“On the eve of its next big product announcement, Apple is expanding its super-secret research office in Kendall Square,” Scott Kirsner reports for BetaBoston. “Several commercial realtors tell me that the Cupertino company has leased more than half a floor at One Broadway, an MIT-owned building that also houses Facebook’s small local team, several venture capital firms, and the Cambridge Innovation Center.”
“The new office, about 13,000 square feet on one of the building’s upper floors, is a major expansion for Apple, which currently has a small team on the building’s fifth floor,” Kirsner reports. “The Cambridge office primarily focuses on improving Apple’s Siri speech recognition technology.”
“Several key team members previously worked for Nuance Communications, the Burlington-based tech company that supplies Apple with some of the software that powers Siri. They include Don McAllastar, Larry Gillick, and Gunnar Evermann,” Kirsner reports. “The three realtors with whom I spoke all said they didn’t believe a build-out of the space had yet begun. Figuring about 200 square feet per employee, 13,000 square feet could mean Apple has room to hire about 65 people locally.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Attribution: MacRumors. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” and “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
These must be some very valuable employees so as to make them all happy by putting them in a local office across the country from Cupertino. You’d think something as valuable as the Siri team — or a big chunk of it — would be kept “in house” for security reasons alone. Plus, you’ve got other tech firms in the same building. Appeasement = Unparalleled talent?
Sometimes you need people away from the corporate headquarters to encourage free thinking, but more importantly they are located amongst some of the smartest academics and technologists around so hardly surprising they would wish to keep a duality of centres for such research.
Do the letters MIT ring any bells?
How about the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology?
Does for me Go Beavers!!!
There is MIT involvement in speech recognition and related functions. Also Nuance Communications, the source of several of the key team members, was located in Burlington. It all fits.
13,000 square-foot expansion, whoop!
13,000 square feet of concentrated innovation beats the entire Microsoft campus and the Google barge combined.
I think Siri needs mate with Watson to get the best results possible from voice search.
I’ve always reasoned that Apple could certainly use a think tank to keep the ideas flowing. I’m sure that’s one way to keep innovation going.