{"id":213,"date":"2013-11-11T18:00:44","date_gmt":"2013-11-11T18:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kevinbillington.com\/wordpress\/?p=213"},"modified":"2017-08-29T12:40:40","modified_gmt":"2017-08-29T11:40:40","slug":"so-thats-why-its-called-bluetooth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevinbillington.com\/site\/?p=213","title":{"rendered":"“So, that’s why it’s called Bluetooth!”"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Evan Dashevsky, www.techhive.com\u00a0on 7th November, 2013<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The startup world is filled with all manner of intentionally misspelled nonwords and incomprehensible baby talk. It\u2019s enough makes one nostalgic for an earlier time when tech names actually meant<\/em> something.<\/p>\n

The stories of how some of the world\u2019s biggest brands and technologies came up with their names open a window to a different era\u2014a simpler time before Web squatters took all the normal names and corporations\u00a0<\/a>focus-grouped language to death.<\/p>\n

A better<\/em> time.<\/p>\n

Here we present the hidden\u2014and occasionally accidental\u2014histories behind some of the biggest names in tech.<\/p>\n

Bluetooth<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Like most normal people, you probably haven\u2019t invested too much of your valuable time pondering the origins of the term \u201cBluetooth.\u201d As it turns out, the ubiquitous wireless technology\u2019s name has nothing to do with being blue or tooth-like in appearance and has everything to do with medieval Scandinavia.<\/p>\n

Harald Bluetooth was the Viking king of Denmark between 958 and 970. King Harald was famous for uniting parts of Denmark and Norway into one nation and converting the Danes to Christianity.<\/p>\n

So, what does a turn-of-the-last-millennium Viking king have to do with wireless communication? He was a uniter!<\/p>\n

\n
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Harald Bluetooth in an ancient version of Instagram.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the mid-1990s, the wireless communication field needed some uniting. Numerous corporations were developing competing, noncompatible standards. Many people saw this growing fragmentation as an impediment to widespread adoption of wireless.<\/p>\n

One such person was Jim Kardach, an Intel engineer working on wireless technologies. Kardach took on the role of a cross-corporate mediator dedicated to bringing various companies together to develop an industry-wide standard for low-power, short-range radio connectivity.<\/p>\n

At the time, Kardach had been reading a book about Vikings that featured the reign of Harald, whom he viewed as an ideal symbol for bringing competing parties together, as he explained:<\/p>\n

Bluetooth was borrowed from the 10th-century, second king of Denmark, King Harald Bluetooth; who was famous for uniting Scandinavia just as we intended to unite the PC and cellular industries with a short-range wireless link.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n
\u00a0\"\"<\/cite><\/div>
This logo might RUNE your day.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The various interested parties eventually came together to form the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, which developed the agreed-upon standard we know and love today. \u201cBluetooth\u201d was originally meant to be a placeholder, but the name had already taken off in the press and thus remains around today.<\/p>\n

The millennium-old shout-out doesn\u2019t end there. The Bluetooth logo\u2014that cryptic symbol in a blue oval printed on the box your phone came in\u2014is actually the initials of Harald Bluetooth written in Scandinavian runes.<\/p>\n

eBay<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\n
\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/cite><\/div>
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Web\u2019s go-to site for acquiring Justin Bieber branded duct tape and oddly shaped potato chips might be excused for including the \u201ce\u201d prefix in its name. The nearly 20-year-old site was born in a technological era when \u201ce\u201d was the accepted prefix to indicate to all things \u201celectronic.\u201d But as it turns out, eBay\u2019s \u201ce\u201d stands for \u201cecho,\u201d and its \u201cbay\u201d just stands for itself\u2014and neither \u201cecho\u201d nor \u201cbay\u201d has anything to do with online bidding.<\/p>\n

The site that would become eBay started life as the more aptly dubbed \u201cAuctionWeb,\u201d which was part of a larger personal site run by former Apple software engineer Pierre Omidyar.<\/p>\n

As AuctionWeb grew in popularity, Omidyar decided to spin it off into its own entity, which he wanted to call \u201cEcho Bay\u201d after his consulting firm, Echo Bay Technology Group. Unfortunately the echobay.com domain was already taken, so Omidyar shortened it to the available \u201cebay.com.\u201d<\/p>\n

Takeaway: Sometimes success means just settling for what\u2019s available.<\/p>\n

Google<\/strong><\/h2>\n

We all do it: We use the awesome power of Google to correct our common misspellings. For example, I never spell the word \u201cbureaucrat\u201d correctly on the first try, but I can depend on Mountain View\u2019s algorithm to provide the correct spelling whenever I plug in \u201cbuerocrat\u201d or some other massacred linguistic approximation.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, this spelling-correction wizardry was unavailable to the site\u2019s founders in the 1990s.<\/p>\n

