Yahoo Buys 17-Year-Old Developer’s App For $30 Million

Nick D’Aloisio is not an MIT computer science graduate; in fact, he’s still in high school. The 17-year-old Brit taught himself to write software at the age of 12. He began by creating an application that cuts news stories down to 140 characters, making them Twitter-friendly. Then at age 15, he took his idea further by creating his application, Summly. Summly sorts news stories by topic and aggregates the significant bits into a summary which is ideal for phone display.

On Monday, Yahoo reportedly purchased the application for $30 million! The application, which has had over 1 million downloads since its launch, was removed from the App Store. Reportedly, Yahoo does not plan to continue running the application. So why did Yahoo spend such a significant amount of cash only to shut the app down?

Yahoo is in a redevelopment stage. Constantly competing with Google and Microsoft has to be one of the most burdensome corporate challenges ever. However, Nick D’Aloisio may have just given Yahoo a leg up on their competition. Yahoo plans to hire Nick and his team (while they finish their classes, of course) and utilize their expertise with the cutting edge technology they created. It will be interesting to see what this type of collaboration will lead to for Yahoo and their new prodigy-hires.