Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak to Talk Tech with Indian CEOs

BANGALORE: Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with the late Steve Jobs in 1976, is visiting India this week, making a trip to the country where his one-time partner wandered in search of spiritual solace. The 61-year-old will reach Bangalore on Thursday morning and stay in India’s technology capital until December 4.
Details of his visit are a closely guarded secret, but ET has learnt that he is in India on the invitation of the Young Presidents’ Organisation, a network of top executives from across the globe. Wozniak, the tech wizard who created the Apple I and II computers with close friend Jobs, will be talking innovation and technology on Saturday morning to the hundreds of CEOs who are a part of YPO.

The event, however, is being not being publicized because Wozniak wants to keep his visit to India as private as possible. A YPO representative declined to share details of the event Jobs, who died on October 5, made a trip to India in 1974. It was only on returning after seven months in the country that he started Apple with Wozniak with an investment of $1,300 from the sale of Jobs’ van and Wozniak’s calculator.

Wozniak's visit to Bangalore has created much buzz on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, with Apple fans across India welcoming him to Bangalore and enquiring about his trip. Prior to coming to India, Wozniak was in Turkey and Russia, where he met Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and the President Dmitri Medvedev and spoke at a conference on innovation.

He is reaching Bangalore on Thursday morning. Wozniak has not played any active role in Apple Inc since the 1980s. He is chief scientist at computer hardware and software systems company Fusion-io and has founded two companies ‘Wheels of Zeus’ and ‘Acquicor Technology’. He is a philanthropist and known to be passionately interested in the cause of education. Pioneers in the personal computing industry, Wozniak and Jobs founded what is now the world’s most valuable technology company.

They made computers more accessible and attractive to ordinary users. When computers were primarily used by large corporations and the scientific community to perform complex mathematics, the two made products that achieved cult status. Early adopters of Apple Computers were the advertising and the design community and the products quickly became aspirational for everyone. Apple Inc topped its success in personal computing with products like the iPhone, iPod and iPad that changed every industry they were a part of.