Jaap Haartsen

Okay, I'm Jaap Haartsen.

I am based in the Netherlands.

I have a wife and three children.

And my wife always says, well, we have a fourth child as well, and that is Bluetooth.

I was asked to come up with some kind of new technology that could make things around the mobile phone wireless.

So no more cables, and they would just seamlessly connect to each other.

Yeah, that was in the summer of 1994.

And the technology, yeah.

Back in like 950 A.D.,

There was this Danish king.

He lived in Jelling, a small town in Denmark.

And the guy was called Blåtand, which is Swedish for Bluetooth.

And why was he called Bluetooth?

Well, maybe he had blue teeth because of rotten teeth or because he liked blueberries.

So we used Bluetooth all the time for a product name.

And then two years later, we went worldwide to launch the system.

And then we didn't have a really commercial name.

So Bluetooth was stuck and it was never changed anymore.

And well, we made a little bit of a story around it because he spread out Christianity in the Scandinavian world, in Norway, Sweden, Denmark.

And then we said, okay, instead of fighting each other, he made the people communicate with each other.