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We’re really excited to see how all the wonderful people we’ve gotten to know over the  past month as we’ve kicked off our diabetes initiative have banded together to do something wonderful for Valentine’s Day. Thanks to Kerri Sparling, Kelly Close, Manny Hernandez, Bennet Dunlap, Adam Brown, and Jeff Hitchcock — and others — for leading the charge.

Spare a Rose, Save a Child asks you buy 11 roses for someone, and to donate the equivalent cost of that 12th rose to the International Diabetes Federation’s Life for a Child Campaign.

It’s a great idea — we’ll be making a donation in honor of everyone signed up for our diabetes pilot (in order to participate, you must be living with Type 2 diabetes and living in the US). Sign up by tonight to be counted!

And spread the word by posting this and tweeting about it at #sparearose

We were lucky enough to have Kim Vlasnik of Texting My Pancreas, feature Ginger.io on her blog this week.

She does a nice job of helping us tell our origin story and talk about what we’re doing.  We especially liked her “alternative titles to this post”:

• Following Your Every Move [But Not In A Creepy Way]“,
• “Stalking Has Never Been So Healthy”,
• “Maybe I Should Just Get On With The Post Already”

So check out Kim’s blog and learn more about what she’s doing!

We were featured in an awesome write-up by Bea on Cranky Pancreas that really focused on one of things we’re most excited about with our app, which is the ability to help people living with chronic conditions manage their overall wellness and mental health.

As Bea writes,

“I started using Ginger.io about 10 days ago. I get a reminder every day to record how my mood was, and I’ve gotten a couple of other questions. The mood thing is really insightful for me because I have a history of depression. By recording how I felt the previous day, I can get an idea of what was going on in my life and identify if the cause of my mood was external or not. What I’ve found is that I’m usually in a pretty good mood these days, which means my depression is under control and everything else goes well with me. I’m motivated, fearless (within healthy limits) and confident —all this impacts my diabetes management.”

It’s awesome for us to hear not only that people are using Ginger.io but why and how they’re using it.  We’re so glad it’s providing insightful for Bea — sign up here to see if it can help you too!

Ginger.io is excited to welcome Sneha Kannan as an intern! Sneha, who is finishing up her senior year at MIT, will be helping us out with a number of projects on the business side. One of her first assignments was to kick off a series of blog posts on what’s happening in medicine and healthtech. Her first installment is below.

Greetings!

I’m Sneha, an intern of sorts for the next few months, and excited to be here! I’m passionate about medicine and innovation, and what better place to work than Ginger.io – a company on its way to changing the face of medicine with technology? I love blogging, so I volunteered to put together a round-up of cool things happening in medicine and health-tech every couple weeks. Just to start off, though, I wanted to post about events happening over the next couple months about medical innovation that I’m really excited for. Reading through some of these speeches, bios, and events is a great way to get an overview of what’s new and interesting in the medical innovation field.

MIT Sloan Bioinnovations Conference (Friday, February 22)
The speaker line-up for this conference is powerful. The keynotes are the CEOs of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Genzyme, and Quest Diagnostics. A peek into the rest of the event shows that this is an innovation conference led by both entrepreneurs and medical professionals. That mix of dialogue is going to lead to a very interesting discussion — especially during the panel Ginger.io CEO Anmol will be on!

Wharton Future of Medical Miracles Conference (Friday, February 22)
This conference hosted by Wharton’s Mack Center for Technological Innovations. Every year the Mack Center hosts a technological showcase for emerging technologies. This year the theme is medicine. I’d check this one out to take a look at some of the coolest technologies and ideas that have been developed over the past year. We’ll also be presenting here.

Though both the Wharton and MIT conferences are on the same day, they provide different perspectives on innovation in medicine, and it’d be worth following up on both.

TEDMED (April 16-19)
TEDMED is the smaller, but no less illustrious, brainchild of the original TED conferences. For those who are new to TED/TEDMED, the annual conference showcases the coolest technologies and most brilliant minds in various fields. I was thrilled when TEDMED was born. It’s an entire 4 day conference dedicated to technology in medicine! I was fortunate enough to be invited and sponsored to attend in April 2012, and it was incredible. The best part about TEDMED, though, is that all the talks are online and free! If you’re at all interested in innovation and technology, take a look at their videos.

To get you started, here’s one I saw last year that was phenomenal. I don’t want to spoil it for you, so I’ll just tell you the title: Can we get 8-billion heartbeats on speed dial?

I hope you get the chance to attend or follow these conferences. Let us know what you think! If you’re going or have other interesting things we should check out, tweet us @ginger_io.

Stay tuned over the next couple weeks for the first round-up of events in healthtech, and until next time!

As we’ve mentioned, one of the best parts about launching our diabetes pilot is the chance to get to know and work with inspiring, patient advocates in the broader diabetes community.

