Singapore Botanic Gardens: National Orchid Farms

This beautiful attraction has been in existence over 150 years. You can learn more about at their website. We spent 6 hours there last march and it was amazing. Spotless (as is everything else) in Singapore, well marked, and easy to navigate.

The highlight was the National Orchid Garden where this photo was taken. The Google synopsis of the garden is found here. My advice is to not do one of the multi-stop bus tours to the Botanic Gardens; they will give you an hour that will leave you aching for more.

Every item in the entire facility is meticoulously tagged for the avid botanist (not me; I just enjoyed the beauty).

On our trip, there were a handful of other sites recommended to us, this was not among them. Hopefully if someone reads this and is headed to Singapore soon, they won't make a mistake by missing this!!

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Siri: Awesome new mobile app for iPhone with AI

Well, I said that if it was as cool as adveritsed I'd be blogging here. Almost better than the app is the pedigree of the senior management team. Read on!!

 

Siri is created by an all-star team of designers and engineers drawn from Google, Yahoo, Apple, Motorola, Netscape, eBay, RealTravel, SRI, NASA, and Xerox PARC.

Siri's Founders: Tom, Dag and Adam

Dag Kittlaus

Co-founder and CEO

Siri's CEO is Dag Kittlaus, who founded the company as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at SRI.
A serial innovator and consumer wireless internet veteran of 10 years in Scandinavia and the US, Dag is working on creating his third consecutive mobile internet product with over a million users.

Dag has held leadership roles as VP of Consumer Internet Services at Scandinavian telecom giant Telenor Mobile, and several consumer product groups at Motorola including GM of xProducts and founder and GM of Motorola's Interactive Media Group. He conceived and launched Screen3, a breakthrough consumer mobile application currently used by millions of users and adopted by Cingular, China Mobile, and Telefonica.

Adam Cheyer

Co-founder and VP of Engineering

Siri's VP of Engineering is Adam Cheyer, who joined the company from SRI, where he was the Program Director in SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center and Chief Architect of the CALO/PAL project. A pioneer in the areas of distributed computing, intelligent agents, and advanced user interfaces, Adam is the author of more than fifty peer-reviewed publications and nine patents. He was previously the VP of Engineering at Dejima and the VP of Engineering at Verticalnet. Adam is also a founding member of Change.org and Genetic Finance, LLC.

Tom Gruber

Co-founder, CTO, and VP Design

Siri's CTO is Tom Gruber, a recognized expert in Artificial Intelligence, intelligent interfaces, and semantic technologies. Tom was a founder and CTO of RealTravel, a knowledge sharing site for travel; a founder and CTO of Intraspect, a collaborative knowledge management application for business; and a founder and Chief Scientist at Consider Solutions. Products designed by Tom are used by millions of consumer and professional users. He was a pioneering researcher at Stanford in the use of Web for knowledge sharing and semantic integration, and helped establish the technical foundations of the Semantic Web.Tom has served as advisor to SocialText, LinkedIn, Powerset, and others.

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