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IT Players Lick Their Lips over Bluetooth
Seventeen leading home appliance makers, telecoms equipment vendors and research houses, including Haier, TCL, Changhong, Eastcom and Tsinghua University, recently proposed forming the Bluetooth Technology Commission to support the standardized development of the technology in China,according to Business Weekly.
Bluetooth, the wireless data transmission technology, will soon be adopted by domestic manufacturers of appliances and communication products.
Bluetooth is nickname of a 10th Century Viking king who united Denmark and Norway. It is now being used to describe short-distance wireless communication technology. Mobile phone giant Ericsson developed the technology by uniting fixed and mobile devices in 1998.
Most information products are currently linked with cables, such as computers, printers, PDAs (personal digital assistant) and mouses. Bluetooth essentially aims to become a cable-replacement technology.
Over 2,000 firms have become members of the international Bluetooth organization, Special Interest Group, and said they would produce Bluetooth-embedded products.
China, the major information products provider in the world, has lagged behind in the research and development of this open-sourced technology. Most home appliance makers believe Bluetooth still has a long way to go before its widespread application.
"The manufacturers should change their minds as soon as possible and grasp the market opportunity provided by the new technology, otherwise they will always stay at the end of the profit list with low-end products," said Deng Shoupeng, director of the State Development Research Centre.
He said the technology would be commercialized in 2002 and should quickly become popular with consumers.
According to forecasts from investment bank Merrill Lynch, 90 per cent of smart phones, 80 per cent of PDAs, and over 50 per cent of printers will be Bluetooth-embedded products by the year 2004.
Some innovators in the Chinese market have recently launched Bluetooth equipped products.
A wireless securities trading terminal has been invented by Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications. It frees securities traders from sitting in front of a computer screen and allows then to walk around in the trading hall and continue trading.
A Beijing restaurant has also started to use wireless ordering terminals. The Bluetooth-embedded terminal informs the kitchen immediately of customers' orders.
New potential applications are constantly emerging, such as using Bluetooth chips in freight containers to identify cargo when a lorry drives into a storage depot, or a headset that communicates with a mobile phone in your pocket.
Some other ideas are more whimsical, like a refrigerator communicating with a Bluetooth-enabled computer, and sending a message to an online retailer for more supplies.
Bluetooth will eventually take off as many companies have invested in it, said Zhou Zheng, a Bluetooth researcher with the Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications.
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