Yahoo buys Summly news app from teenager for £18m 
A 17-year-old London schoolboy has sold his app company to the internet giant Yahoo for an estimated £18m. But he won't be moving to the company's California headquarters just yet … because he wants to finish his A-levels.
Nick D'Aloisio, from Wimbledon, south London, created the app, called Summly – which provides bite-sized summaries of content from news and other sites – a little over a year ago from his bedroom and now joins an elite group of teenagers who have become internet millionaires.
D'Aloisio, who is still too young to be a director of his own firm, said he had begun tinkering with apps for mobile devices as a hobby and had not expected to profit from it.
The price tag is understood to be £18m, 90% in cash and 10% in Yahoo shares, though other reports suggested the total could be up to £40m. Neither D'Aloisio nor Yahoo would confirm the details of the deal.
His mother, Diana D'Aloisio, appeared to still be somewhat in shock. "I knew he was a little out of the box, but I didn't expect it to happen all of a sudden like this," she said. "From a young age he displayed abilities in technologies I frankly didn't understand. He was doing 3D programming, and we bought him a book called C Programming For Dummies. My husband and I just used our computers for work, he was doing totally different stuff."
D'Aloisio began using computers at the age of nine, making films, and then moved to programming at the age of 12 when Apple opened its App Store for the iPhone. The teenager's success comes less than five years after he released his first app, called Fingermill, an onscreen virtual treadmill for fingers.
The student is taking maths and philosophy A-levels at King's College school, and trying to decide whether the third one should be physics or history. "He still wants to go to Oxford University," his mother said.
D'Aloisio got the idea for the app in 2011 when revising for his exams and finding himself frustrated with web pages that broadly repeated the same content. He produced an early version of Summly, called Trimit, which was downloaded more than 200,000 times.
Maths Careers
A 2009 Survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers – which looked at American students’ job prospects after leaving university found that – “The top 15 highest-earning college degrees all have one thing in common — math skills.”
“Math is at the crux of who gets paid,” said Ed Koc, director of research at NACE. “If you have those skills, you are an extremely valuable asset.”
Maths Careers
According to a comprehensive careers survey by Careers Cast – which looked at over 200 different jobs and ranked them for stress, pay, job stability and work environment – 6 of the top 10 jobs require or strongly prefer maths graduates or those with a good mathematical background.
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