Posted By LambChop
From Reuters:
File under: “There is no age discrimination with capitalism.”
Nick D'Aloisio, a 17-year-old London schoolboy sold his Smartphone news app to Yahoo for a reported $30 million. The terms of the sale, four months after the Summly app was launched for the iPhone, have not been fully disclosed. D'Aloisio is currently studying for school exams while joining Yahoo as its youngest employee.
"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 News.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 for now on his access to it.
Nick D'Aloisio taught himself to code at age 12 after Apple's App Store was launched, creating several apps including Facemood, a service which analyzed sentiment to determine the moods of Facebook users, and music discovery service- SongStumblr.
Later, D'Aloisio thought up the idea for the mobile app while correcting a history exam two years ago. He became frustrated with cumbersome Google searches and having to track separate websites while looking for the information he needed. He came up with the idea and created a prototype of an app that distils news stories into chunks of text readable on small Smartphone screens, powered by an algorithm that “trims” article to 400 characters.
The early version was backed by Horizons Ventures, a venture capital firm owned by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, which put in $250,000.That interest attracted other celebrity backers, among them Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher, British broadcaster Stephen Fry, artist Yoko Ono, the widow of Beatle John Lennon, and Rupert Murdoch.
Great story. Sadly, he'll only pocket roughly 2.5 million of that after the Inland Revenue Service gets through with him.
Posted by: German Shepherd | 03/26/2013 at 07:27 PM