Yahoo has paid a 17-year-old boy £18 million (US$27 million) for his mobile app and now plans to shut it down.
As part of chief executive Marissa Mayer’s repositioning strategy, one of the world’s first web giants is making a series of company purchases aimed at the booming smartphone market.
The latest purchase is Summly, which provides bite-sized summaries of content from news and other sites, and was founded and developed by 17-year-old London schoolboy Nick D’Aloisio. The app tailors the news alerts to fit into a single smartphone screen.
Despite D’Aloisio being too young to be a director of his own firm he has managed to negotiate a deal which will see him receive £18 million (90 per cent in cash and 10 per cent in Yahoo shares).
He told the Guardian: “It was spending time on the [Yahoo] campus. Marissa Mayer wants to reinvent the company, and they have a big opportunity. They have a really strong focus on mobile and taking daily habits and reinventing them for a mobile device. I can’t wait to work on that level.”
The app launched in November 2012 and the company says 90 million summaries have already been read.
However, as part of the acquisition it will be shut down to be integrated into Yahoo’s business.
D’Aloisio has chosen to work from Yahoo’s London offices rather than move State-side and plans to finish his higher education.
His mother, Diana D’Aloisio, said: “I knew he was a little out of the box, but I didn’t expect it to happen all of a sudden like this.
“From a young age he displayed abilities in technologies I frankly didn’t understand. He was doing 3D programming, and we bought him a book called C Programming For Dummies. My husband and I just used our computers for work, he was doing totally different stuff.”
