EBay founder Pierre Omidyar is at it again, this time in Kaimuki and this time with Punahou grad Randy Ching, a former eBay employee.

The two incorporated Peer News Inc. in Delaware in November and set up shop in Kaimuki.

The company launched its first product, ginx.com, earlier this year.

Ginx is a Twitter client designed to enable people to become more actively engaged in the news and topics they care about, the company said in a brief January statement.

After weeks of pestering by your columnist and stories in the technology press, Ginx was ready for some local ink.

“;Peer News is focused on how people connect to the world around them through their friends,”; said Ching, a recovering attorney and engineering major.

“;There has been a lot of innovation in the social media space,”; through Facebook, Twitter and other sites, he said. Of them, Twitter had “;a nice open platform and APIs (application program interfaces) we could use”; to study how people interact using technology.

Twitter is a social networking site that allows users to interact with people they otherwise might not have met.

Ginx mirrors Twitter, but has features Twitter does not.

One question Twitter newcomers have is “;who should I follow?”; Ching noted.

Ginx created groups that Twitter users with Ginx invitation-codes can use to follow people in the same industry or with similar interests.

Other third-party Twitter tools, such as Tweetdeck, also allow for categorization but require an application download, whereas Ginx's is built-in.

Ginxjourno and journotwits are for journalists, administered by Omidyar; chinameme is for English-speaking people with China experience and insight; hawaiigroup is maintained by local tech community luminary Ryan Ozawa; and Pam Chun, of Hawaiian Islands Ministries, maintains nporgs for nonprofits. There are groups for Web developers, triathletes and headbangers, to name a few.

One end game for Peer News is that “;people have an innate desire to be informed and it's only heightened right now”; because of economic and political events, Ching said.

To help with the back end of that, Ginx is looking for a few good Web developers.

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Erika Engle is a reporter with the Star-Bulletin. Reach her by e-mail at

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