The Summly deal makes no sense
philosophically.com
The Summly deal makes no sense
1–10 of 260 posts
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#2It 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.
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#3It 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.
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?
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#4It 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.
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
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#5It 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.
Also free advertising. The BBC had "teenage entrepreneur sells amazing app to yahoo" plastered all over it yesterday.
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#6I suppose Yahoo will have to answer to their shareholders, just not yet. It seems to me that they have invested in the talent and the current customer base. If Yahoo really do make an impact on the mobile news market I'm sure $30m will seem like buttons.
I do agree that many other development teams would have jumped at an acquisition offer of a lot less money but they were either unknown to Yahoo or deemed not suitable for Yahoo.
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#7There's a possibility that this publicity changes younger people's perception of Yahoo's. They'll see the BBC headline and a) will now know what Yahoo! is and b) might get motivated to write/learn code and even want to go work for a tech company (even Yahoo itself). Combined with everything else Marissa Mayer is doing, (b) might actually happen, as altruistic-seeming as it might sound.
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#8It 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.
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.
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#9Unless I missed a particular story, I haven't seen Summly or Yahoo! announce the number is $30m. A reasonable point here was that relicensing from SRI for the core functionality of this app could be a large part of the purchase price. Also, not being totally familiar with taking VC money, it sounds reasonable to me that a significant portion of the monies is going back to the investor(s?).
While I think $15m would have been fine and generous, it doesn't shock me that someone important in Yahoo! got it stuck into their head that Summly was hitting on something that would "change the way people use news", a particularly neat fit if their intention is still to be the new homepage of the internet.
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.