teleguy
Enthusiast
Mar 9, 2005, 2:13 AM
Post #1 of 1
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Are you streaming music to your phone and using a Bluetooth headset now? Would you?
Broadcom Beefs Up Bluetooth Offerings
Jason Lopez, wireless.newsfactor.com
The communications semiconductor company Broadcom (Nasdaq: BRCM - news) says it will buy Bluetooth chip maker Zeevo for $29.4 million in cash and $2.6 million in stock. Zeevo’s technologies serve music listeners by enabling wireless connections between source devices, speakers and headphones.
Broadcom is interested in becoming an instant player in the wireless headphone market. Zeevo, considered a leader in the space, makes the chips in Hewlett-Packard’s popular Bluetooth Stereo Headphones designed for HP’s iPaq series of handheld devices.
Data to Your Ears
The purchase of Zeevo helps Broadcom widen its Bluetooth strategy to include technologies that specialize in playing music wirelessly. “We’ve been leading the progression [of Bluetooth technology implementation] on the mobile phone side and on the PC side,” said Scott Bibaud, senior director of marketing for Broadcom’s Bluetooth technology.
“Last year, we brought out software that started to enable the phones, the PCs and the PDAs to stream stereo data out to a Bluetooth stereo headset,” he told NewsFactor. With the merger of Zeevo’s technologies, Broadcom owns a more complete portfolio of a music-oriented wireless system.
Dot-Com Promise
The promise of Bluetooth has not yet arrived. When the technology was discussed during the dot-com boom, it was projected as the next killer app. “It was an unrealistic expectation that the network would grow to the point of being very lucrative and widespread in a short period of time,” Bibaud explained.
Last year, about 130 million Bluetooth devices shipped. “It’s becoming a de facto standard on phones,” Bibaud added, “and it’s a standard on PDAs and becoming a standard on PCs.”
According to a new study from the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, consumer awareness of the technology is surging. The research -- based on a poll of 1,300 people in the U.S., UK and Japan -- found the number of consumers aware of Bluetooth almost doubled from 2003 to 2004.
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