Apple Hires Former AltaVista and Amazon Search Exec to Run Siri Unit
Apple has hired William Stasior, a search veteran from Amazon and early search engine AltaVista, to run its Siri unit, according to a report from All Things D.
Stasior was previously in charge of Amazon's A9 unit, the company's worldwide search and search advertising division.
Stasior has an impressive pedigree (you can read his resume and see a really geeky binary image he posted of himself here). The MIT Ph.D. has taught here too and has done stints at Oracle, Netcentives and AltaVista. He came to Amazon in 2003 as its director of search and navigation.
He will now be in charge of Siri, which is Apple’s famous voice-activated personal-assistant program. The tech giant acquired Siri in April of 2010 to garner a big stake in voice-activated search.
Apple purchased Siri in April 2010 and launched Siri as a major component of iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S in October 2011. However, two major Siri executives -- Adam Cheyer and Dag Kittlaus have left the company in the past year.
The addition of Stasior, a search expert, to the Siri team could give a hint to where Apple plans to take the product in the future.
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