Area served Worldwide Current status Discontinued | Website summify.com | |
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Headquarters Vancouver, British Columbia Founder(s) Mircea Paşoi
Cristian Strat Industry news aggregation
social media | ||
Summify was a social news aggregator founded by Mircea Paşoi and Cristian Strat, two former Google and Microsoft interns from Romania. The service emails its users a periodic summary of news articles shared from their social networks based on relevance and importance. The platform supported Twitter, Facebook, and Google Reader accounts. Advisors to Summify include Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite and Ethan Anderson, CEO of Redbeacon.
Contents
History
In 2009, Paşoi and Strat created ReadFu, a plugin that provided a contextual summary and statistics of the target page of a hyperlink. In January 2010, ReadFu was accepted into the Vancouver based start-up incubator Bootup Labs. On March 20, 2010 the service was renamed as Summify and a private beta began.
On August 11, 2010 Paşoi and Strat announced a new direction for the service. It would become a real-time social news reader that aggregates incoming news from social networks and displays articles by importance using social reactions.
After receiving feedback, the team realized that its users enjoyed the short article digests Summify sent via email. On March 22, 2011, the team announced that email digests would become the core part of the service “Our users didn't really want another news reader, another destination site to check every day” say Paşoi and Strat. The real-time news reader version of Summify was shut down three days later.
Summify released a free app on the Apple App Store July 8, 2011. The app allows users to consume their web summaries from iOS mobile devices.
Summify was acquired by Twitter on January 19, 2012. The service shut down on June 22.
Investors
In March 2011, Summify completed a seed round of funding from the following investors:
Reception
Summify has been well received by popular websites such as TechCrunch, who say "if you only have time to read 5 stories a day, let Summify pick them." It has also been featured in Time, The Globe and Mail, Mashable, VentureBeat, Gizmodo, Lifehacker, and The Next Web.