Yahoo continues its mobile spending spree with acquisition of intelligent news app Summly

Today, Yahoo announced it has acquired Summly, an iOS news app that uses a combination of natural language processing and algorithms developed by famed scientists to pick out and deliver the most important parts of lengthy news articles. Like Yahoo’s other recent acquisitions, UK-based Summly swill be shut down, and its 17-year-old founder Nick D’Aloisio and his team will be integrated into Yahoo’s ever-expanding development teams. AllThingsD reports that Yahoo paid “just under $30 million” for the company.

Summly becomes the fourth mobile-focused startup that Yahoo has bought since Marissa Mayer became CEO in July. As the company attempts to focus on improving its personalization and recommendation tools as part of Mayer’s “coherent mobile strategy,” Yahoo will integrate Summly’s technology into its existing mobile experiences “soon.” When the app launched in November, D’Aloisio was immediately billed as “the next Mark Zuckerberg,” and it held an all-time user rating of four stars before it was pulled from Apple’s marketplace earlier today.

Posting a short statement to the Summly website, D’Aloisio notes that users had generated more than 90 million summaries in the four months before its acquisition. Recognizing its desire “to make people’s daily routines entertaining and meaningful,” the startup founder believes Yahoo will be the “perfect fit” for him and his company.