[Southsider2k12]

http://thenewsdispatch.com/articles/2011/1...43635689842.txt

A Michigan City success story: Former resident Dag Kittlaus, an Elston grad, creates Siri for Apple

Dag Kittlaus and his mother, Michigan City resident Liv Markle, are shown on a recent trip to Norway. Photo provided
By Barbara Stodola

The phone call from Steve Jobs came as a surprise. But even before he took that call, in March, 2010, former Michigan City resident Dag Kittlaus knew that Siri, his voice-controlled cellphone application, was a winner. So did Dag's mother Liv Markle, who still lives in Michigan City.

"When Stanford Research Institute got interested, that's when I knew it was really going somewhere," Liv said. Siri, a voice-operated "personal assistant," enables the cellphone user to ask for directions, make an appointment, find a restaurant, or get other types of information — in English, French or German.

In February, 2010, when Dag launched Siri, it quickly rose to 1st place in the Lifestyle section of Apple's App store. A few weeks later Jobs called Dag and, according to Forbes Magazine, "He had been playing with the Siri app and liked it." On April 27, 2010, Apple bought Siri for a reported $200 million.

For 44-year-old Dag, a graduate of Michigan City Elston High School and CEO of Siri, the question immediately arose — so what are you doing with the rest of your life?

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He spent the next 18 months working for Apple, heading the team that applied Siri technology to the iPhone 4S, which was unveiled this year on Oct. 4, the day before Steve Jobs died. In the first 24 hours after the phone's release, the company took a record-breaking one million online orders — "the most amazing iPhone yet," Apple boasted.

Dag had been planning to leave California and return to the Midwest, where his family lives. He put the finishing touches on his dream house and moved, with his wife and three small children, back to the Chicago area. His older brother, Erik Kittlaus, is a web-page designer in Chicago. Their younger brother, Aaron Markle, operates a 150-acre organic farm near Benton Harbor, Mich., and is expected to lend his culinary skills to the family's Thanksgiving celebration. For the Christmas holidays, they are planning a ski trip to Colorado.

Dag now has the time to work on his first book, a mystery novel. He is also indulging his passion for severe weather. "I'm a storm chaser," he said. "I chase tornadoes. I'm installing a lightning detection system, a whole series of weather technology equipment. I love severe weather - that's one of the things I've missed about the Midwest."

"He was always a daredevil," his mother remembers. "Gymnastics, diving, every sport you can think of, Dag has done it. He has a deep-diving certificate, he's jumped out of a plane, he's teaching his kids how to ski. Dag never sits still."

In school he was "a good student, it came easy for him," Liv said, "but he was more interested in sports." He graduated from Long Beach Elementary School, Elston Middle School and then Michigan City Elston High School, where he played tennis, won the MVP award and set a few records.

"There were 16 boys in the Duneland Beach neighborhood where we lived," Liv recalled — all in the age group of Dag and his brothers. "They had sailboats, catamarans, they were always at the beach or the tennis courts, right down the street. It was a wonderful place for kids to grow up. They all went to school together." Dag enrolled at Indiana University and studied business, but still did not have a career focus.

"That was when he decided to make up for lost time," Liv said, "so he went to Norway, where he could complete his MBA in one year."

Liv, a native of Norway, had met Dag's father, Karl Kittlaus, when he was serving with the U.S. Air Force in France and she was studying French at a school run by nuns in Paris. Having worked as an au pair in England, Liv hoped for similar work in France. But Kittlaus proposed, and she followed him to the United States. The couple settled in Palos Heights, Ill., and had two sons. Whenever possible, Liv took them to visit her parents and sister in Norway, and "Dag loved everything about Norway — the skiing, the scenery, the weather, everything."

After completing his MBA at BI Norwegian Business School, in Oslo, Dag stayed in Norway for seven more years. He began his career in technology at the Scandinavian telecom giant, Telenor Mobile. Returning to the United States, he worked at Motorola for five years. In 2007, he co-founded Siri with Tom Gruber, CTO, and Adam Cheyer, VP Engineering. They named the company "Siri," a Norwegian girls' name. At the time they sold the company to Apple, Siri had 24 employees.

Dag met his wife-to-be, Ida, also of Norwegian descent, at a conference in Washington, D.C. For their wedding ceremonies, the couple and their families traveled to the Norwegian fjords. Some years earlier Dag had vacationed in the idyllic village of Geiranger and promised, "If I ever get married, it will be here."

