I tried the Jyngle service after a positive experience with Pinger and boy was I disappointed. It's surprising that for all the publicity these companies get that no one actually reports on the quality of these services. Deal info and CEO hobnobbing seem to trump first hand experience.

Jyngle and Pinger realize different subsets of the same space of ideas. Where Pinger promotes peer to peer communication, Jyngle promotes 1 to N, leader to group broadcasting; recipients can't reply. IMHO, the latter product strategy is more focused and a stronger attempt at finding a chasm crossing niche. Jyngle targets the leaders or appointed communicators of well-defined groups like athletic teams. Teams and clubs that meet regularly often have to broadcast room or field changes or snow cancellations or reminders, etc. Teams happy with the service would tell other teams, leagues other leagues, and team members their co-workers back at the office all the way to main street in a happy scenario.

With this focus, Jyngle's web interface naturally emphasizes group management. Subscribers can create groups, join groups, leave groups with mechanisms similar to those on the Yahoo Groups. Group owners have a variety of ways to get their messages out: SMS, Text to Voice Message, or Voice Message. The messages also must be scheduled with time and date.

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Pinger is the first service I'll examine in a small set of startups and established companies aspiring to bring swarming or flocking to mobile communication. (Next post, I'll look at Jyngle.)
CELL 2 CELL BASE CASE

Pinger's operations can be a bit difficult to describe, so I'll start with the steady state case where all participants are set up and mobile. Let's be clear that Pinger's quanta of communication is the voice message and voice is the UI. The mobile user never types a message. SMS is only received as system generated alerts.

The initiating user dials a designated special local number and specifies, with voice prompt guidance, the distribution list and records the message. The voice recognition works very well for my test examples. Contacts are managed through the web interface. The recipients each receive an SMS alert on their phones which specify a number to call for message retrieval. (Pressing TALK on my phone dials the number in the SMS automatically.) Pinger uses caller ID to identify the account so no password entry is necessary. (Those afraid of caller ID spoofing or who have blocked ID can enable password protection.)
Recipients hear the message, can then record their own voice reply and direct that much the same way an email can be directed, back to the original sender only, all recipients or forwarded to other recipients. Like the carbon copy (cc: ) trail in an email conversation, Pinger plays back the whole stack of voice messages in the thread last in, first out (LIFO). Pressing 1 kills the playback and shifts to reply mode immediately.

The distribution list can be comprised of individual contacts or groups of contacts established through the web interface. For example, I can specify "Jane Doe" and "Crocheting Club." Pinger seems smart enough not to send the same message to Jane Doe twice if she happens to be a contact in the "Crocheting Club."

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Today’s New York Times runs a story about the power of databases in shaping reputation. The story focuses on expunged criminal records but it could just as well been about the impact of identity theft on credit histories. In either case, facts adverse to one’s reputation seem to take a life of its own and persist long after the event, lying dormant until surfacing at a vital juncture in the identity holder’s life. In the wake of the job or credit denial, the applicant must then grapple with the databases to mend her reputation.

The internet version of this story is of the teenager who gets denied by Princeton because of her MySpace profile or the employee who gets canned for her personal blog entries or dismissed by a potential lover because of stupid forum postings. Unlike proprietary credit or criminal databases, the reputation keeper here is Google--and its lesser brethern—that save and index everything they come across on the open internet.

The credit agencies, happy to sell arms to all sides, provide proactive solutions to individuals like real time credit monitoring services. On the internet, techdirt offers reputation monitoring to corporations. What services exist for individual reputation on the internet?

ReputationDefender.com uncloaked recently and quietly in beta to fill just that void. CEO Michael Fertik leads a startup team with distinguished legal and public policy backgrounds that you’d expect to see on the roster of a Beltway think tank or law firm. Filling out the executive team are CTO Brian Kelley, Director of Operations Ross Chanin and Directory of Privacy Research David Thompson. Fertik co-founded TruExchange, and many of those same people are involved in this new venture. The company is based in Louisville, Kentucky.

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