Little-known fact: The term "Bluetooth" derives from the surname of a 10th-century Danish king, Harold Bluetooth, who helped negotiate treaties between warring Norwegian nations. When inventors sought a name for their new wireless specification, which was created to enable conflicting technologies to communicate with one another, "Bluetooth" was a perfect fit.

Since Bluetooth's introduction in 1999, the power-efficient radio signal can be found in a variety of high-tech items ranging from laptops to cellular phones to GPS navigation devices. In an example of Bluetooth's ubiquity, Michael Foley, the executive director of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, marks today as a major Bluetooth milestone: One billion Bluetooth devices have been sold worldwide. To put the statistic in perspective, that number is greater than the number of worldwide PC users (expected to reach one billion in 2010), and is equal to the number of mobile phones shipped globally in 2006. To put Bluetooth's market-penetration into perspective, Bluetooth-enabled devices are estimated to ship at the staggering pace of 12 million per week.

With Bluetooth's success, it's only natural to ponder what's next for the technology. According to Foley, it's an increase in speed: "With the current incarnation of Bluetooth, you can stream a song, but speed is a limiting factor- the same with video. You can stream a low-quality video, but in the future we expect to see the exchange of camcorder-quality video at speeds approaching 100 Mbps," he said.

Because the speedier version of Bluetooth won't be available to consumers for about 18 months, we'll have to make do with the current Bluetooth that we all know and love.