Happy New Year! Looking back on this past year, we would like to thank Techstars, our advisors and mentors, for all of their incredible support and guidance. We also want to extend a special shout out to our expanding team of engineers who appeared on Day 6 in the 12 Days of Techstars holiday video, Sabih, Sai, and Anmol. It has been an exciting ride for all of us and we look forward to 2012! Warm wishes for the upcoming year, The Ginger.io Team Posted by | PermalinkTags: AnnouncementsLive from World Diabetes Day! We’re very pleased to share that we have been named the winner of the Sanofi-Aventis Data, Design, Diabetes Innovation Challenge. The announcement coincides with World Diabetes Day, which aims to raise awareness around diabetes in order to stem the tide of this devastating epidemic. We are honored to receive this award, and would like to take this opportunity to thank sanofi-aventis for their leadership in catalyzing innovation to improve the lives of those with diabetes. We would also like to recognize Chewable and all of the other DDD Challenge participants for pioneering innovative new technologies, products and services we wholeheartedly believe will make a difference. We’re also humbled by the magnitude of the challenge collectively faced by all who strive to combat this deadly epidemic. It is our hope and our aim to develop innovative solutions that will serve as one piece of a broader puzzle, and we anticipate working hand-in-hand with myriad collaborators in this pursuit. We have and will continue to work hard to develop technological solutions to improve care and quality of life for persons with diabetes, and are grateful for this award that will substantially accelerate our ability to do so. Much love to the community for your support!
Posted by Karan on November 15, 2011, at 08:08 PM | PermalinkTags: The TeamIntroducing Sai Moturu!Here at Ginger.io we are all about big data - data that can provide meaningful insights about health symptoms and outcomes. Sai Moturu, our newest team member, joins us as an expert in data science to help us determine those valuable insights that can help you lead a healthier life.  Sai received his PhD in Computer Science from Arizona State University and recently completed a two-year postdoctoral stint at the MIT Media Lab focused on examining how our health and wellness are affected by behavioral factors, which are in turn influenced by the social and contextual environment. Sai will be joining us regularly on this blog to share interesting analytical findings, to comment on the ‘big data analytics’ space, and to share general Ginger.io data trends. Ginger Bytes about Sai:
Posted by Lara on November 10, 2011, at 04:57 PM | PermalinkTags: The TeamFollow the data, and your heartThis entry was originally posted in the Data Design Diabetes challenge blog on November 4, 2011.
This week, finalist Ginger.io explains how they use big data and passive monitoring to support people living with diabetes. At Ginger.io (pronounced “ginger-eye-oh”), we’re all about big data and better health. We are strong believers in passively harnessing digital traces of behavior to develop meaningful insights into your health. For people living with diabetes, our goal is to provide an automated “check engine light,” activating a social support network that can help individuals stay on track. We’re still early in our development and are traveling up a steep learning curve. Here are some of the lessons we’ve learned so far. Find Your Passion We found ours. We have family and friends that deal with diabetes on a daily basis. Early detection and proper treatment are critical in addressing this national public health crisis. As the prevalence of diabetes grows, it has become clear to us that there are few issues which are more important to the health of our country and the world. This passion and frustration with the current state of affairs helps us power through the sleepless nights and inevitable setbacks and push forward to create a better product. The issue deserves our creative energy. We intend to help people cope with their condition as well as help them care. We believe information equals advantage, and with the right information people can take control of their health. Follow the data. And your heart. Join (or Build) a Movement Healthcare in the U.S. is broken. There has to be a better way to treat those that are ill and keep the rest healthy. Fortunately, many in this country share the sentiment and the movement is growing. We know innovation occurs at the intersection of disciplines and the juncture between healthcare and technology is no exception. More and more people are "hacking medicine". As recent MIT graduates, it’s in our DNA. By leveraging technology and an interactive approach, we can help drive down costs while improving access to quality care. Through partnership with others who share that vision, we can move the community forward. Worry less about competition. This is a big space. Focus on solving one problem really well and the rest will flow. Find Mentors Early We’ve experienced the importance of great advice in guiding our product development. Fortunately, the Innovation Challenge connected us with some fantastic advisers, including Jeff Gothelf (@jboogie) and Richard Banfield (@freshtilledsoil). They helped us hone in on two key re-design goals from our early concepts, personalization and simplicity. While healthcare has traditionally moved slowly, there is hope. We found champions here in Cambridge, MA and across