Just do it, says Yahoo! Inc's teen app millionaire

The 17-year-old London schoolboy has reportedly sold a smartphone news app to Yahoo for $30 mn

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 has just sold his smartphone news app to Yahoo! Inc 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.

The terms of the sale, four months after Summly was launched for the iPhone, have not been disclosed and D’Aloisio, still studying for school exams while joining Yahoo! as its youngest employee, refused to divulge. But technology blog AllThingsD said Yahoo! paid him roughly $30 million.

D’Aloisio said he was the majority owner of Summly and would now invest the money from the sale, though his age imposes legal limits on his access to it for now. “I’m happy with that and working with my parents to go through that whole process,” he said.

D’Aloisio, who lives in London’s prosperous Wimbledon suburb, highlights the support of family and school, which gave him time off, and, critically, the ideas that came with enthusiastic financial backers.

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 distills 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, powered by an algorithm that automatically boiled 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 added up to the publicity when Summly launched in November 2012, but the backers brought more than just cash for the app, downloaded close to a million times. “It’s been super-exciting, (the investors) found out about it in 2012, once the original investment from Li Ka-shing had gone public,” said D’Aloisio. “They all believed in the idea, but they all offered different experiences to help us out.”
APP-LAUSE FOR THE WHIZZ

• At age 12, Nick D’Aloisio taught himself to code after Apple’s App Store was launched
• For Apple, he created several apps, including Facemood, a service which analysed sentiment to determine the moods of Facebook users, and music discovery service SongStumblr.
• His Summly, which he calls “automatic summarisation algorithm”, one that “can take pre-existing long-form content and summarise it”, officially came online last November.
• Star investors of Summly include Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, Wendi Murdoch, Ashton Kutcher and Yoko Ono