This thing didn't work well at all. Strange acquisition. What's the dealio? Yahoo assisting not-so-smart investors from waking up with egg on their faces?
I worked on auto-summary-generation in the late 90s (I know I know, lawn, get off you shall) When I ragged on Summly elsewhere ("yet another example of people claiming genius inventions by under-18s that fall short upon closer inspection of the claims") I came across http://skimzee.com in a comment of an older guy who complained about the attention Summly generated.
Skimzee.com lacks the web 3.0 design finesse, and hipp-ly name, but does a very admirable job summarizing articles in various languages. Tried it out and was very impressed, simple interface, works on non-English languages as well. Deserving your attention/feedback.
(disclosure: have nothing to do with the site, but did communicate with the creator a couple of times. very smart older guy.)
After Marissa Mayer came in, I read that their acquisition strategy became to buy distressed companies with talent on the cheap. This fits that description.
I had this originally pegged at a acquihire on the sub $5M range. I wouldn't be surprised if getting to $30M requires some heavy rounding and a massively successful earn out of some kind. If it was $30M, then I think I'd want his VCs in my next round, because that is an amazing feat of corp dev.
The rumor is that they were raising another round at a big valuation which might explain this. They might have been play off Yahoo and the VCs looking to lead the round off each other. Still, a really high number for an app that doesn't seem to have much traction.
So my best guesses are:
1) $30M is basically a BS, "maybe they can get it in some crazy situation number"
2) $30M number is not real at all
3) They had some technology that was patented, hard to build, and was perceived to be super valuable to Yahoo but not obvious from the app itself
4) Something about having this "wiz kid" was really important to Yahoo's image
And it was definitely not:
-the product (being shut down)
-much of the team (only 3 are going with)
The lessons from (1) and (2) would be don't believe everything you hear. The lessons from (3) and (4) are that having great corp dev resources (VCs, advisors, etc) are worth a whole lot.
I agree. I really don't see the value beyond a few talented search engineers. They lost a lot of people with similar skills in the last few years. Nonetheless, this is a massive premium and I am not sure where the return on this investment will come from.
By way of update, word is that only 3 people, including Nick, are going over to Yahoo!. If this is accurate, I am unclear on the long term value of this deal.
I just looked at skimzee - looks like a nice site, but: for the few article summaries that I compared with the original article: the summary was just the first couple of paragraphs in the article.
Fiddle with the slider at the top. The default setting is rather limited. It works better on some sites than it does on others, mainly because distinguishing content from "other clutter" is a b*tch of a problem to solve.
The best way I've found to test this out is installing the bookmarklet (which for some odd reason is hidden in the settings page... see http://skimzee.com/settings.html )
I remember when this launched and people on here were ragging on it, because it seemingly used the most naïve NLP imaginable and seemed to be getting hype simply because the founder was 15. I never used the app, so I'm curious what the story behind this acquisition is. Did it get a lot better? Did Yahoo! get snowed (seems unlikely)? Talent acquisition?
d'Aloisio seems to have a attracted disproportionate mainstream press coverage and and unusually critical tech press attention considering his app's relatively low budget and short life, even for a youngster. Being expensively acquihired by Yahoo might not change that, but I guess the monetary reward at 17 gives him the last laugh
Congratulations, Yahoo! Now you own a slice of the smartphone apps pie.
Remember when you bought Geocities and Broadcast.com to have a slice of the dot com bubble pie? Remember when you bought Flickr and Delicious to have a slice of the Web 2.0 pie?
* * *
Good news for D’Aloisio: post-acqhiresition, founders of companies bought by Yahoo always seem to do well.
Not sure about other people's experiences however the app consistently produced inaccurate results for me and often had several nasty bugs. i.e. I would see HTML in bullet points because it wasn't parsing the page properly.
Although money isn't everything it's pretty note worthy in this case that the sale price was apparently around £30 million[1] which means he's now worth 8 figures, self-made money that he's too young to access. Heh.
Well, it seems he has gathered capital from a number of investors, which may want to be paid back:
"Angel Investors and Advisors include; Ashton Kutcher, Betaworks, Brian Chesky, Hosain Rahman, Jessica Powell, Joanna Shields, Josh Kushner, Mark Pincus, Matt Mullenweg, Seb Bishop, Shakil Khan, Spencer Hyman, Stephen Fry, Troy Carter, Vivi Nevo, Yoko Ono and many more. We are also working closely with News Corporation on the summarization of their content."
Fair play to him for doing this himself, but he wasn't exactly poor to begin with. A bit of googling shows the jobs his parents hold and an address on Parkside SW19 (which is one of the most expensive roads outside central London).
Slightly related, but I'm ecstatic about young developers building things like this. It shows a great aptitude for engineering, i.e. identifying and solving a problem or a need. It's even better that his product got acquired.
I hope that this can serve as yet another example of how important software and product development can in education.
It's an interesting purchase from Yahoo, I've used the app a few times on and off since it was released. It's fun, not sure how good it is at what it promises but it can always be tweaked up. Maybe it's a sign of Yahoo's slow realisation that there's money to be made in them thar mobile delivery platforms.
In my honest opinion Yahoo! acquired Summly for their launch video: https://vimeo.com/52014691
It's simply so cool. Yahoo! is nowhere near that cool. The experiment now is if buying cool makes you cool.
Premium domain names (of .com tld suffix) are nearly impossible to come by, and if you're interested in buying them some will literally run into the millions (last month I tried to engage with a domain seller... I was in my mind convinced that I'd pay up to $500 for the domain he owned, imagine my surprise when the guy gets back to me with a '$650,000' counter-offer). So now a lot of startups (without much funds) are flocking to .ly, .io, etc. domain suffixes, coming up with clever puns to name their startups, etc. all to avoid paying ridiculous amounts for domains. Yes, I don't exactly have a good opinion of people in this domain squatting business as you could have guessed.
The .ly domain name for startups has become somewhat of a fun fad, there isn't much rhyme or reason to it.
I worked on auto-summary-generation in the late 90s (I know I know, lawn, get off you shall) When I ragged on Summly elsewhere ("yet another example of people claiming genius inventions by under-18s that fall short upon closer inspection of the claims") I came across http://skimzee.com in a comment of an older guy who complained about the attention Summly generated.
Skimzee.com lacks the web 3.0 design finesse, and hipp-ly name, but does a very admirable job summarizing articles in various languages. Tried it out and was very impressed, simple interface, works on non-English languages as well. Deserving your attention/feedback.
(disclosure: have nothing to do with the site, but did communicate with the creator a couple of times. very smart older guy.)