquires Summly

  • Summly Team to be integrated into Yahoo
  • Uses natural language processing and algorithm
  • Summly to shut down soon

Yahoo announced today that it has acquired Summly, an iOS app that aggregates news feeds from different sources and at the same time shortens each story into a 400 summary that is easily consumed by re

  • Summly Team to be integrated into Yahoo
  • Uses natural language processing and algorithm
  • Summly to shut down soon

Yahoo announced today that it has acquired Summly, an iOS app that aggregates news feeds from different sources and at the same time shortens each story into a 400 summary that is easily consumed by readers.

The app was first launched in December 2011 as a tech summarization prototype and was founded by 17-year old Nick D’Aloisio. Last year the company raised over US$1.5 million from different investors including Horizons Ventures, betaworks, Shakil Khan, and Matt Mullenweg to name a few. The app has enjoyed considerable success on iOS with an all-time user rating of four stars before it was finally pulled from the Apple app store today.

According to reports, the acquisition cost of Summly is somewhere close to $30 million, with the members of the Summly team being absorbed by Yahoo over the next few months. Moreover, Yahoo has already announced that the acquisition would spell the end of the Summly app as the service will be integrated into Yahoo’s mobile experience in the future.

In a short note posted on Summly’s website, its CEO and founder Nick D’Aloisio announced Yahoo’s acquisition of the app and thanked the company’s investors, advisors, development team and of course the users that contributed to the success of Summly. He also mentioned that the app will be pulled out from the app store but reassures users that the technology will soon be available in multiple Yahoo products.

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