File this one under typical gripes of old, bitter newspaper employees.
According to the New York Times, a 17-year-old British dude who still has a year and a half left of high school just sold the news reading app he invented to Yahoo for an estimated $30 million. The app in question uses an algorithm that takes long-form stories and articles from newspapers and magazines and shortens them into bite-sized 400-character snippets for readers using smartphones, presumably so they won’t be too distracted while playing Angry Birds, taking selfy photos or tweeting about the OMG long lineup at Starbucks #epicfail.
To make matters worse, Nick D’Aloisio, the programming wiz behind the app, which is appropriately called Summly — cuz spelling out real words is lame and too time consuming — founded the company when he was just 15 and has received financial backing from such unlikely investors as Yoko Ono and Ashton Kutcher. If memory serves, when Kudos & Kvetches was 15 we were starting to experiment with Rockaberry Cooler and nearly failing math class while writing crude lyrics to Van Halen’s “Panama,” which we cleverly changed to “Hairy Palm.”
As with most popular web innovations that Yahoo acquires and subsequently makes worse (we’re looking at you, Flickr), the tech giant (?) plans to shut down Summly so it can incorporate the technology into Yahoo news products.
So just to reiterate, a 17-year-old British kid, along with investor Ashton Kutcher, are now millions of dollars richer because of an app that turns newspaper articles into 400 character info-nuggets so smartphone users don’t have to read so much. Or in the words of Summly: “Teenaged yahoo wizzes on Ashton Kutcher for $30-million computer called #hairypalm.”
