Summly: Millennial App Makes $30 Million

Have you heard of the app, Summly? I haven’t until today. But do not look it up… for technically, it does not exist. Why am I telling you about a non-existing app? Because its technology lives in Yahoo!

I don’t know if this is news to you or not, but a young entrepreneur became a millionaire at 17 this past spring. When I heard about this, I went crazy—I looked up every possible article on this young, tech superstar. And if you are like other Millennials, you want to know how Nick D’Aloisio made it big when he is still so young.

Nick D’Aloisio captured the attention of a venture capitalist and other investors, and created an app at 15. He then sold his technology to Yahoo! for $30 million two years later (this past spring).

What was Summly?

Summly was designed to shorten lengthy news stories into a just a few sentences; so essentially, it gave readers the ability to only read the true reason of the articles. This was a genius idea for it formatted articles and blogs to the size people are looking for today—something short and sweet. Why do you think everybody likes Twitter? It does not waste a lot of time (unless your completely addicted). Summly condenses everything to give readers ability to keep up with the real-time world with plenty of time to spare.

Summly’s app and website give users faster accesses to stay connected with the world at a more intimate level than sites such as Twitter, is what made it attractive to companies like Yahoo! I do not know if was worth the $30 million, but I guess we will see sooner or later.

In an interview with Forbes, Nick, founder of Summly talks about Yahoo! and Summly’s partnership:

“Our visions to simplify how we get information and we are thrilled to continue this mission with Yahoo!s’ global scale and expertise,” founder Nick D’Aloisio said in a post about the acquisition. “After spending 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.”

The new Yahoo! app with the Summly technology was released earlier this year, and it seems to be a hit. According to Business Insider, CEO Marissa Mayer, “The new Yahoo! mobile app is also smarter, using Summly’s natural-language algorithms and machine learning to deliver quick story summaries.” Hopefully for Yahoo!’s sake for survival the Summly-Yahoo! merging-features will help Yahoo! contest more with Google’s mobile abilities.

You need to try out the new Yahoo! app for iOS! It give you easy access to world news with more depth than social media sites such as Twitter. For all us Millennials, we need to learn from entertainers and continue to implement our experiences and skills to enhance our future.

Photo credit: http://i.i.cbsi.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim2/2013/07/16/summly-yahoo.jpg

Homeschooler in the Real World

Emma Folts, a sophomore at Wheaton College, shares her experience about her transition into college and how homeschool has both helped and hindered her.
How has your homeschool experience benefitted you, especially in your transition into college?
I think the one thing that homeschooling did that was really helpful as I entered college was that it taught me time management. As a homeschooler I had the same freedom as a college student has to put things off during the day and go see a friend instead. Since I had that experience, I knew the cost of that.
Also, personal responsibility and accountability with assignments. I feel like a lot of the other students had more expectations for gentler grading and that the professor would give them retakes or extensions, but that wasn’t something that ever happened to me in school. That learning curve wasn’t added because I never had it the other way. I think another thing was that because I was homeschooled, I was familiar with the format of teaching and then studying on my own.
Did you see any issues with your transition socially?
I think that homeschooling had two ramifications for me socially. One was helpful, one was hurtful.
It was really helpful because as a homeschooler, I had spent a lot of time realizing and developing who I was as a person and learning to recognize people who were being themselves, and those were the people I sought out as friends. Friendship as a homeschooler takes a lot more investment. I knew I was choosier with my friends which made me a lot less anxious and a lot more content.
The only real negative impact of the social bit was that I was really used to getting to choose the time I got to spend with people. As a homeschooler I spent a lot of time with people, but that time was controlled by me. As a college student, I found that you can’t really control the time you spend with people and alone time is not really available. Learning to deal with that was a lot harder than anticipated.
Any last comments on homeschool and how it has affected your college experience?
I think homeschooling is really helpful, however it does take a slightly increased amount of advocacy with your peers when you’re entering into college. I think a lot of people come in with certain assumptions about homeschool, especially students. You’re going to get a lot of, ‘oh my gosh, you don’t seem like a homeschooled person!’ [You can’t] take that too personally and explain your experience so that friends can understand it’s an important piece of you, though it might not look like the homeschooling that they’ve seen.
My encouragement to anyone who is a homeschooler transitioning into college is to realize the benefit that you have having been homeschooled, and to realize that the bit of advocacy and explaining that you need to do with your peers is totally normal and that it’s not a big deal. Once they understand your experience, it’s not something I’ve experienced being looked down on for.