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.
History of Apple Inc.
In 2000, Apple introduced its iTools service, a set of free web-based tools that included an email account, internet greeting cards called iCards, a service called iReview that gave internet users a place to read and write reviews of Web sites, and a tool called KidSafe which promised to prevent children from browsing inappropriate portions of the web. The latter two services were eventually canceled because of lack of success, while iCards and email became integrated into Apple's .Mac subscription based service introduced in 2002 and discontinued in mid-2008 to make way for the release of the new MobileMe service, coinciding with the iPhone 3G release. MobileMe, which carried the same US$99.00 annual subscription price as its .Mac predecessor, featured the addition of "push" services to instantly and automatically send emails, contacts and calendar updates directly to users' iPhone devices. Some controversy surrounded the release of MobileMe services to users resulting in expected downtime and a significantly longer release window. As a result of this, Apple extended the subscriptions of existing MobileMe subscribers by an additional 30 days free-of-charge. At the WWDC event in June 2011, Apple announced its most up to date cloud service, iCloud, replacing MobileMe. This service kept most of the core services that MobileMe offered, however dropping iDisk, Gallery, and iWeb. Additionally, it added a number of other features to the group, including Find my Mac, iTunes Match, Photo Stream, Documents & Data Backup, and iCloud backup for iOS devices. The service requires users to be running iOS 5 and OS X 10.7 Lion.