[Southsider2k12]

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-03...a-ticket-broker

Siri's dad speaks for himself
Dag Kittlaus is the co-founder and chief executive of the company that created Siri. He's back in the Midwest.

Dag Kittlaus, co-founder and chief executive of the company that created… (Dag Kittlaus, HANDOUT)
March 18, 2012|Phil Rosenthal

The first time I ask Siri how to get to Dag Kittlaus' house, Siri hears it as "dog get blouses house." Then Siri tells me there are four nearby kennels. Finally, drawing from my iPhone's contact list, Siri presents three potential routes into the northern suburbs.

Kittlaus is one of Siri's parents.

This connection doesn't seem to be made by the voice-interaction feature that's been the great lure of the iPhone 4S, which Apple introduced last fall to much fanfare. But Siri's hardly alone in not knowing all that much about the youthful, blond 45-year-old.

The co-founder and chief executive of the company that created Siri was keeping a low profile even before October. That's when the 4S launched, and he left California's Silicon Valley and Apple, which acquired his firm a year and a half earlier. He was in pursuit of a more varied environment, literally and figuratively, back home in the Midwest.

Here, he can sit with a laptop on his rooftop perch, watch the storms roll past and develop a weather app as an extension of his meteorology hobby. Here the man who helped bring science-fiction technology into the real world can sketch out the beginnings of his own sci-fi novel. He can clear his head and his vision to better see around corners and over the horizon to problems and solutions others have yet to consider.

It's exactly as he wants, and perhaps needs, for himself, his wife and kids, and his projects just coming into focus but not ready for public discussion.

"I've been dreaming about it since high school, which is to get in a position where everything's on your own terms from that point on," Kittlaus said, poised to enjoy a leisurely sunny afternoon. "It happened when I got off the phone with Steve Jobs, when we agreed on a deal (for Apple to buy the company two years ago). I walked around the city (of San Jose) and just thought about things. … It's liberating."

Kittlaus hails from the Chicago area, growing up in Hinsdale and Michigan City, Ind., as well as his mother's native Norway. He was an entrepreneur at a young age, and he and his brother once came home from an early Taste of Chicago with a big garbage bag full of cash from selling custom T-shirts while still in high school. For a time he made money as a ticket broker.

His education was focused in economics, and he picked up degrees at Indiana University and the BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo. He built his own data, voice and Internet company here, then sold it. He rose through Norway's Telenor before coming back to the States and Motorola, where he was described in a 2005 Sun-Times column as "a blond, baby-faced Nordic Brad Pitt" overseeing "arguably the world's most fertile communications idea-factory."

But Kittlaus left Schaumburg-based Motorola for California in 2007, segueing into a partnership that helped create Siri. Adam Cheyer and Tom Gruber brought mobile industry engineering, artificial intelligence and interface design expertise. He brought the inkling of the idea, and together they recruited talent from Google, NASA and elsewhere.

The independence of an entrepreneurial startup, Kittlaus said, is often prerequisite to great innovation.

"You need that separation of focus and motivation that that structure allows for," he said. "Why do big companies need to buy their innovation? Because they suck at it. They get entrenched in their narrow focus of running their own business, and any research that's done on the side is generally trying to feed that into something the company's already doing, as opposed to thinking of new things that don't exist.

"Good investors, they're really not interested in somebody who builds a slightly better mousetrap. They're looking for the people who have the bionic mouse."

When Kittlaus speaks of a future 25 years away with self-driving cars, chromosome manipulation that retards human aging and devices in one's home capable of producing an actual cheeseburger that's attached to an email, he sounds like he's talking about his prospective novel as much as advances in technology and research.

"There's stuff going on now that will blow your mind," Kittlaus said. "The problem is these (research) guys are great at solving technical problems. They're not necessarily great at figuring out what the hell to do with it, so they need someone like me to come in and create a vision around what this technology can do."

So one day the phone rings, and it's Apple boss Jobs. He wants to talk Siri. At his home. The next day.

"Actually, he changed his schedule because I was supposed to take my wife to the ballet," Kittlaus said. "He treated us with respect from the beginning. He had a soft spot in his heart for entrepreneurs."

Or maybe he just understood the role entrepreneurs play in the development ecosystem.