Thursday, 28 March 2013

Yahoo sale makes UK schoolboy millionaire



A British schoolboy's hobby has turned him into one of the youngest self-made multi-millionaires in the world.

Yahoo! announced on Monday that Nick D'Aloisio, 17, had sold his news-condensing mobile app Summly to the US tech giant for an undisclosed sum, reported to be £20m ($30m).

D'Aloisio created Summly when he was 15 as "a hobby" while revising for a history exam in London and it attracted financial backers including US actor Ashton Kutcher and Japanese artist Yoko Ono, widow of Beatles singer John Lennon.

D'Aloisio said that there were no copyright concerns about Summly, which works by running a statistical analysis of the text to guess which bits are the most relevant to cut the content down.

He said international media companies such as News Corporation had collaborated on making their content more Summly friendly and that shortening software would ultimately be a win-win for content providers.

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