The word googol (note the third \u201co\u201d and the lack of an \u201ce\u201d) is a mathematical term for the number 10 to the 100th power (or a 1 followed by 100 zeros). Cofounder, and current sad CEO Larry Page decided that it would be the perfect name for his new company as it reflected the nearly unimaginable vastness the Web.<\/p>\n

However, the two-\u201co\u201d \u201cGoogle\u201d we\u2019re familiar with today is the result of an accidental misspelling by one of Page\u2019s classmates, Sean Anderson. David Koller, another Stanford classmate of Page who was around at the dawn of Google recalls the story behind Google\u2019s name on his personal Stanford site:<\/p>\n

[Fellow Stanford student] Sean [Anderson] and Larry were in their office, using the whiteboard, trying to think up a good name\u2014something that related to the indexing of an immense amount of data. Sean verbally suggested the word \u201cgoogolplex,\u201d and Larry responded verbally with the shortened form, \u201cgoogol\u201d…Sean is not an infallible speller, and he made the mistake of searching for the name spelled as \u201cgoogle.com,\u201d which he found to be available. Larry liked the name, and within hours he took the step of registering the name \u201cgoogle.com\u201d…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Amazon<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Amazon.com is the global superstore that places everything from diapers to streaming original sitcoms to questionably legal botanicals a single click away from increasing your credit card debt. But what does the name \u201cAmazon\u201d have to do with the site\u2019s original niche\u2014books\u2014let alone with its expanded mission as an electronics manufacturer and a seller of all things sellable?<\/p>\n

Well, they\u2019re both big, and they both start with the right letter.<\/p>\n

\n
\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/cite><\/div>
Bezos wants to bring you all the things.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Founder Jeff Bezos had originally dubbed his company \u201cCadabra\u201d (as in \u201cabracadabra\u201d). But when his lawyer misheard the name as \u201ccadaver\u201d (as in \u201cdead person\u201d), Bezos decided his company needed a new, less morgue-friendly name.<\/p>\n

Back in the pre-Google world, a company\u2019s position near the front of alphabetized phonebooks (and of early web approximations of phonebooks) was still a chief concern. \u201cA\u201d was where you wanted to be.<\/p>\n

So Bezos went rummaging through the dictionary\u2019s first chapter in search of a likely business name\u2014and eventually settled on \u201cAmazon.\u201d Why? According to him, because it referred to the biggest river in the world. The biggest by a long shot.<\/p>\n

On a tangential note: Take a look at the subliminal messaging in the current Amazon logo, which features a slightly askew smirk beneath the Amazon name. Note how the smirk resembles an arrow connecting the first \u201ca\u201d in \u201cAmazon\u201d to the letter \u201cz,\u201d subtly driving home the point that the store delivers everything from A to Z.<\/p>\n

Etsy<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\n
\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/cite><\/div>
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Etsy is the multi-million-dollar virtual marketplace for occasionally insane homespun crafts. But what is an \u201cetsy\u201d exactly? If you think it\u2019s just some made-up nonsense word that has no meaning, you\u2019re absolutely correct.<\/p>\n

Launched in 2005, the company came about at a time when natural language URLs were already in short supply. Etsy cofounder Robert Kalin has admitted that \u201cetsy\u201d was simply an available nothing word, but one that sorta has some nice happenstances of translation.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted a nonsense word because I wanted to build the brand from scratch,\u201d Kalin said in a 2010 interview with Reader\u2019s Digest. \u201cI was watching Fellini\u2019s 8\u00bd<\/em> and writing down what I was hearing. In Italian, you say etsi<\/em> a lot. It means \u2018oh, yes.\u2019 And in Latin, it means \u2018and if.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

So the company\u2019s name means \u201cand if\u201d in a dead language. Try as Kalin might to justify it, Etsy still means nothing.<\/p>\n

Nintendo<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Though it wasn\u2019t the first home console system, the Nintendo Entertainment System was the biggest of its day. But few American children who spent the late 1980s addicted to goomba-stomping were aware that the Kyoto-based Nintendo Corporation had been in existence for more than a century.<\/p>\n

Nintendo traces its roots back to 1889, when the company produced hand-made playing cards painted on mulberry tree bark and used in a game known as Hanafuda. Hanafuda is a game of chance that dates back several centuries and is closely associated with gambling and the Yakuza (indeed, the name ya-ku-za<\/em> translates as \u201c8-9-3,\u201d a losing hand in a Blackjack-like game). The name \u201cNintendo\u201d in Japanese roughly translates as \u201cleave luck to heaven\u201d or \u201cin heaven\u2019s hands.\u201d<\/p>\n

