Big companies swallow little ones every day.
So the purchase on March 25 by Yahoo (annual revenue, $5 billion) of Summly, a British start-up (annual revenue, nil), for a reported $30 million normally would merit merely a shrug of the shoulders and some muttering about the curious economics of the Internet.
But the deal is worth noting for two reasons. One is that Summly's founder, Nick d'Aloisio, is only 17. This summer, he will be sitting for his college entrance exams like other teenagers.
He created an iPhone app to summarize articles in 300-400 words, ideal for the smartphone-user wondering what he should bother reading.
Li Ka-shing, a Hong Kong telecoms tycoon, invested money in the venture, having got wind of an early version of the app after tech blogs wrote about it, D'Aloisio says.
Actors (Ashton Kutcher, Stephen Fry), artists (Yoko Ono) and entrepreneurs (Mark Pincus, co-founder and boss of Zynga, a maker of games) also have chipped in, taking the sum outsiders invested in Summly to $1.5 million. D'Aloisio says that he remained the largest shareholder.
The second reason is that Summly is just the latest of a half-dozen start-ups snapped up by Yahoo in as many months. The Internet company also has bought Stamped, Alike and Jybe, which built apps for personalized recommendations of, among other things, books, food and music; OnTheAir, a video-chat company, and Snip.it, which created an app for curating and sharing articles.
Marissa Mayer, Yahoo's boss since July, says she is determined to make the company a stronger force on smartphones and tablets.
