Search Guru Bill Stasior CEO of Amazon’s A9 Unit, Hired By Apple To Oversee Siri
To be the very best, you need to deliver your hundred percent even some times more than hundred percent, and this race continues. As a result Apple has hired 'search guru' Bill Stasior, CEO of Amazon.com’s A9 search and advertising search unit, to oversee Apple's Siri voice-activated personal assistant. Stasior, who joined Amazon in 2003 as director of search and navigation, founded A9.com in May 2004 and then became CEO of the wholly owned subsidiary in February 2006, according to his LinkedIn profile. Stasior, who holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describes A9.com as a “company with a mission to create groundbreaking technologies in search, advertising, and mobile that power customer centric, Internet businesses.” Apple confirmed his hire but didn't provide any comment. Stasior has an impressive pedigree (you can read his resume and see a really geeky binary image he posted of himself here). The MIT PhD has taught there, too, and has done stints at Oracle, Netcentives and AltaVista.
Siri, Apple's famous voice-activated personal assistant program, was acquired in April 2010 to launch a big stake in voice-activated search. Since Apple kicked Google Maps to the curb in iOS 6, the only remaining tie with Google is search. Will Apple eventually do its own search network? Who knows. Stasior’s background in search will certainly be of value if the time ever comes. While Siri has had a high profile in the iPhone range, Apple has lost some of the talent who created it. Adam Cheyer, who co-founded the voice recognition software, recently left the company. CEO Dag Kittlaus departed in October 2011.
Here we want to remind you that last month Twitter hired famous whitehat hacker Charlie Miller, to boost up its security. Here its Apple who hired Stasior presumably, strengthening Apple’s search and search advertising technology in the wake of its increasing competition with Google. While talking about the news of hiring geniuses then the name of Nicholas Allegra, the world-famous hacker known as "Comex", creater of JailbreakMe.com comes. He was also hired by Apple in 2011.
-Source (AllThingsD)
