Yahoo Is Eyeing Mobile Startups for Acquisitions

According to a report by AllThingsD, Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer has held meetings with Summly teen-founder Nick D’Aloisio in recent weeks, as she looks for mobile applications that will get the company back on track. While the meetings may lead to nowhere, it’s definitely interesting to see where Mayer is looking to turn the struggling Yahoo around.

If you’re not familiar with Summly, it’s an iPhone app that summarizes news articles in 400 characters or less. The app uses a natural language algorithm to process the article’s text and turn it into a bite-sized piece of information that can be read quickly, without missing any critical details of the story.

And in my tests, it works well in most cases. In fact, it’s really impressive how well it works. To be sure, I read an article in-full on a site and then visited that same article with Summly, the overall message of the article was conveyed in Summly’s 400 character summarization.

The app has apparently been downloaded over 500,000 times since its relaunch last month and the company itself has attracted several outside investors, including Ashton Kutcher, Zynga’s Mark Pincus, Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg, and Airbnb’s Brian Chesky.

If one thing is clear, Mayer, like the rest of us, knows that mobile is the future and her quest to turn Yahoo around is absolutely right to focus on mobile apps.

You can watch a fun video (featuring its founder, Nick D’Aloisio) explaining how Summly works below.