So how did playing cards eventually lead to Mario Kart? After trying its hand (excuse the pun) at numerous endeavors over the next century, the company eventually found its way into the toy industry, which by the 1970s was a natural jumping-off point into the burgeoning video game market.<\/p>\n

Should Nintendo\u2019s video game future falter on the trainwreck of a system known as Wii U, it can always fall back on its roots as a maker of playing cards, which it continues to produce for the Japanese market.<\/p>\n

Nokia<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\n
\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n
Photo by: Michael Homnick<\/cite><\/div>
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Nokia brand may soon go away following an all-but-final\u00a0acquisition by Microsoft, but the Finnish company can claim a history that reaches back nearly 150 years.<\/p>\n

Nokia began its existence far from the world of mobile technology\u2014as a paper mill. The nascent company\u2019s second groundwood pulp mill was built near the town of Nokia (about 100 miles northwest of Helsinki), which the company decided to adopt as its name when it became a public share company in 1871.<\/p>\n

Over the decades, Nokia dabbled in all sorts of industrial ventures, which eventually led to its forming a telecommunications department in the late 1960s. By the 1980s, the company had become one of the first manufacturers of early mobile phones, such as the nearly 2-pound Mobira Cityman 900 in 1987.<\/p>\n

Flash-forward to 2013, and the company manufactures mobile phones with some spec<\/em>-tacular imaging hardware that is unfortunately attached to a Windows phone. And if everything goes Microsoft\u2019s way, Nokia may remain married to Windows phones for a looong time.<\/p>\n

Sony<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\n
\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/cite><\/div>
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In its first decade of existence, the company that would go on to create the Walkman, the\u00a0PlayStation, and various other forms of\u00a0bathtub-proof\u00a0gadgetry went by the name Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo\u2014or in English, \u201cTokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company.\u201d<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s founders felt that they needed to change its decidedly Japanese name if it was to successfully\u00a0compete in the developed postwar markets of Europe and the United States\u2014especially at a time when, in those markets, \u201cMade in Japan\u201d was synonymous with cheap junk.<\/p>\n

In a bid for Romanized respectability, the company\u2019s founders chose the word \u201cSony\u201d as a combination of the Latin word sonus<\/em>, meaning \u201csound,\u201d and the common American colloquialism \u201csonny-boy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first Sony-branded product was the TR-55 transistor radio, which went on sale in 1955 as Japan\u2019s first portable radio.<\/p>\n

Yahoo!<\/strong><\/h2>\n

God bless her, Marissa Mayer continues to do her darnedest to transform the once-powerful brand from a virtual warehouser of\u00a0stale email addresses to a powerhouse of hip.<\/p>\n

We wish her the best, but Yahoo\u2019s best years may far behind it.<\/p>\n

Indeed, those heady days are so long gone that most people forget when the company\u2019s curated list of links was quite a handy tool to have around.<\/p>\n

The company began as a hobby. Stanford University Ph.D. candidates David Filo and Jerry Yang kept a list of all their favorite sites. As the list began to grow plump with categories and subcategories, the pair realized they might have a service that would be useful to early Web surfers.<\/p>\n

Though they originally matter-of-factly dubbed their service \u201cJerry and David\u2019s Guide to the World Wide Web,\u201d the pair eventually decided on the fun exclamation-enlivened brand \u201cYahoo!\u201d\u2014which was bacronymed to encompass \u201cYet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle\u201d (the full name lacking an exclamation point, for some reason).<\/p>\n

Apple<\/strong><\/h2>\n

According to Walter Isaacson\u2019s Steve Jobs biography, the largest electronics firm in the world picked up its name in the most casual of ways.<\/p>\n

As Jobs and Wozniak were mulling over a name for their nascent company, Jobs had just returned from a visit to a communal apple farm. Off the cuff, he proposed the name \u201cApple Computer.\u201d The term, he explained to Isaacson \u201csounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge off the word \u2018computer.\u2019 Plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the phonebook.\u201d<\/p>\n

Once again, that phonebook was a big deal. Which might also explain why Google finds multiple companies answering to the name Aardvark Electronics.<\/p>\n

An end to nonsense names?<\/h2>\n

The past decade of tech names has been an unimpressive mess of language. Arguably, the biggest contributor to the disarray has been the dearth of available dot-com domain names.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the new-released bounty of top-level domain names will shake things up.\u00a0Perhaps companies will take advantage of their new freedom of URL and begin to veer away from the plague of nonsense.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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