Jaap Haartsen
Bluetooth Pioneer

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Imagine if the appliances in your home — phones, cameras, washing machines, computers, you name it — could communicate with one another via a radio link. A tiny chip called Bluetooth can make it happen — and, after years of hype and rumor, Bluetooth is finally coming. Indeed, it has been estimated that an astounding 672 million Bluetooth devices will be in use by 2005. It's no surprise that among the first available to consumers, scheduled for release this year, is a wireless headset for Ericsson's T28 cell phones — for Bluetooth arose from Jaap Haarsten's effort to develop that very product.

In 1994 Ericsson asked Haartsen to develop a radio link between a headset and a cell phone. Soon Ericsson and several other companies — Nokia, Intel, IBM and Toshiba — realized they were all working on similar technologies. In an impressive show of corporate solidarity, these firms established the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, standardizing their efforts so that devices made by different companies could talk to one another. The technology they settled on was based in large measure on that pioneered by Haartsen. Last year Microsoft, Lucent, Motorola and 3Com joined, and some 2,000 companies have followed suit.

Meanwhile, Haartsen, 37, is still with Ericsson, working to make Bluetooth handle more data, more quickly. "We want to get the data-transfer rate at least 10 times higher than it is today," he says. "Perhaps in the future, we can even go higher."

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PHOTOGRAPH FOR TIME DIGITAL BY CHRIS HILDRETH
PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME DIGITAL BY WILLIAM DUKE (inset)

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