It's not even five programmers - according to the news, only the founder and 2 employees are joining Yahoo. This is acquisition is fantastic news for the founder, but I'm still at a loss on how it can possibly be a good business decision for Yahoo.

I don't believe in "publicity" and "getting in the news" and "making Yahoo hip again" - for $30m, you could do much better. I don't really believe it's for talent either - they could have found much bigger and better mobile teams for that money if they wanted to.

The only two hypotheses that seem plausible to me are:

* SRI accidentally granted Summly a too broad and cheap license for their summarisation technology, and it's cheaper than licensing from SRI directly.

* The 17-year-old founder's parent is a Morgan Stanley executive, and the startup has high-profile investors. Some M&A exec at Yahoo went golfing with one of the investors, and decided to help an old friend cash out on his investment. The rest of the deal is just a side effect.