Teenager Sells App to Yahoo!
O'BRIEN: Welcome, everybody. Let's intro the team this morning. Richard Socarides is with us, former senior adviser to President Clinton. Now a writer for "Newyorker.com." Also this morning, Christopher John Farley, senior editorial director of digital features at "The Wall Street Journal" and editor of their "Speakeasy" blog. And Gloria Reuben is back, this time on our panel. She, of course, is an actress and a philanthropist. Nice to have you with us. Christine Romans is with us, as well. She's going to look at the day's business.</s>ROMANS: Good morning, Soledad. We're "Minding your Business" this morning. Stock market looks like it could rebound after those losses Monday. The concerns about the eurozone still front and center. We're going to get some data on the U.S. economy this morning. In particular the housing market. That could put stocks back in rally mode. The S&P; 500 pretty close to record highs, about 13 points or less than 1 percent away. Okay, Yahoo!'s latest acquisition, an app invented by a teenager in England. The kid's name is Nick D'aloisio. He's 17. He's about to be worth tens of millions of dollars. Yahoo! reportedly just bought his company and the tech blog, "AllthingsD" (ph) put the price tag at $30 million. He invented a news reading app called Summly. In December he told CNN's Piers Morgan how he got the idea.</s>NICK D'ALOISIO, CREATOR, SUMMLY: Sure. I started programming when I was 12, and had been doing apps for a few years, and the way I thought of this idea is I was revising some history exams and I thought if I could build a piece of technology that could take pre-existing content and summarize it and condense it, it would really help people my age and everyone else consume it.</s>ROMANS: The app turns articles and takes them, turns them into short summaries to make it easier to read on your smartphone. Nick still has to finish high school so he'll work from Yahoo!'s London office. He, of course has to comply with the new policy that band telecommuting. So, he'll be studying for his finals and working from Yahoo! and counting the money in his bank account, all at the same time.</s>O'BRIEN: Wow. Love that kid.</s>GLORIA REUBEN, ACTOR AND PHILANTHROPIST: When I was 12, I was listening to led zeppelin. I didn't even know --</s>O'BRIEN: You weren't programming?</s>REUBEN: I wasn't. I should have been, clearly.</s>O'BRIEN: It's like the Cliff's Notes. Basically he made Cliff's Notes.</s>RICHARD SOCARIDES, WRITER, "NEWYORKER.COM": For everything. For everything. And like some of our news like is like some people think the news is like in too much of a summary fashion already. But now this is going to summarize it and condense it even more.</s>CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY, WRITER, "SPEAKEASY": Can I still adopt him? Is he too old to adopt?</s>SOCARIDES: You'd be rich.</s>O'BRIEN: I love that story. Still ahead this morning on STARTING POINT, we're following lots of breaking news that we'll be talking about. An Italian court has ruled that Amanda Knox should stand trial again in the death of her roommate. What now? One of her longtime defense attorneys is going to talk with us coming up next. And don't blame the groundhog. We'll tell you about Punxsutawney Phil's handler says it is not his fault that he got the spring prediction wrong. You're watching STARTING POINT. We're back in a moment.