A query from someone who had read my earlier post on 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” — motivated me to do a quick search to see if I could find anything more about the system. I discovered a recent Red Herring article on “Mobile Phone Tag” that provides some new information. The article (dated August 11, 2004) claims that the service currently has 1,500 subscribers (on an island of 4.3 million) and charges US$0.60 / month for unlimited usage; an ITU article from June 24 claimed “over 1000” users; it may be that the two articles come from the same source but were posted at different times, but I haven’t seen anything more recent about BEDD, and these subscriber numbers do seem awfully low. I also cannot find a web site for the company, leaving me curious as to what is really happening with BEDD.
The Red Herring article also references a number of similar or related services, such as MyCupid (from Singapore Telecommunications, costing SG$0.15, or US$0.09, per search or SMS), TrackUrMate (from India’s Bharti Airtel, costing 3 rupees, or US$0.06, per SMS), Era (from Poland), Dodgeball (from Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert, available in several US cities and currently free) and Match.com Mobile (available in the US via Cingular, AT&T and Nextel). I do not know the numbers of subscribers for any of these other services, and I wonder whether any of them has gotten much traction (especially compared with the millions of subscribers to more “traditional” online, but not necessarily mobile, social network and/or dating services).
[Update: Adrian, who had sent me the initial query, followed up with a link to the BEDD web site. The site highlights a new feature, “distributed memory”, in which a BEDD subscriber’s phone can carry another subscriber’s profile (from the description, it’s not clear whether it can have multiple profiles). This seems to deviate from the “proximity-based” networking that I thought was the focus of the system — the other profiled subscriber(s) could be anywhere — and I wonder if the viewer of such profiles is given any indication of whether or not a viewed profile is the one associated with the proximate subscriber or someone else. If one can select among different profiles to make available, it may open up new possibilities for the maintenance and transmission of multiple personas (perhaps that is, in fact, the intent). If multiple profiles are shown simultaneously — and others’ profiles are clearly distinguishable — then it provides a new way for people to show others how popular they are, either by the number of friends’ profiles they carry on their phones, or by how many other phones carry their profile.]