TrendIn this week: Summly, WifiSlam, Flipboard, Vine... the Little Apps that Could

This has been the week of little startups done good, from Summly's acquisition by Yahoo! to WifiSlam's acquisition by Apple and Vine getting its Hollywood cred.

The tech star of the week is – no contest – Nick D'Aloisio. This British teen was once studying for exams and came across a problem: Google search results were not giving him a good enough summary of each page. Nevermind that, he'd build the algorithm for it. Thus came Summly, an app that summarizes long news stories into short mobile-friendly paragraphs. Eighteen months later, at just 17, D'Aloisio sold his company to Yahoo! for a reported $30 million.

Summly is the latest in a wave of mobile acquisitions for Yahoo, after Stamped and Jybe. Yahoo! will shut down the app and use the tech within its own products, while D'Aloisio and most of his team will come work on the Yahoo! campus (D'Aloisio himself will finish school first). The acquisition still raises a few questions – beyond "What was I doing at 17?" which I know you're all asking yourselves.

One: Is Yahoo! really interested in the tech, did it simply want to snatch a smart founder and his team or is this just a cunning PR move with a "adorkable" kid? (copyright Kara Swisher, h/t ). On that last proposition, I'm doubtful. Sure, Summly is the hot flavor of the week but wait for the next multi-million dollar app acquisition – 3, 2, 1... here it is – and D'Aloisio will be history. Thirty million dollars is a lot of money for a PR move that might last a week. It may be part of the company's media momentum, but it alone will not make Yahoo! the come-back kid. Even snatching Marissa Mayer didn't do that. Tech circles and users still need to be convinced before they turn their back on Google and Apple and return durably to Yahoo!. Only products will do that.

Two: What's the point anyway? Summly is a heresy to many journalists, summarizing complex thought and well-crafted sentences into easily digestible tidbits. Artisanal aged cheddar made into Cheez-its, if you will. And lots of Cheez-its. All without a human brain. You don't have to be a curmudgeon to question the value proposition here. Tech lover and journalist Marie-Catherine Beuth (disclosure: a former colleague at French daily Le Figaro) writes:

I share their philosophy on the need for a more time efficient distribution and consumption of news. People can easily turn away from information if they feel overwhelmed. Simplifying some stories is very helpful for the more casual news consumer.

However, I’m bothered by the motivation of these services who still seem to care… about volume. (...)

Personnaly, this is precisely what made my experience with Summly disastrous: everytime I would launch the app, an overwhelming “99+ unread summlys” would welcome me. I would flip through a couple of them but read none because of a lack of interest. Summarizing news to fit more pieces of content into my media diet doesn’t seem to make sense.

Which leads me to another important issue: the “why?”. Why do we want to summarize news? Is it because news is not worthy spending time with (sort of what Summly suggested)? Or because we want to make room for the things that are worth our while (what I hope to achieve)?

There is an inherent danger in this tendency to over-simplify and über-summarize, that we suffocate the news and end up spreading the feeling that news is not valuable enough to have us spend time on it."

The week's second trending topic was... another multi-million dollar acquisition. What did I tell you? Apple bought the indoor mapping service WifiSLAM for a reported $20 million. After its own Maps debacle, Apple could use the startup's technology to offer mapping inside malls, office buildings, stadiums etc... Imagine walking into a mall and immediately finding the closest ATM without having to figure out where you are on those dreadful maps by the escalators. Or your phone directing you automatically to your seat – it knows which, your ticket is in Passbook – the second you enter a concert hall. (Note: I was an opera house usher once, I'd hate to see those jobs go.)

Flipboard also made top trending topics with its new release. The app used to be about discovering and reading content from multiple sources in a visually pleasing interface. Now, Flipboard is also a curating and publishing platform where users can create digital magazines on any topic. GigaOm's Mathew Ingram sees major disruptive potential here:

The idea is that brands and advertisers now have all of the same tools on which traditional publishers used to have a monopoly—i.e., the ability to create and distribute interesting content and reach audiences directly. If a brand can curate content itself, and have its own ads with e-commerce features built in, why does it need a traditional magazine?

Finally, Vine – another app recently acquired by Twitter – got its own moment in the spotlight. The app, which allows users to create and publish 6-second videos, gave the world its first sneak peak at the upcoming superhero blockbuster Wolverine – on mobile a full 24 hours before the usual 20-second preview to be distributed online and on TV. A sign of times to come? No. They're already here.

Photo: Nick D'Aloisio at LeWeb London 2012, by Vince Kmeron/Flickr under Creative Commons license.

This post is a joint effort with LinkedIn senior data scientist Viet Ha-Thuc, who each week provides me with trending data. Thank you.