the country who want to help. Find early adopters that can get you off the ground quickly, learn from them, and enable them to help champion your cause with others. Get Outside As Steve Blank reminds us, “no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.” Real, uncut feedback is both daunting and rewarding. And thanks to your support, we’re getting a whole lot of it. For example, as finalists of the DDD challenge, we get a chance to gather feedback from the community in a month-long community uptake exercise. Get involved in your target community and take a walk in their shoes, just like we did when, inspired by the MIT Age Lab, we walked around with pins and needles in our shoes to simulate diabetic neuropathy. Develop experiments, test your hypotheses, and remind yourself that this is about people. Aim High Do something meaningful. We see big opportunities to make an impact at scale through health tech entrepreneurship. Our ability to harness mobile data has applications beyond health, but ultimately we are about understanding our communities and the people living in them. We see implications for massive, passive behavior data to improve public health delivery, from marshaling medical resources to identifying epidemics. And we see a chance to advance the state of clinical research and understanding for how we develop new, more personalized treatments. This mission has helped us recruit new teammates and new resources to accelerate our momentum. There’s a lot to fix. Do your part. You may be surprised at who’s willing to join you for the ride. Thanks, Team DDD! Regardless of your business model, being patient centered should be your true north. The DDD team has given us a fantastic opportunity to maintain this cardinal direction. A big thank you for giving us a chance to take this journey. We’re honored to be part of these early efforts, and have taken big strides in the past few months. Look out for exciting new developments as we continue on our journey.
Posted by | PermalinkTags: DDDFunding NewsWe're delighted to announce our $1.7M seed financing with investors from Boston, New York and San Francisco. We’re excited to bring together key expertise in mobile, consumer health, and big data. The round was led by our friends at True Ventures, a seed fund with an inspiring perspective on early stage growth. Participation also included west coast investors Mitch Kapor at Kapor Capital (Lotus 1-2-3), James Joaquin (XMarks, Pixable), and Ty Curry (Managing Partner at ZS Associates). Notable East coast investors include Romulus Capital (seed investor in MIT/Harvard startups), Walt Winshall (PatientsLikeMe, AgaMatrix), Bill Warner (Avid, Wildfire), Ari Buchler (General Counsel for Phase Forward), ENIAC Ventures (mobile seed fund in NY), Launch Capital (seed stage mobile and health startups), and of course, Techstars (startup accelerator program). We plan to use this round of financing to grow our technology platform, and ramp up our engineering and product development to support our early partners. If you’re interested in joining the team, get in touch. It’s been an exciting journey so far, and we’re just getting started. A big thank you to the Ginger.io extended family for your support. We couldn’t have gotten here without you. Alright, now it’s back to work!
Posted by Karan | PermalinkTags: AnnouncementsWe're DDD finalists!
More big news! Thanks to your support, we were selected as finalists in the sanolfi aventis Data Design and Diabetes (DDD) Contest. We will be launching a month long pilot of the Ginger.io application with diabetes patients. If you missed our pitch at Demo Day in New York last month, watch it above. We’re really excited about this opportunity to pilot the Ginger.io DDD app. People living with diabetes are up to two times more likely to suffer from stress, anxiety, and depression, making it more difficult to take medications faithfully and maintain a healthy lifestyle. Our goal with the DDD application is to lift the burden depression places on diabetic patients by using passively collected data to provide easy and effective social support. People with depression often have a hard time reaching out to the people they need the most. This is where the DDD app comes in by interpreting texts, calls and other factors to determine a baseline behavior profile for users. Our system detects changes in individual behavior, signaling the patient’s care network when appropriate. If this works the way we believe it will, the application will be capable of identifying whether or not someone is about to or is currently having a significant change in their mental state, and provide an effective social intervention (i.e notification) to their care team. We believe a social intervention like this is capable of having a powerful effect on a user’s health. And importantly, patient privacy is upheld throughout. Each user owns their data, and chooses when and with whom to share it. With the help of two of our advisers, Jeff Gothelf (@jboogie / a lead UI and UX designer) and Richard Banfield (@freshtilledsoil / lead designer and CEO of Fresh Tilled Soil), we zoned in on (1) personalization and (2) simplicity as key goals for the design of this app. And using our application is simple: 1. Download the app We’re excited to be finalists in the Data Design Diabetes competition and we look forward to receiving feedback from the community! Thanks again for your support through this journey. We’ll be sharing more soon. In the meantime, check out the DDD challenge blog.