Today, we’re highlighting Scott of Scott’s Diabetes. Scott was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in April of 1980 and started blogging in late 2004.  He brings an honest and open account of his life with diabetes to his blog. Scott works hard to stay involved and contribute as much as he can back to the community that has changed his life in such a beneficial way.

You can read about our conversation with Scott on his blog, and learn more about Scott as well.

And of course, sign up to be a part of pilot!

As part of our new diabetes initiative, we’ve been talking to many others who share our common goal of helping people living with diabetes better manage their conditions — and their overall health. We’ll be highlighting a number of these conversations over the next few weeks, but wanted to kick things off by introducing you to Corengi.

Corengi is a new site designed to help match people with clinical trials that might be a good fit for them.  They’ve started with type 2 diabetes, and will be expanding to other conditions.  It’s a great idea — and the site is a great place to find information about new approaches to treating chronic conditions.

If you want to learn more about Corengi, check our their blog (and read what they’ve said about us!)

Back in 2011, Ginger.io won the Sanofi Data Design Diabetes challenge with our diabetes-focused caregiver support app. Since then, we’ve gone under the hood to tweak the engine. We’ve also given our user experience a scrub and added a fresh coat of paint. Shiny.

We’re feeling giddy about all the work we’ve done, and we’re excited to give lots of people living with diabetes a new way to stay in touch with their health, contribute to science, and help make diabetes care better.

Ginger.io is simple to use. It can be downloaded with one email – and it’s free. As a Ginger.io user, all you’ll have to do is answer a question or two every day and let our app do it’s thing in the background. It’ll take a month or two to get started, but soon you’ll get insights, alerts and observations that will help you – and your care team – better manage your care.

With our diabetes app, we hope to build a connected community to support you and people like you. Letting us know how diabetes affects you helps us learn how it affects other people living with it. Simple and free – Ginger.io is an easy way to help contribute to science and improve care for you and the rest of the diabetes community.

Interested? Learn more.

We’re looking for people who:

• are living with type 2 diabetes (or type 1 or pre-diabetes)
• are 18-65
• own an Android or iPhone smartphone
• are fluent in English

Does this sound like you or anyone you know? If so,  sign up directly, send an invite to someone you care about, or sign up for our webinar next week!

In 2013, our New Year’s blog post will feature crazy infographics and some great data findings. Stay tuned.

But for 2012, we wanted to focus on saying a genuine, heartfelt thank you to everyone who helped make this a year of growth and change for Ginger.io. To the patients who were the first to use our app, the provider partners who put their trust in us, the investors who supported and advised us and the family and friends who don’t quite get what we do but helped us all the same, we raise our phones in a toast to all of you!

Holiday Party 2012 (apologies to Anmol for the cheesy title and to Sabih for the image)

Here’s to a happy, healthier 2013!

—Team Ginger.io

As we mentioned in our announcement last week, we are kicking off a campaign to help people contribute to science by participating in our pilot studies to unlock various Behavior Genomes (the patterns of behavior associated with a given condition in a given population).

We wanted to share a first person account of what it’s like to use Ginger.io as a contributor.  Jennie is a tester for our IBD project with the C3N Project, and has written about her experience on the ImproveCareNow blog.  We’re really excited that she’s sharing what it’s been like – and how it’s helped her.

If you’d like to get involved, and have Crohn’s and an android (or iphone), sign up!

We are thrilled to announce that we will be concluding what has been an incredible year of growth for Ginger.io by welcoming Vinod Khosla and his team at Khosla Ventures to the Ginger.io family. We are delighted to announce our $6.5M Series A funding round led by KV. Seed investors True Ventures and Romulus Capital also participated in the round.

Raising a round of financing is a very important decision for any company, and we spent a lot of time thinking if and why this was appropriate. Given our company focus on keeping populations healthy, the incredible client partnerships we’ve built, and the advancements in healthcare reform, we had the opportunity to grow in a way that would allow us to achieve both business and mission-driven goals. Over the next year, we’ll be using the new capital to scale our team, improve our product, and support existing and new partners.

We also spent a lot of time thinking about who were the right partners to help us grow. We have been incredibly fortunate in the time and effort our seed investors and advisors have devoted to our team. With Khosla and True’s focus on true mentorship to their companies, and commitment to disrupt health care, we are confident about our mission of changing how patients are supported away from the doctor’s office.

The most exciting part of this announcement is that we can find more great people to work with. If you are energized by what we are doing, we are actively hiring for engineering and business development roles in both Boston and San Francisco. To learn more about employment opportunities at Ginger.io, visit: http://ginger.io/join-us/.

We are also actively recruiting individuals living with Diabetes, ADHD, Heart disease, and Crohns & Ulcerative Colitis to help us accelerate the development and deployment of the Ginger.io system by becoming early adopters. More information about signing up is available here: http://ginger.io/contribute-to-science/.

For more information, here is our full press release.

You can also check out some of our coverage on TechCrunch, Xconomy and Mobihealthnews.