A fairytale ending for Summly

It really is a modern-day fairytale. Boy learns to code, creates innovative tech product and then becomes rich overnight after being bought out by a multi-million dollar internet company.

And while the whole saga seems rather unlikely and larger than life, but that’s exactly what’s happened in the case of 17-year-old Nick D'Aloisio – an Australian-born, London-based high-schooler who has just become Yahoo’s youngest employee.

Yahoo has bought his company Summly for a reported £18 million ($A26 million) and in doing so completely transformed the young programmer’s life.

When you take a look at his product, it’s no wonder Marissa Mayer and her team at Yahoo took an interest in D’Aloisio.

Summly is a sleek content aggregator that collates stories from a raft of news and commentary sites. It then provides users with a snippet of each piece to help them get a broad overview of the news – an essential tool in an era where the overflow of media content threatens to drive even the most placid news follower to the brink of insanity.

It’s a perfect fit when you consider how Yahoo’s COO Henrique De Castro explained the company’s content aggregation strategy to AllThingsD.

“The winners…are the ones who will aggregate premium quality content at scale, and distribute it in a personalised way,” he says.

D'Aloisio has already garnered fame for his creation (which he started when he was just 15). He won Apple’s 2012 Best App award and also featured on a video with international celebrity Stephen Fry spruiking his creation.

Past success aside, there is a question mark over the future of D'Aloisio’s Summly product. For those of you who have just heard about the creation, and want to download it, don’t bother. As D'Aloisio said on his product’s blog, the app is currently taking a “power nap” and has been pulled from the iTunes store.

It will be interesting to see whether Summly resurfaces as an independent app, or whether it’s subsumed into Yahoo’s overall offering. Though, the most likely outcome is that both services will continue to exist and Yahoo will tap into D'Aloisio’s expertise when it comes to revamping its own news aggregation system.

It’s also worth noting that Yahoo isn’t alone in its race to provide the best aggregated news service. LinkedIn recently bought Pulse – another news aggregation app – for a reported $US50 million, showing that there is a definite appetite for such start-ups.

While it’s all good news at the moment, there may be storm clouds on the horizon for news aggregation. A US court recently found news monitoring company Meltwater in breach of the fair use of content for creating and then monetising a tailored news aggregation service.

Then there’s also a push in France and Germany for huge aggregators like Google and Yahoo to pay a fee for featuring any publication’s content on their service. Such cries for funds may get louder as the shifting advertising market continues to squeeze many media companies to the brink.

But enough with the negatives – for what it’s worth this is still very much as close to a fairytale as we’re going to get in this modern age. To give you an idea of just how far Summly and D'Aloisio have come we have included an infographic on the product’s success below.

Click to enlarge