Posted by Karan | PermalinkTags: AnnouncementsDDD Finalists Big news! We are honored to be selected as semi-finalists for the Data Design Diabetes Innovation Challenge hosted by sanofi aventis and the US government. We join four other exciting new start-ups chosen as the “most innovative data-driven and human-centered concepts aimed at helping people living with diabetes.” With $20K in prize money, we have one month to build a prototype to showcase at Demo Day in New York City. Why diabetes? We have close family and friends that deal with the condition on a daily basis. Obesity, sedentary lifestyles, and diabetes are all strongly linked. Early detection and proper treatment will be critical in addressing this national public health crisis. Why us? We believe this issue deserves our creative energy. We intend to help people cope with their condition. We intend to help them care. We believe people have an incomplete picture of their own and each other’s health. We intend to help people see. We believe information equals advantage. We believe with the right information people can cope. We intend to make it easy and useful to collect behavioral data, and make a real impact on diabetes self-care [a hat tip to our advisor Bill Warner for his guidance in building a start-up 'from the heart']. We believe we can make a meaningful difference to the state of care for diabetes patients across the country, and hopefully, the globe. But, we need your support. Please keep the ideas flowing!
Posted by Anmol | PermalinkTags: PressSharing Our Experiences We’ve been heads-down over the past month working closely with our partners on some great new updates. Meanwhile, we’ve had a few opportunities to share what we’re building with the Boston community. 2011 Health Tech Conference where we spoke on a panel on innovation in mobile health. We enjoyed connecting with fellow panelists and entrepeneurs, from Ben Rubin @ Zeo to Suzanne Xie @ Lollihop. More specifically, we discussed the challenges with B2C (consumer directed) vs. B2B2C (enterprise driven) models at the intersection of health and technology. 2011 Propel Careers Panel where we spoke on “convergent” technologies in life sciences (picture above). Representing the new venture perspective, we were honored to be included on a group with such deep expertise in the space. We discussed the important of finding strong enterprise partners who can provide the layer of trust and support to get to scale. 2011 MicroTech Conference & Expo where we discussed modeling objective quality of life measures using mobile phone sensors. Quality of life is a big concern across healthcare, and current methods just don't work. We described how our behavioral analytics approach provides objective quality of life scores to a variety of players in the health ecosystem. A big thanks to the organizers: Lauren Celano, Charles Huang, and Chris & Sarai Tsai, and Karen Lightman for organizing a great set of events!
Posted by Karan on August 22, 2011, at 11:05 AM | PermalinkTags: ConferencesGinger.io Makes MassChallenge Finals If you haven't read it elsewhere already... Ginger.io is a finalist at MassChallenge! We're very proud to have made it this far, and over-joyed at the positive response our ideas have been receiving from investors and the start-up community in Boston/Cambridge.
Posted by Anmol on August 22, 2011, at 11:06 AM | PermalinkTags: VentureThe Really Smart PhoneThe Wall Street Journal today ran a story about the "Really Smart Phone"-- it discusses the recent work of the leading researchers and collaborators in our space. Link to full article at WSJ.com I spoke to Lee many months ago, and was caught by surprise to see this story today. In addition to mentioning some of my thesis work with my PhD adviser Dr. Alex Pentland, this piece underlines the hypothesis behind our work at Ginger.io -- that mobile phones are powerful social sensors of our lives.
