15 and Rich

 

Two years ago, at 15, Nick D'Aloisio came up with the idea for a mobile-phone application at his parents' home in London.

This week, at 17, he became a millionaire after selling his app, called Summly, to Yahoo.

Yahoo announced the deal for Summly, which makes it easier to read news on smaller screens, without disclosing financial details. But the purchase price was reportedly $30 million.

D'Aloisio, who will join Yahoo along with some members of his team, has been building applications for handsets since he was 12, creating "gimmicky games" like a program that turned a phone into a treadmill for your fingers, he said Tuesday.

While he declined to discuss the sale price, he said his parents - his dad is an energy financier, his mother is a lawyer - will help him manage the financial windfall (he says all he wants is a new computer and pair of Nike trainers).

Summly, founded in 2011 as Trimit, counted Zynga Chief Executive Officer Mark Pincus, Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, as well as actors Ashton Kutcher and Stephen Fry, among its early backers.

Summly's technology generates summaries of news items and helps users search for topics based on keywords. The company partnered with SRI International, a nonprofit research institute, to come up with the algorithm that automatically generates its blurbs.

"I was very agnostic in terms of talking to these companies," D'Aloisio said. "I wanted to do what's right for the technology. Yahoo is going to offer us the scale."

The free app has been removed from Apple's store and will be worked into multiple Yahoo products, according to a statement on Summly.com.

Before it was pulled from the app store, Summly had been downloaded nearly 1 million times. It had deals with 250 online publishers, including News Corp., and 10 employees in London.

D'Aloisio, who took a break from school for six months to focus full time on Summly, will join Yahoo's London office while continuing his studies in the evenings and living at home with his parents. He says Yahoo plans to integrate Summly into all sorts of mobile experiences.

"The real idea is to take the core of the technology and find different fits for it and make it as ubiquitous as possible on the Web," he said. "We want to take summarization and build beautiful content experiences around it."

"Most articles and Web pages were formatted for browsing with mouse clicks," Yahoo said on its blog. "The ability to skim them on a phone or a tablet can be a real challenge. We want easier ways to identify what's important to us."

Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer is focusing the Sunnyvale company on providing Web services that are customized for individual users, and intends to add engineers by buying small technology startups, she said last year. Yahoo has acquired at least six such teams since Mayer took over in July.

"Yahoo in my mind is one of these classic Internet companies and there is so much opportunity now that they have new leadership with Marissa Mayer," D'Aloisio said. "There's a massive opportunity in what they're doing, which is taking technologies like Summly and allowing them to become used by hundreds of millions of people."

Investors seemed to like the deal. Yahoo gained nearly a percent to close at $23.59 Tuesday. The shares have risen 18 percent this year.

D'Aloisio said he'd like to continue building companies after a stint at Yahoo and is particularly interested in artificial intelligence technology, such as Apple's Siri.     Read more: