Nick D'Aloisio: Summly
Summly — automatic news summaries; sold to Yahoo at 17.
Revising for exams, D'Aloisio found long articles slow to scan on a phone and built Trimit at 15, then Summly at 16: an app that condensed articles to about 400 characters by scoring sentences for information and coherence. He raised US$300,000 from Horizons Ventures at 15, brought in natural-language researchers from SRI International, and sold the company to Yahoo in March 2013 at 17 for a reported US$30 million. Yahoo folded the engine into Yahoo News Digest.
IP note
Co-inventor on US 9,916,309 B2 (priority Oct 2011, granted 2018), assigned to Yahoo Assets LLC.
Recognition
Yahoo acquisition ~US$30m 2013; WSJ Innovator of the Year 2013.
What this means for a student inventor in India
[Editor: 120–200 words connecting this story to the Indian route — Section 6 (any true inventor may apply), provisional vs complete specification, disclosure at fairs (Section 31), renewals, and who owns what when a school is involved. Link to the relevant MYCrave guide.]
Related young innovators
- Trisha Prabhu — ReThink
- Nilay Kulkarni — Ashioto
- Kavya Kopparapu — Eyeagnosis and GlioVision
Sources
[Editor: list the 2–4 primary sources from the research notes for this entry, with the date checked.]
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