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[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."