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Yahoo buys Summly... and shuts it

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It's attracted the attention of the world's richest men, including Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing, now Yahoo has announced its acquisition of news reading application Summly, along with the hiring of its young entrepreneur Nick D'Aloisio.British-born D'Aloisio founded Summly from his bedroom at the ripe old age of 15. That was two years ago.The app allows users to read concise summaries of online news content from a string of publishers including The Guardian, BBC, Business Insider, Forbes and News Corporation.Early interest in the technology saw News Corp founder Rupert Murdoch and a host of celebrities from Ashton Kutcher, Stephen Fry and Zynga founder Mark Pincus back D'Aloisio's idea that news-gathering was broken and good apps were needed to fix news aggregation.D'Aloisio also found early support from Li Ka-shing and his Hong Kong-based investment company, Horizons Ventures.From today, the Summly app will be effectively shut down and Yahoo said it plans to use Summly's summarization technology across multiple Yahoo products.Yahoo did not disclose its acquisition price but said D'Aloisio and his team would join the company in coming weeks.A brief statement from D'Aloisio said he was thrilled to continue his mission with Yahoo's global scale and expertise."With over 90 million summaries read in just a few short months, this is just the beginning for our technology."As we move towards a more refined, liberated and intelligent mobile web, summaries will continue to help navigate through our ever expanding information universe."

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