Ping Mobile Launches the Revolutionary PingRewards™ Mobile Coupon Service

Ping Mobile LLC. announced today the commercial launch of the company’s flagship PingRewards™ Service, which sends registered users mobile coupons and vouchers from their favorite retail stores directly to their mobile phones in the form of SMS’s, or “text messages.”The PingRewards™ Web site is supported by a sophisticated back-office system which enables the company to provide top of-the-line security for users’ personal information; while at the same time delivering targeted, value-rich mobile content in the form of coupons, vouchers and discounts directly to these users’ cellular phones. The PingRewards™ coupons and vouchers are then redeemed and cashed-in at participating store locations.Retail vendors sign on as advertising partners via a “pay per coupon” mechanism that allows them access to a brand new, performance-based, and revenue generating channel of communication with customers who they would otherwise not be able to reach. These customers sign up for free through a double opt-in registration process, ensuring full acceptance and eagerness to receive these marketing messages, making the PingRewards™ mobile lists 100% targeted, as well as premium and exclusive to each of the participating retailers.PingRewards™ is the brain child of former online advertising executive, Shira Simmonds. “Our goal is to provide retail vendors with an innovative way to communicate their marketing messages to consumers, essentially delivering these messages directly into the hands of an audience that is not only targeted, but also eager and receptive to receiving these communications from those specific vendors.”She continued by explaining that “our system is very advanced, and allows retailers to manage and execute mobile campaigns on a monthly, weekly, daily or even hourly basis. Basically, anytime they need a boost in sales and in-store traffic, they turn to PingRewards™.” Mrs. Simmonds’ partner and Ping Mobile co-founder Nicole Mayraz agreed, stating that the “retail store owners are very excited about working with us, since they really see the potential for all the ongoing consumer marketing opportunities they now have at their disposal by partnering with Ping Mobile, and through their ongoing participation with the PingRewards™ Service.”Mrs. Simmonds added, “It was also the knowledge that they’d be saving significant amounts of previously wasted dollars by not having to print up and send out paper coupons - which people often forget to bring with them when they’re out shopping – as well as the exclusive opportunity we provide our retail clients for instant customer acquisition via our mobile registration option.”The mobile registration option gives retail store owners the “on-the-spot” capability to acquire new customers to the mobile coupon service. Ping Mobile provides store owners who choose this option with a PingRewards™ in-store advertising poster, which contains the stores’ personalized keyword and the short code number PING2 (74642). The customer simply types in that keyword and sends it as a text message to Ping Mobile. They are instantly registered to the PingRewards™ service with that retail vendor automatically listed in their “Favorites”, and they receive their first redeemable coupon for that store location within 60 seconds. Both the online and mobile phone-based registration for the PingRewards™ service is free to all users, although the mobile-based registration may involve fees for sending the outgoing text message, dependant upon the users’ individual carrier service. The company’s strict privacy and information security policies enable users to control every aspect of the service, and includes options for choosing which retail stores they want to get messages from, as well as the ability to designate the frequency of the mobile coupons, discounts and promotions that they receive.

British SMS Boom Leads To Digit Damage

Mobile telephone text messaging has become so popular in Britain that millions of users now suffer injuries to their thumbs and fingers because of their love of keeping in touch, according to a survey on Tuesday.
Over 93.5 million text messages are sent every day but all this digit action has lead to an explosion in people reporting cases of repetitive strain injury (RSI).
Thirty-eight percent more people suffer from sore wrists and thumbs due to texting than five years ago and 3.8 million people now complain of text-related injuries every year.
The survey for Virgin Mobile found the texting phenomenon shows no sign of slowing. Over 12 percent of the population admit to sending 20 texts per day and 10 percent confess to sending up to 100 texts every day.
While psychologists say it is important for people to communicate there is a danger that using arms-length tools like texting and email is making people uncomfortable with more intimate face-to-face conversations.
There has even been concern voiced that some people run the risk of becoming addicted to excessive texting.

Microsoft sends SMS R2 to beta

SMS R2 includes two prominent features, a new catalog service that will let users download third-party patches directly into SMS and a new vulnerability-scanning engine to discover misconfigured software.
SMS is one of two cornerstone tools Microsoft is developing under the System Center brand name. The other is Microsoft Operations Manager, which will get an R2 update later this year. Microsoft also plans to flesh out its System Center product family and revamp the System Center roadmap at its annual Management Summit in April.
SMS R2's catalog features are part of the new Inventory Tool for Custom Updates. The tool allows third parties and application developers to create and publish a catalog of updates using the same formats used for Microsoft Update, which is Microsoft's Web-based download center for patches. SMS R2, which now only scans the Microsoft Update catalog, will be able to scan catalogs posted on non-Microsoft Web sites and download the patches into SMS for later distribution. Currently, users must download the non-Microsoft patches manually, repackage them in the proper formats and then import them into SMS.
Users also can use the Inventory Tool to create native SMS-formatted updates for custom software and line-of-business applications.
"We worked with the hardware vendors to create the same experience for firmware upgrades using SMS, now we are turning to the application side," says Felicity McGourty, director of product management in the Windows enterprise management division at Microsoft. "From the customer perspective it is real simple. Whether you do firmware, operating system, Microsoft applications, third-party applications or line-of-business you can do it in the same format, same tool same experience."
The second tool that highlights SMS R2 is the Scan Tool for Vulnerability Assessment, which can scan for nearly 100 configuration settings to help identify potential security issues. The tool reports on settings that don’t meet with internal configuration policies such as having the firewall activated on all desktops. The scan tool allows you to create the policies, as well as, scan the network to ensure that desktops and servers adhere to those policies. The scan tool is based on Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) 2.0, a free vulnerability assessment tool.