SRI International
In December 2007, SRI launched a spin-off company, Siri Inc., which Apple acquired in April 2010. In October 2011, Apple announced the Siri personal assistant as an integrated feature of the Apple iPhone 4S. Siri's technology was born from SRI's work on the DARPA-funded CALO project, described by SRI as the largest artificial intelligence project ever launched. Siri was co-founded in December 2007 by Dag Kittlaus (CEO), Adam Cheyer (vice president, engineering), and Tom Gruber (CTO/vice president, design), together with Norman Winarsky (vice president of SRI Ventures). Investors included Menlo Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures.
Apple Pippin
Originally, Bandai never intended to develop a system with Internet connectivity in mind. However, Apple and Bandai received feedback from customers, indicating that they were looking for a system that could connect to the Internet. To make Internet connectivity possible, Apple had to incorporate a modem into the Pippin design. Two years earlier (1992), Apple had already moved away from the older serial interface with an external Hayes-compatible modem on its Macintosh systems, and switched to a serial interface which included GeoPort – a serial data technology that allowed software to emulate a modem. Implementing GeoPort into the Pippin platform required Apple to make a major change in its design – moving away from the 68030 footprint and to a PowerPC footprint. Apple chose the PowerPC 603 32-bit processor, as it was designed to be a low-cost, low-end processor for embedded use.