Bluetooth is like the well-mannered child who does what he's told but never gets much attention.
Show-off sister WiFi gets her name plastered on "Wireless Hotspot" stickers all over town. Speedy cousin WiMax is poised to cover whole cities with mobile broadband Internet.
In the end, they're just ways of sending data over the radio. Bluetooth is actually close to being a teenager, having been introduced by IBM, Intel, Nokia, and Toshiba back in 1998.
Those companies still appear on the official Bluetooth Special Interest Group's home page, though IBM's presence has morphed into computer-maker Lenovo.
Bluetooth.com claims that consumers around the world are becoming more aware of this technology and putting it to good use.
It notes in a report by Millward Brown, commissioned by the Bluetooth SIG, an average 81 per cent of consumers are aware of Bluetooth technology, up from 73 per cent in 2005.
A more telling statistic is the number of consumers who claim to be "extremely familiar" with Bluetooth, which probably means they're actually using it.
For the U.S., at least, that number leapt from a mere two per cent of survey respondents in 2005 to 50 per cent in 2006.
This is probably due to Bluetooth's increasing prevalence in cellphone handsets, which has reached over 60 per cent in North America in 2007, according to IMS Research Report The Worldwide Market for Bluetooth.
But what exactly can you do with it?
Let's start with your car. We all know that fooling around with a handheld cellphone in traffic is a dumb idea, and in some places it's already illegal.
Bluetooth allows you to connect your cellphone to your car stereo, so the whole car pool can share your neurotic need to be connected while driving.
When you're not yammering away, a Bluetooth transmitter hooked up to your mp3 player can stream your favourite music wirelessly to the car stereo.
I know somebody who has a playlist on his iPod called "turbulence tunes" to help him through rough plane rides.
Perhaps you could have some "heavy traffic hits" or "detour ditties."
Many luxury vehicles are coming with Bluetooth as an option, and according to a survey by the Polk Center for Automotive Studies, 85 per cent of luxury driving respondents will consider Bluetooth technology.
Get a Lexus LX470, and the phone number of the person calling will be displayed on a screen.
Just what every driver needs, another distraction.
Of course, every techno-toy comes with built-in risks.
A friend of mine jumped in his Bluetooth-equipped car recently and drove away from his office, which happens to be full of computer security geeks.
The next morning, they greeted him with "Good morning, snookie-poo."
The gang had pointed their "bluesnarfing rifle" at Ron's car and picked up his phone conversation with his wife.
"Bluejacking" is a milder form of this kind of hack, in which a mysterious message appears on your cellphone or PDA because somebody discovered it and sent it by Bluetooth.
Other Bluetooth-enabled devices can also be attacked in this fashion, and with important business data sitting on laptops and PDAs, it's important to take some security precautions.
Just changing your device from "discoverable" to "hidden" will reduce the chance of somebody stumbling up on it.
But if the company crown jewels are on a laptop, and you're heading out to a tradeshow full of hungry competitors, I'd turn the Bluetooth off completely.
The range of Bluetooth signals varies from around 10 metres in most cellphones to up to 100 metres in laptops with Class 1 transmitters.
Chicago-based Callpod, Inc. is offering a range of powerful Bluetooth devices, including the Dragon headset, which claims a 100-metre-plus range.
So, you can roam around your home or office, or home office, and never be away from the phone. You can even, according to the company's website, connect with your PC for Skype calls simultaneously, allowing you to switch between your PC and mobile phone with a press of a button.
As a bonus, you'll spend the whole day looking like a space alien waiting to be beamed up to the mothership.
Bluetooth is also cropping up in medical and sports applications, and of course in games like the Nintendo Wii. Nintendo chose Bluetooth as the wireless standard for its popular gaming platform, and technogeeks are already finding ways to stretch it, sometimes in ways that Nintendo never intended.
For example, the Wii console will only support four Wiimotes, but the Bluetooth standard allows for seven. This might come in handy if you have a big family or the whole office needs a Wii break.
Bluetooth users, especially in business, need to be thoughtful - and perhaps even a little paranoid - about wireless security.
One blogger claimed that he found pictures from his brother's Bluetooth-enabled cellphone mysteriously appearing in the photo channel of his Wii console.
The rumour was scotched pretty quickly on the Go Nintendo website, which noted that Bluetooth devices have to be paired to get them to one another.
Maybe so, but Ron is still trying to get over the ribbing he took after calling "snookie-poo" to say he'd be late for dinner.
(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)
