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Bluetooth Was Only a Codename: the Industry Voted 4-1 for "PAN" Until a Web Search Turned Up Tens of Thousands of Hits
Intel's Jim Kardach proposed Bluetooth as a placeholder named for a 10th-century Danish king. The founding companies voted for PAN instead, a search a week later killed it, nobody had cleared the backup, and the launch was about three weeks out.
Kardach told the whole thing himself in a 2008 piece for EE Times. Before there was one standard, there were three short-range radio projects: Intel’s Business-RF, Ericsson’s MC-Link and Nokia’s Low Power RF. Getting them to agree on anything, a name included, was the job.
The name came out of a novel. After a pitch went badly on a trip to Toronto, an Ericsson engineer told Kardach about a book he’d been reading, “the Longships by Frans G. Bengtsson,” a Viking adventure. Kardach went and read a history of the Vikings and found King Harald Bluetooth. “Harald had united Denmark and Christianized the Danes!” he wrote. Uniting the PC and cellphone industries was exactly what the group was trying to do.
Bluetooth was meant to be the placeholder. The Bluetooth SIG’s own history says it was “only intended as a placeholder until marketing could come up with something really cool.”
Marketing tried. The two finalists were RadioWire, Intel’s pick, and PAN, short for Personal Area Networking, from IBM. “In April we held our board meeting and voted for the official name which went to PAN in a 4-1 vote,” Kardach wrote.
Then somebody typed PAN into a search engine. “An internet search produced tens of thousands of hits.” About a week later, an emergency meeting was called. RadioWire had never been through a trademark search, the group was “driving towards the launch event which would occur in about four weeks,” and, in Kardach’s words, “the only name we could go to launch with on short notice was Bluetooth!”
There was one more twist. When the SIG filed for a US trademark, Kardach wrote, “it was originally rejected because Bluetooth is synonymous with ‘short range radios.’” The name nobody picked had already become the generic word for the thing.
The losing names deserve a moment. Kardach’s favorite reject was “Flirt,” with the catchphrase “getting close, but not touching.” Imagine pairing a hearing aid over Flirt.
Naming hasn’t gotten easier since. Every product team now has to clear a name across domains, app stores and social handles, on top of trademarks, which makes the bland, made-up, searchable word the safe pick. The odds favor more Bluetooths: codenames that survive because they were the only thing cleared in time. Watch for the next one in your own company’s launch deck, the name everyone says “for now.”