On the heels of Apple’s acquisition of chip company, Intrinsity, the folks in Cupertino have gobbled up yet another firm. Today it was announced that Apple has acquired mobile assistance firm, Siri. It’s thought that Apple may have paid as much as $200 million for Siri, which has quickly become a very well respected entity in the digital world.
Siri’s claim to fame is what can best be described as “a mobile virtual personal assistant.” Essentially, Siri has facilitated a way for iPhone and iPod touch users to pose questions to the app (an example on Siri’s website is: “What’s a romantic place for dinner?”) and the algorithm developed by Siri gobbles up the info, analyzes and interprets it, and then provides a response based on the user’s location, time, and other pertinent data.
Ironically, on a day when many people learned that Steve Jobs will appear at this year’s “All Things Digital” conference, it was at last year’s conference when Siri first publicly unveiled and demonstrated the aforementioned technology that certainly went a long way in attracting Apple as a buyer of the very promising company.
So what does this latest purchase by Apple suggest? Apple is ramping up efforts at every turn to obliterate Google as its primary competitor. Making a gradual but obvious transition to the mobile search space, Apple is undeniably charting a course that Cupertino hopes will result in Apple dominating the new mobile web and – in particular – the new API-driven web.
