The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG)

Bluetooth technology was originally developed by the Swedish company Ericsson, which now licenses the Bluetooth trademark to the special interest group (SIG) of manufacturers that want to market products based on this technology. You used to be able to visit the Web site at www.bluetooth.com to find more information about the group and the vendors that are members . However, recently the SIG has incorporated, and you need to sign up as a member to view the contents of the site, such as the standards documents.

The IEEE has also licensed Bluetooth technology from the Bluetooth SIG and given it the name of IEEE 802.15.1 to establish a standard. You can view an abstract (in PDF format) of the version of the IEEE standards document using the URL http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/new.html. You can also purchase the proposed standards documents for just under $200!

Bluetooth-enabled devices, which are based on a set of standards called profiles , should make it easy to interconnect and exchange voice and data between almost any kind of electronic devices you can think of.