Yahoo has announced in March 2013 to acquire the news-reading app Summly, reported to be for a handsome price of US$30 million. The app was created by Nick D’Aloisio when he was only 15 to improve the experience of reading news and texts on the web. The existing Summly app will be shut down after the acquisition, but the technology will soon come to life through Yahoo’s mobile experiences. This high school programming whiz becomes the richest new employee of Yahoo.

The record of the youngest person to receive venture capital funding has been broken more and more frequently. For most young people, the reaction is downright laughable: “I feel old!” However, don’t sacrifice your potential to become someone; instead, fancy yourself as an entrepreneur, then you can be the one that no one else can be. The world is full of opportunities – as long as you are willing to walk out and grasp it.

The Summly app is more than the geeky “automatic summarization algorithm”. One of its keys to success is Nick’s vision of making people’s daily routines entertaining and meaningful. His perseverance and never-give-up character is of course another success factor. That’s the reason why we see hundreds of new apps published each day, but only a few innovative and user friendly ones survive.