Pinger, a pretty cool vmail service

Have you ever been in a rush, and wanted to call someone, but just to leave them a message without actually talking with them?

The big problem: If you call them, they might pick up.

Joe Sipher and Greg Woock, former executives at the personal digital assistant company Handspring, have produced a surprisingly convenient vmail service to do that -- from any mobile phone. Their new company is called Pinger, and Greg showed us the service last Friday. Today, it has started testing the service, and you can sign up on their site We think this has a great shot at getting wide adoption.

Here's how it works: Pinger gives you a local number that you store in your phone under "speed dial." Whenever you want to use the service, you press "p", and it dials a local number. So far, you have just pressed one button.

Pinger then gives you a prompt, and then you simply say the name of the person you want to call (your phone must have the person's contact details stored, such as email address and/or phone number). Pinger uses voice recognition (from Tellme) to look up their details. Pinger then gives you a second prompt, and you speak your message into the phone. Pinger then sends the audio message to the person's email account, or to their phone via an SMS audio file. So the person on the other end can listen to it immediately or later -- but the main point is, you're not locked into actually talking with them.

The break-through technology that has allowed this is VoIP. When you call that local number from your cell, by pressing "p," Pinger tunnels into a VoIP network, and then distributes the number. It works independent of carriers, so it can send to and receive from any carrier or phone.

So, here it stands in favorable contrast with other products, including that of Coremobility "vnotes" product, which we wrote about almost two years ago. Sprint has launched that on millions of phones, but you have to be a Sprint subscriber to use it.

Woock said the engineering was tricky, but that he was able to hire the right folks to do it. Given the company's expertise and experience in taking products to market, this company should be able to execute just fine. Woock was Handspring's VP of sales, and Sipher was Handspring's VP of marketing. So success will depend on how useful this product really is. They are going to rely on a viral campaign, Woock said. We've used it, and really like it.

If you use the service from your computer, via the Web, it will be free. But Pinger will start charging you once you exceed ten messages a month from your phone. Even if only three percent of Pinger's expected users choose to pay for the service, it will make money, Woock predicts.

At every step, it is designed for easy use. Once you leave a message with someone, via email, that person gets a message asking them whether they want to sign up with Pinger too. It then handholds them through the process. You have a dashboard for settings, which you can manage on the Web. You can choose "expert" mode if you simply want a little tone prompt instead of spoken directions each time you call. You can choose whether messages are sent via text or email, or both, and so on.

Woock likes to call the service "asynchronous" voice, meaning it is the voice equivalent of text messaging or emailing -- where both parties aren't talking with each other in real time.

Woock thinks there's a large market for this. Texting (SMS'ing) exploded from practically zero messages being sent in early 2005, to almost 50 billion messages being sent in the second half of 2005, he said.

Last year, the company got $3 million in backing from Randy Komisar at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which we've mentioned before, back when it was called VoiceVault. They met him through Donna Dubinsky, who they'd worked with at Handspring.