There are several actual companies with products up and running that provide this service (http://www.bigdoor.com/http://levlr.com and http://www.badgeville.com) are the first that come to mind. Do you think you've put yourself at a disadvantage by not having a product ready to go after getting publicity?
Yes there are competitors but I'm not quite sure that the sites you mentioned are that. I Believe what http://www.Reputely.com is wanting to do is more similar to http://www.BunchBall.com and my startup http://www.IActionable.com. Basically something called 'Game Mechanics as a Service'. Where the service provided are achievements, rewards and points for your existing applications. http://www.BigDoor.com seems to have focused on the Virtual Currency aspect of Game Mechanics.
There seems to also be a breed of service that is somewhere in between. Where your application does the hard work of determining when a user has earned the points or reward and just tells another service to 'store' that. Our startup originally went down this road but HN quickly gave us feedback and said they didn't like the idea of sites doing all the hard work and then just letting someone else store that reputation data. Now we are more similar to BunchBall in that we actually provide a configurable rule engine which awards the items to your users for you.
I think its interesting to see so many companies 'go public' all at once. Like dwynings says on his blog, other companies coming out just validates the market. Now its time to actually deliver something. :)
