17 Year Old Sells His iPhone App to Yahoo for £20M.

So, surely the majority of you have heard this big story at some point today or yesterday. I put the sell price as £20M because that's the current estimation, and what most articles are going with. However, in the quote below it does mention that a purchase price has not been disclosed.

Quote:

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An app created by a British teenager has been snapped up by internet giant Yahoo in a deal thought to be worth "dozens of millions" of pounds.
Yahoo purchased the Summly app, which summarises news stories from popular media companies, from its 17-year-old creator Nick D'Aloisio.
The price of purchasing the app has not been disclosed, but industry experts have suggested it could be between £20 million and £40 million.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoesGw-RYvg




Not too sure as to why it says he's 16 in that video, but that's it. First app when he was 12. Not half bad, I say.

Regarding the application, from what I understand it takes large news article and summarizes them into a set of characters that fits onto your phone screen. Basically avoids the boring and lengthy parts, and puts it into a summary that news readers want to see.

So its an app that creates an option " tl;dr ".

Wow, lucky him. I'd be a happy person too if I had 20m.

An app. for women, then?

The app is pretty useful actually, he's one lucky kid but he deserves it. His idea, his app, nothing to say her, good going champ.

And then the content providers turn around and demand a cut of the advert revenue, and yahoo gets fucked over again. He's lucky to be getting out while he still can imo.

As far as I can tell there's nothing innovative in it, and it's completely open for someone else to rip it off if they wanted. And hell any company which is using another companies content is destined to fail at some point, because the content owner has all the power.

Cool thing, and it's an interesting idea for an app, however just like Robert says, this might not really make it that far to be honest.
However, very cool and innovative, and seeing as he is so young, he could go a lot further and come up with some really cool things in the future :).

£20M ??????? oh man !!! what the world !!! LOL
that mean this dude is a pro guy !!! respect !

While we are sitting on RZ he's probably sitting on a couple million... Haha how's it make ya feel?

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Originally Posted by Crum

While we are sitting on RZ he's probably sitting on a couple million... Haha how's it make ya feel?

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I'm happy for him.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Crum

While we are sitting on RZ he's probably sitting on a couple million... Haha how's it make ya feel?

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He was already luxuriously wealthy. A few million mean nothing to people who have hundreds of them already.

But the story you're paraphrasing is meant to create hype, surely to try to upsell this for Yahoo's sake.

The real story is that around 12, Nick learned how to code which isn't abnormally young, so it's nothing to write home about. At 15, instead of just making shit for himself like everyone else who learns to code early on, he had an idea to tldr long articles. His initial implementation was generally considered completely worthless and the app itself was quite terrible as many users have pointed out. So he didn't do anything really amazing.

What is amazing is that at 15, because his family is very wealthy/connected, due to his age, they were able to drum up media attention about the idea. They sold the idea, not the implementation. Then they got investors involved to improve things. Along with this, they hired a lot of really senior people in the field and hired a research company called SRI to do most of the R&D into developing an algorithm to do significantly better than the really crappy application he had written. Now we're talking about a company burning multiple millions per year on staffing costs and R&D contracts alone -- and it's not known whether they kept the patents or SRI got to keep the patents (that's up to the contract that isn't public).

So a few years later, with a lot of talent acquired and enormous amounts of money pumped into the company, they have something that most people are reviewing as "not that good." The idea is a pretty good idea, and someone can probably do a lot better, but it is far from what the media hype would have you believe. The kid did not sell his app for $xx million. His app was basically trashed years ago. The kid sold his company for $xx million. A company built largely from affluence and being well connected, with a decent idea and a barely passable implementation.

It's entirely unclear what Yahoo wants from this purchase. The technology isn't that impressive in its current state -- and it's probably patented by SRI so Yahoo would still have to pay licensing fees (which raises the question: why purchase a company when you can just license the patents independently and have much more capable engineers implement them). Nick himself is being lauded as some kind of superstar programmer but there's no evidence whatsoever to support these claims. He's had less than 5 years experience coding at all -- I've never met someone with 5 years experience in coding that could engineer even simple things very well, and it sounds like this application was only built very well after a team of very experienced engineers was procured. So Yahoo either did it for the talent of the team, or for the story, or a little bit of both.

But it's still a bad move either way. I see this as a terrible purchase by Yahoo, since the application is largely vaporware, hyped by the news and celebrity connections created by the founder's affluence, not by the product itself. The team took a good idea and made a barely passable implementation -- not a sign of world-class anything. And any algorithms are probably tied up in patents. So they paid $xx million to buy a few engineers, a bunch of executives (this company has a very high executive:engineer ratio, which indicates something very fishy about funding, and likely means > 80% of the company's valuation is tied up in like 4 people rather than those who actually built it). This would piss me off if I were a Yahoo employee, and it's summarily not impressing the tech community, with almost every response on HN and other tech news sites being net negative, both towards Nick and Yahoo. What a miserable failure.

But cool, the rich kid and his executive team of mid-50 something talentless morons all got a few million dollars. How exciting.

A better story: What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly :: Hacking, Distributed

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Robert

As far as I can tell there's nothing innovative in it, and it's completely open for someone else to rip it off if they wanted. And hell any company which is using another companies content is destined to fail at some point, because the content owner has all the power.

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From the short description I can only gather that he himself ripped it off. It's probably a really well executed rip-off, but these things are pretty basic.

EDIT: never mind.

-Sent from my mobile-

After thinking about this for a while I must conclude that this kid's idea simply doesn't make any sense. This app's purpose is to gather news sources and summarize them into shorter ones. This lets the users save time by reading less and implies that in the end you can get more out of less. The problem is, it is too good to be true and at the same time it is a dreadful and appalling service since it is beaten by the most basic pieces of an article, the title of the article itself. In order for this software to be of any use it must assume that people don't want to read an article even though they clicked on it. It also assumes that people don't know how to skim over the parts they don't want to read and that is a very big assumption.

How could a company that has been delivering articles around the clock for years not about such crucial piece of information such as the purpose of a title? Well, the answer is they know it very well and they also know a lot about finance. Surprisingly, their stock trend has remained in a steady increase after they purchased another start-up a week ago and after this has happened.

Well, what a coincidence! Congratulations Yahoo!