17-year old kid’s app gets bought for 10s of millions

A British kid has struck lucky after Yahoo bought his application for a figure reported to be in the 10s of millions of dollars.

Nick D’Aloiso’s Summly app takes stories from the wire and summarises them, according to a report from the BBC.

As well as collecting stashes of cash from Yahoo, D’Aloiso has been hired by the company, which intends to use it in mobile products it will produce in the future.

Summly was launched when D’Aloiso was only 15 – Yahoo has also hired a number of the other Summly folk.  

Yahoo is interested in the app because it believes it takes a fresh lok at stories on the web.

In a note on the Summly blog, the lucky kid said: “Thank you to our wonderful users who have helped contribute to us receiving Apple’s Best Apps of 2012 award for Intuitive Touch! We will be removing Summly from the App Store today but expect our summarization technology will soon return to multiple Yahoo! products – see this as a ‘power nap’ so to speak.”