At just 17, former Perth and Melbourne resident Nick
D'Aloisio is now one of the world's youngest self-made multimillionaires, after
tech giant Yahoo acquired his firm for a reported $28.7 million.
His technology Summly aims to change the way we read emails,
news articles or any other text on our computers and smartphones by using
algorithms to summarise text in under 400 characters.
Yahoo did not disclose the terms of the deal, but The Wall
Street Journal's AllThingsD blog said Yahoo would pay $US30 million ($28.7
million), mostly in cash, with 10 per cent in stock.
Before the Yahoo deal, D'Aloisio received a collective
$US1.5 million in investment funds from people including celebrities Ashton
Kutcher and Stephen Fry and billionaire Li Ka-shing.
Speaking from his family home in London, where he has lived
since leaving Australia when he was seven, D'Aloisio said he was excited about
the deal with Yahoo, believing it would help assist in developing the Summly
technology further and integrating it with Yahoo's offerings.
His technology summarises text using algorithmic
technologies, allowing for simplified dot point summaries of anything on the
web such as search results. It has many uses and could even be used to
summarise emails, social networking posts and product descriptions.
he deal with Yahoo will see his company's iPhone app Summly
shut down. D'Aloisio said the app had been downloaded almost 1 million times in
the past five months and generated about 90 million summaries.
While active it received Apple's Best Apps of 2012 award for
Intuitive Touch and had a contract to display content from News Corp
publications.
The purchase has led some in the media to question why Yahoo
would want to acquire the technology. Technology news website Wired suggested
it was so that Yahoo could be cool again.
The Summly app summarised news in under 400 words.
"There's no
logical explanation for Yahoo's reported $US30 million acquisition of
Summly," wrote Wired's Ryan Tate. "The team and technology are
unexceptional and the app itself will be shut down. What Yahoo really gets for
its big cheque is momentum and buzz. In other words, Yahoo bought Summly to
appear cool again."
D'Aloisio said it was "technically true" that he
was now a millionaire after sealing the Yahoo deal, but added that he had no
immediate plans to do anything with the money.
"Obviously the money is going to be in a fund and I'll
work with my parents to save it,' he said. "I'm just focused now on
working for Yahoo and kind of taking everything to the next level.
"I like shoes, I will buy a new pair of Nike trainers
and I'll probably get a new computer but at the moment I just want to save and
bank it. I don't have many living expenses," he told the London Evening
Standard.
D'Aloisio told Fairfax Media last year that he began his
journey with computers when he was eight, using Apple's movie making software
iMovie before progressing to the more professional video software Final Cut
Pro.
"I basically begged my parents for six months to get
[an Apple] computer," he said of his father, an investment banker, and his
mother, a lawyer. "And when I finally got it, instead of using it for just
watching videos or browsing the web, I kind of had an interest to create
things."
A lot of D'Aloisio's coverage in the media has been
positive, with some describing him as "telegenic" and a "wunderkind".
But the coverage wasn't always so glowing.
In 2011 an app writer for technology website Gizmodo, Casey
Chan, published D'Aloisio's Trimit app (now Summly) as "worst app of the
week" after D'Aloisio bombarded his office with emails.
"Over the course of a few days, D'Aloisio ... barraged
me with over a hundred emails about Trimit," Chan said in a post entitled
"How I made a 15-year-old app developer cry".
"I saw him go from calm to excited to a nervous wreck
..." (In comparison, Fairfax was sent six emails chasing up when last
year's article would be published.)
Asked for a response last year to the Gizmodo post,
D'Aloisio said his actions occurred at a "very early stage of
development". "Obviously I'm still learning and really excited about
everything that's happened with Summly," he said. "Dealing with the
current media attention is something I'm unexpectedly going to have to get used
to."
In a statement, Yahoo said it was excited to share that it
was acquiring Summly and that D'Aloisio and a team would join the technology
giant "in the coming weeks".
D'Aloisio will be based at Yahoo's central London office.
"At the age of 15, Nick D'Aloisio created the Summly
app at his home in London," Yahoo said in its statement. "It started
with an insight — that we live in a world of constant information and need new
ways to simplify how we find the stories that are important to us, at a
glance."
Yahoo said most articles and web pages were formatted for
browsing with mouse clicks and that "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".
Former Google executive Marissa Mayer took over at Yahoo in
July 2012 as part of efforts by the struggling internet search pioneer to
reinvent itself.
D'Aloisio said he was excited to be working with Mayer.
"The thing that's really exciting me about Yahoo is the
fact that Marissa Mayer is now their CEO, who is a product person," he
said.
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