Summly

Summly operated as a mobile application company that developed technology to automatically summarize news articles for mobile devices. The company was founded in 2011 by Nick D'Aloisio, who was 15 years old at the time and had taught himself to code. The initial idea stemmed from his frustration with reading long-form articles on a small screen while studying for exams.

The core of Summly's offering was an iOS application that used natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to condense news from various sources into concise, easy-to-read summaries. The technology was developed in collaboration with SRI International and other NLP experts. The app targeted mobile users who wanted to quickly scan and evaluate the importance of news stories before committing to reading the full text. The business did not have a revenue-generating model at the time of its major corporate event and was focused on user acquisition and product refinement.

The company's history began with an earlier app called Trimit, which D'Aloisio launched in March 2011 to condense text into shorter formats. Trimit gained the attention of investor Li Ka-Shing, leading to an initial seed funding of around $300,000. Leveraging this investment and user feedback, D'Aloisio redesigned the application, relaunching it as Summly in December 2011. The company later secured an additional $1 million in funding from a high-profile group of investors, including Horizons Ventures, Rupert Murdoch, Stephen Fry, Yoko Ono, and Ashton Kutcher. A key milestone was receiving Apple's 'Best Apps of 2012' award for Intuitive Touch.

In March 2013, Yahoo acquired Summly for a figure reported to be around $30 million. Following the acquisition, the Summly app was shut down, and D'Aloisio and his team joined Yahoo to integrate the summarization technology into Yahoo's mobile products. This technology became a foundational element of the Yahoo News Digest app, which launched in 2014 and provided users with curated news summaries twice a day. Yahoo News Digest was eventually discontinued in June 2017 as part of a broader strategy shift by Yahoo's new parent company, Verizon.

Keywords: news summarization, mobile news, natural language processing, automatic summarization, content aggregation, AI technology, text condensation, mobile application, Nick D'Aloisio, Yahoo acquisition, SRI International, Horizons Ventures, news digest, content discovery, short-form content, information consumption, machine learning, algorithmic curation, app development, news technology