Interview with Woz: To innovate, get personal

Many of us in the tech press say that we've hit a lull in technology innovation, after an amazing run of truly disruptive new technologies from cloud computing to social networking, from mobile devices to voice services, in the last decade. Steve "Woz" Wozniak is not so sure, but he does believe that innovations can't be scheduled or even predicted with any certainty. They take off only when many factors come together.

Wozniak, of course, knows a little something about innovation. The 63-year-old engineer is a co-founder of Apple and helped invent personal computing in the forms of the Apple II and Macintosh. He has been an adviser to and sounding board for Apple over much of its history, as well as a consultant to other tech companies. He founded a company called CL 9 in 1987 that produced the first programmable universal TV remote control. He has been an elementary school teacher. Now he is chief scientist at Fusion-io and speaks on technology and innovation throughout the world; this week, he's a featured speaker at the Apps World conference in San Francisco.