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Comment by nicholassmith | Hacker News Reader

It makes perfect sense, they've got some technology out of it, some people who understand mobile, and a nice big headline.

Worth $30m of my money? Probably not. Worth $30m of Yahoo's money? Maybe, they're not likely to have decided to spend that much on an acquihire without board approval really are they. Unless they Zuckerberg'd it and thought it was better to seek forgiveness.

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The summarization tech isn't owned by Summly. It's owned by SRI International and was licensed to Summly. Maybe a large chunk of the reported $30 million was actually used to acquire that technology from SRI?

I actually didn't know about this before. I think one of the first article I read about the product was the story when the product was called TrimIt, and the company just received some investment from Li Ka Shing. For some reason, the articles[1][2][3] gave me the impression that the technology was developed by the founder (or did they switched the algorithms?)

[1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2011/12/13/teenage-pr... [2]: http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/15/trimit-summarizes-emails-bl... [3]: http://gigaom.com/2011/12/13/meet-the-internets-newest-boy-g...

A good answer.

Here's my conspiracy theory - Summly has a very nice contract with SRI that gives them full usage forever and is transferable to Yahoo. Yahoo tries to license the tech from SRI directly and realize it will cost them 20 mil a year based on their heavy usage. So instead they buy Summly for the SRI tech at a discount.

Annnd that's about the only way this makes sense to em.

There is nothing that I can see on Summly's site to suggest that they own their technology. That is, the piece of technology that creates a summary of an article does appear to be licensed from SRI.com

Maybe it was just quicker/cheaper for Yahoo! to buy Summly and their license than to negotiate their own license off SRI?

Also free advertising. The BBC had "teenage entrepreneur sells amazing app to yahoo" plastered all over it yesterday.

Free as in "costs $30m"? Not to get into who is this advertisement aimed at, and what kind of image value can Yahoo derive from it.

All the best free stuff costs millions :)

Yeah I guess that is a bit of a non-sequitur, but you can't pay to get coverage on the BBC news page (AFAICT) so it sort of works.

Will anyone really remember it tomorrow though? Nope.

What is a "people who understand mobile"?

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