Summly

Yahoo! agrees to acquire Summly

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:02:12 +0000

In true Summly fashion, I will keep this short and sweet.

I am delighted to announce Summly has signed an agreement to be acquired by Yahoo!. Our vision is to simplify how we get information and we are thrilled to continue this mission with Yahoo!’s global scale and expertise. After spending some time on campus, I discovered that Yahoo! has an inspirational goal to make people’s daily routines entertaining and meaningful, and mobile will be a central part of that vision. For us, it’s the perfect fit.

When I founded Summly at 15, I would have never imagined being in this position so suddenly. I’d personally like to thank Li Ka-Shing and Horizons Ventures for having the foresight to back a teenager pursuing his dream. Also to our investors, advisors and of course the fantastic team for believing in the potential of Summly. Without you all, this never would have been possible. I’d also like to thank my family, friends and school for supporting me.

Most importantly, thank you to our wonderful users who have helped contribute to us receiving Apple’s Best Apps of 2012 award for Intuitive Touch! We will be removing Summly from the App Store today but expect our summarization technology will soon return to multiple Yahoo! products - see this as a ‘power nap’ so to speak.

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.

Sincerely,

Nick

Founder

Summly's first month in numbers

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 09:52:47 +0000

Today we are proud to announce some new stats one month after we launched Summly on iPhone. We are excited to keep building the product over the current months and expand to other platforms and languages. We’d like to thank our users for their continued support and feedback.

Happy Thanksgiving! Some goodies in today's update.

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 20:07:17 +0000

We have been listening to all of your feedback! Please keep sending it in.

Today we are releasing v2.0.2 of Summly which is our biggest update yet. We have added lots of features and fixed some critical bugs from launch.

Features Added:

- Tapping on a category tile now takes you back to the last summary you were on.

- Each category tile now has 30 summaries instead of just 20 by default, allowing you to read more summarized content!

- Browse all unread summaries on the app by pressing on right of the coverpage tile.

- Unread summaries are now a different colour in the headline view (by pressing on right of tile)

Bug Fixes:

- Saving of custom settings and sources will now always be saved to the server; have changed subscription process.

- Green tiles are now refreshing on a 24 hour cycle with new content; will become more regular in the next few days with keywords with a higher distribution being refreshed on a greater frequency.

- Bug fixes and optimizations.

Summly Update/v 1.0.1

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 21:11:29 +0000

Summly has been featured in over 48 countries as Apple’s Editor’s Choice (App of the Week). Summly is/has been the Number 1 news app in over 40 countries and made the top of the UK App Store. Thank you for your support!

Summly v1.0.1 is now live! Here is what is new:

- ability to receive push notifications on news (will be activated

- you can now refresh all tiles for new content with a single swipe of the coverscreen tile

- improved Twitter sharing functionality

- fixes double posting to Facebook

- minor bug fixes to increase stability

Update From the Team

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 16:56:58 +0000

Thanks to everyone from the Summly team.

The response has been overwhelming in the past 24 hours. We are humbled by the acceptance of Summly as a new and innovative solution for news on mobile.

We are currently experiencing some minor problems handling the demand and you can trust that these problems will be fixed very soon.

Appreciate your interest and look forward to making our app better and better.

Stay tuned! We’ll keep you posted.

Nick

Summly: the story behind the summary

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 09:25:00 +0000

In early 2011 I was sitting at home, trying to study for my upcoming exams. I was using the Internet to find more information about a particular subject, and was finding that I kept clicking through to websites that in the end didn’t have the information I needed. I wondered why there wasn’t a better way for people to preview information before they did a deep dive.

This frustration got me interested in summarization technology. I read up on natural language processing (NLP) and machine translation—the two key areas contributing to summarization efforts—and tried my hand at an early prototype. The demo let people enter a web site’s URL and receive a summary of the content.

I was particularly interested in mobile news—it’s a really poor experience, full of lots of waiting and frustration. Plus, at the risk of saying something obvious: the news is really important! And I don’t feel like my generation is engaging with it as it should, in part because most of our life is digital and existing technologies don’t necessarily do the best job of engaging us with news content. So I was hoping to build something that could help.

Today I’m proud to announce the launch of the new Summly. The best way to consume news on any mobile device in the world. Summly provides ‘pocket sized news’ which consists of automatically generated summaries from news articles across the web. We have built a technology with the world’s leading NLP experts that can produce summaries for any screen size algorithmically. We have also introduced a new standard of mobile user interface and experience design, with a unique gesture navigation and minimalistic approach.

With Summly, you can:

Quickly browse summaries of articles from hundreds of news sources
Customise news to the topics, keywords, and news sources that most interest you
Share summaries with friends through social channels, SMS, and email
Easily navigate news stories using innovative design and gestures

The last 12 months have been an exciting journey and I have been very overwhelmed by the support I have received. Our angel investors, advisors and team have allowed me to take Summly from the technical demonstration I released last December to the fully fledged product it is today. Working with SRI International and other NLP experts, we have built an unparalleled service that will make consuming content on mobile simple, fun and intuitive for the first time.

This product has been inspired by my generation and their style of content consumption; fast and to the point. It will be useful for anyone who suffers from information overload and wants to consume news and other content in a seamless manner on mobile devices. We will be expanding very soon to other platforms and devices, as well as other languages.

I hope you find Summly informative and fun to use!

Nick