Posted by Anmol on August 22, 2011, at 11:06 AM | PermalinkTags: Venture Data HealthGo, Romulus Capital! With so much going on, we can be a little slow on updates sometimes. We'd like to acknowledge the awesome folks at Romulus Capital as one of our early seed investors. From their website, Romulus Capital (RC) is a seed-stage venture capital fund raised to help talented students at the most entrepreneurial institutions transform their passions to action. While we've known the folks at Romulus only for a short while, but they've been a fantastic team-member and partner in our growth. And now for the exciting news. You can be one of their portfolio companies too! Romulus is having their coffee chats next weekend. Go talk to them and see if you can convince them to invest in you. They're student-run, entrepreneur-friendly, and very well-connected in the VC world, amongst entrepreneurial professors, and with the necessary lawyers and bankers, and highly recommended. For specific hours and times this weekend, please email ideas@romuluscap.com
Posted by Anmol on August 22, 2011, at 11:06 AM | PermalinkTags: Venture Data HealthBrandango!  Effective branding is a challenge, even for seasoned professionals. Every cook in the kitchen has an opinion when it comes to what the company should be called, what the logo looks like, which colors to use, which influences to mimic, the direction to head for product-market-fit, and which gurus to listen to. If we knew all the answers, it wouldn't be much of a start-up. Each step provides a set of choices to funnel you towards an envisioned end, and the only way to get there is to stay agile and keep hustling. At DailyData we're no exception. Probably like many other start-ups, we're constantly probing our own values and identity as a company:
If you follow us on Twitter, met us as through TechStars, or heard us talk at AAAS, HBS or other conferences, you may have even noticed that we go by two names! DailyData (@DailyData) and Ginger.io (@ginger_io). What's up with that? There is a method to this madness. As a company, we've realized we'd like to keep our consumer brand (@DailyData) and our enterprise brand (@ginger_io) distinct. This becomes especially important as we deal with individual data and privacy, and these products are completely different, albeit based on the same technology. Special thanks to the extended DailyData development team, "Mobile Stig", Eric, Chris, Lauren, Sam & TechStars for keeping us agile and on point. To Jodi from La Capoise Gallerie for listening to us grumble about branding for an afternoon. And to @dhassell and the team at 15Five for generously giving us their @DailyData Twitter handle.
Posted by Ryan on August 22, 2011, at 11:07 AM | PermalinkTags: Venture Design BuildTech Stars Boston 2011 We've been keeping it under our hats since being admitted, but now the cat (pdf) is out of the bag (pdf). We are 1 of 12 companies accepted into the TechStars Boston class of 2011! TechStars is a seed accelerator program whose mission is to groom the next generation of start-up founders to get their visions off the ground and funded. So far it's been rad! We're honored to have made the cut (12 out of 600+ companies applied this year), and inspired by how baddass our fellow TechStars founders have turned out to be. Props to Katie Rae and Reed Sturtevant for picking such an excellent crew. We're glad to be aboard.
Posted by Ryan on August 22, 2011, at 11:07 AM | PermalinkTags: VentureGinger.io Blog Launch
Hello World! We are Ginger.io (pronounced "ginger-eye-oh")! A group of recently minted entrepreneurs from the MIT Media Lab and MIT Sloan business school. Our passion is developing personal health care applications for the general public and enterprise partners, and our expertise is personal health analysis, interaction design, machine learning, and mobile sensors. The Ginger.io Difference Your mobile phone is a powerful sensor for passively tracking your wellness. No extra hardware required. We have the MIT research to prove it. And we've come to a fascinating conclusion! Better data about your mental and social health will improve your health care. Dive Deeper Check out an overview of our technology for more information, then register for our waiting list to be invited to our private alpha. We look forward to helping you monitor your health.
Posted by Ryan on August 22, 2011, at 11:07 AM | PermalinkTags: Venture Data Health |
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