This is a great blog about electronics! I remember I needed to solder something and wasn't sure I can do it, so I searched for some tutorials on Youtube and came across this guy's series about soldering. He shows very well how easy it is to solder once you get to know a few techniques of dealing with solder and tools. And Australian accent adds an entertaining bit to it, so it's never boring.
I was also confused about that. Just assumed he incremented expenses with each step, but I think you're right, since 10 euros for framing doesn't sound legit. At over thousand of material/services cost the whole thing appears to be even less sensible.
Notes about projection choice seem to prevail, which is nerdy.
Well, 400 euros for a wall map seems like a lot of money, but what isn't described very well is how the source file was created. It seems like the guy was manually stitching screenshots. God knows how much time did this take.
There's little to no hacking in this project. Just the bit where he makes something custom.
Eugene Ciurana's, author of "Developing with Google App Engine", works there in CTO role and I bet he's one of those two engineers selected by Yahoo. His Linkedin profile [1] provides an insight on the technical stack of Summly as well as gives you an idea of the size of the development team.