Summify was a social
news aggregator founded by Mircea Paşoi and Cristian Strat, two former
Google and
Microsoft interns from
Romania.[1][2] The service emailed its users a periodic summary of news articles shared from their social networks based on relevance and importance.[3] The platform supported
Twitter,
Facebook, and
Google Reader accounts.[4] Advisors to Summify include Ryan Holmes, CEO of
Hootsuite and Ethan Anderson, CEO of Redbeacon.[2]
History
In 2009, Paşoi and Strat created ReadFu, a plugin that provided a contextual summary and statistics of the target page of a hyperlink.[5] In January 2010, ReadFu was accepted into the
Vancouver-based start-up incubator Bootup Labs.[6] On March 20, 2010 the service was renamed as Summify and a private beta began.[7][8][9]
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.[10][11][12][13]
After some feedback that the users preferred article digests by email more than the real-time news reader version, Summify discontinued the news reader version.
Summify released a free app on the
AppleApp Store on July 8, 2011.[14][15] 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, 2012.[16]
Investors
In March 2011, Summify completed a seed round of funding from the following investors:[1][2][17][18][19]