After our successful Atlanta developers conference in 1998, which we sold out, we started doing three Bluetooth developer conferences a year: Spring was in Europe (in 1999 it was London), the USA in fall (in 1999 it was LA).  Early in the development of the conference we decided that we would have a party for the developers at the LA House of Blues to thank everybody for the tremendous amount of progress that we had made on the Bluetooth program (specification, security legislation, frequency harmonization, and the regulatory qualification program).  Having been a guitar player most of my life, and with the setting of the House of Blues, I thought it would only be fitting to write a Blues song.  While on an airplane to Copenhagen I jotted down lyrics to the “Bluetooth Blues” loosely based off the Kansas City Blues chord progression.  I sent the song off to the promoter’s group email reflector, and got a response from Warren Allen of Toshiba who was also a Guitar player.  Warren had basically turned this into a real tune and created some very funny lyrics.  Just prior to the party I met with Warren in my room and we ran through the song once, and then performed the song for the developers at the House of Blues.  An encore performance was given in the Presidential suite of the Bonaventure Hotel (where the conference was taking place) where the police broke-up the party and Vince Holton of the Incisor was able to nab some embarrassing photos that he published in his Incisor magazine (Vince always seemed to show up at the parties).  Photo to the right shows Simon Ellis, Jim Kardach behind Simon, Stephnie, Ralf, Warren Allen Playing Guitar, and Freddie on harp.
A professional rendition of the Bluetooth Blues was performed and recorded; I’ve attached a link to the file here.  Warren formally wrote-up the song and it still appears on his website!

The mp3 file below is a professional recording of the Bluetooth Blues done by Ollie and his partner (forgot the name).  They performed the Bluetooth Blues at a large SIG meeting which took place in Jukas Jarvi, which is in the Arctic Circle in Northern Sweden.  Warren played Harmonica and joined Ollie and partner.  I need to see if I can find the movie from this (its great).

Bluetooth Blues.mp3

Also have the video tape of the performance (edited by Simon Ellis).

The 3rd Bluetooth conference was pretty exciting.  First we had been doing secret negotiations with Lucent (within a year they would become Agear), 3COM and Microsoft to join the SIG as promoters.  While the SIG was really screaming along (this developer’s conference had more attendees than the Intel Developer’s conference for that year), we still needed more momentum, and Microsoft could provide drivers for the most used OS, Lucent had tons of RF expertise, and 3COM was providing lots of consumer product experience (they had just purchased Palm, which they would sell again; go figure).  We had hammered out the agreement (a long, painful and drawn out process that involves lots of lawyers) and were going to announce the additional promoters at the conference and then welcome the new promoters at the house of blues party discussed above.  The new promoters were very aware of the momentum of the SIG and were concerned that they would be overshadowed by the existing promoter companies, so we agreed that the SIG wouldn’t call out the old versus new promoters at the event; a subject I particular brought up with our Bluetooth SIG marketing chair Simon Ellis (I was the chairman of the SIG at the time).

You can imagine my surprise when I walked into the Bonaventure Hotel only to view the 40 foot tall banner hanging from the second story listing all of the original promoters (see photo to the right)!  Would they notice this?  Immediately upon arriving I was told Microsoft, Lucent and 3COM were looking for me (yep, they saw it).  All Simon had to say was Oops!  There was a lot of pain associated with that incident ...

Simon also forgot to mention to the House of Blues party organizers that the new promoters were invited to the SIG party and the new promoters were kicked off the Busses (Oops again).  After a couple of phone calls, we straightened it out, but I really feared meeting them at the party; luckly they were already drunk by the time I got to the House of Blues and performed the newly written song “the Bluetooth Blues”.  There was a lot of pain associated with that incident ...

However we had a great night, and as part of the initiation into the SIG, each of the new board members was given a horned viking helmet.  Simon configured Mike Foley’s helmet (Mike was with Microsoft at the time) such that one horn pointed up and the other pointed down; which was to help Mike blend in better with the other promoters (Mike says the the helmet is still in his office in its original configuration).

Also at the LA conference the Bluetooth SIG received an award from byte magazine for best technology.