BEDD: Multidimensional Social Software for Bluetooth Phones

John Sherry sent me a Yahoo News article about BEDD, a Bluetooth mobile phone application launched recently in Singapore that allows users to discover things about and interact with the other BEDD-enabled phone users in their immediate vicinity. The application brings together a number of proximity-based features that have been explored in separate applications (e.g., mobile dating, alerts and messaging) plus some new features (e.g., mobile proximity-based advertising). The article reports 1000 users in the first month, which is far short of what I would expect to be the critical mass to make this successful, but the application sounds promising.

According to an article at Hardware Zone

For the end-users, BEDD costs only S$0.98 per month and offers a full menu of BEDD-functions: BEDDmates - searches automatically for friendship or dating; BEDDbay - searches automatically for items to buy, sell and trade; BEDDtalk - allows users to send free SMS with Bluetooth range either person to person or broadcast to a group simultaneously; BEDDbuddies - alerts users when their buddies or family are close by; BEDDshare - superdistribution of the software where users can share with each other; and BEDDfish - allows users to send Bluetooth messages to any Bluetooth enabled phone.