Britain: Boy Sells Phone App to Yahoo for $30 Million
March 26th, 2013Maybe someone will make an app that turns Cryptogon posts into Haiku and sell it for big bucks! 🙂
Paper money doom
Spooks monitor internets
Best go milk the goat
Eh? Eh? Get those checkbooks out.
Via: Reuters:
Got a tech idea and want to make a fortune before you’re out of your teens? Just do it, is the advice of the London schoolboy who’s just sold his smartphone news app to Yahoo for a reported $30 million.
The money is there, just waiting for clever new moves, said 17-year-old Nick D’Aloisio, who can point to a roster of early backers for his Summly app that includes Yoko Ono and Rupert Murdoch.
“If you have a good idea, or you think there’s a gap in the market, just go out and launch it because there are investors across the world right now looking for companies to invest in,” he told Reuters in a telephone interview late on Monday.
…
He had first dreamt up the mobile software while revising for a history exam two years ago, going on to create a prototype of the app that distils news stories into chunks of text readable on small smartphone screens.
He was inspired, he said, by the frustrating experience of trawling through Google searches and separate websites to find information when revising for the test.
Trimit was an early version of the app, which is powered by an algorithm that automatically boils down articles to about 400 characters. It caught the eye of Horizons Ventures, a venture capital firm owned by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, which put in $250,000.
That investment attracted other celebrity backers, among them Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher, British broadcaster Stephen Fry, artist Ono, the widow of Beatle John Lennon, and News Corp media mogul Murdoch.
That all added up to maximum publicity when Summly launched in November 2012, but the backers brought more than just cash for an app that has been downloaded close to a million times.
Oh, come on now… how long have you been sitting on that BRILLIANT haiku? Just waiting for a chance to trot it out, weren’t you? Sums up Cryptogon perfectly. Bravo.