The Series A round, led by U.S. Venture Partners, with participation from The Vertical Group, Founder Collective, NEA, TriplePoint Capital, Kapor Capital, and angel investors, brings the companies total amount raised to $5.5 million.

The company said the new financing will go towards supporting the commercial rollout of its flagship product Prevent, the 16-week online program for those at risk for developing diabetes. The funding will also help the company expand into new disease categories — co-founder Sean Duffy said they’re eyeing type 2 diabetes and adult weight loss.

As we noted when Omada first launched Prevent, it combines CDC-backed research, digital devices (like wireless scales), social support from peers with similar health profiles and good design to encourage necessary behavior change.

At the time, Duffy said, “Our goal is to serve as a complement to [Centers for Disease Control diabetes prevention] efforts and expand the reach to more people with fun and beautiful experiences that represent the best of the consumer web.”

Given the CDC statistic that one in three American adults have prediabetes (meaning that their blood glucose levels are higher than normal but not high enough to be diagnosed as diabetic) Omada chose a worthy target with its first product, as have other startups, including Ginger.io and Glooko. But the company’s approach to disease prevention could be easily applied to other conditions.

It builds off of evidence-based research to provide an online program that includes a curriculum, online health coach and cohort support. When participants sign up for the $120 per month program, they’re placed into small groups with others with similar BMIs (body mass index), ages and locations. And as they progress through the four months and learn about diet, exercise and other healthy habits, they’re guided via the web with a a simple social networking-like interface. The company hasn’t disclosed names but said Prevent is being used within a select group of self-insured employers and providers in the United States.

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The combination of ubiquitous broadband and cloud computing are behind the birth of massive data centers, ever smarter (and larger) mobile devices and fatter networks. And when it comes to building fatter networks a new generation of companies has arisen that are using fiber to deliver Ethernet capacity to Internet Exchange points in a way that’s more flexible and cheaper than older copper-based or point-to-point fiber networks. We are moving into the terabit age, and in the last few years, several new companies building out fiber networks have started and received private equity investments, including Sidera, Lightower, Allied Fiber, Zayo and others.

Craig Plunkett, managing director of CEDX Corporation, wrote a post for GigaOM last year describing the change in connectivity that is behind this deal:

Ethernet exchanges open options for subscribers and publishers that didn’t exist in the time of point-to-point provisioning. Combine the growth of MetroE footprint, the increases in carrier Ethernet capacity to 40 and 100 Gigabit and new long- and short-haul dark fiber providers coming online with connections to Ethernet exchanges, and the world sees the rise of a new international communications platform being built on an Ethernet backbone that’s cheaper and more flexible than legacy copper. This is a repeat of the revolution that took place over a hundred years ago with the rise of the Bell system. In this case, it’s being built on a packet switched fiber infrastructure, and with central offices that are carrier-neutral from their inception. This new platform will give rise to revolutionary capabilities and efficiencies in the way we communicate, produce and consume content, store data and use compute cycles.

M/C Partners and Pamlico Capital acquired Lightower from National Grid plc in August 2007 and also has an investment in Zayo. M/C will exit Lightower with this deal, while Pamlico Capital, a Lightower investor, and ABRY Partners, a significant Sidera investor, will remain as investors in the new company. The combined company will be led by current Lightower CEO, Rob Shanahan. The merger is pending regulatory approval and is expected to close in the second quarter of 2013.

Following the merger, the combined company will have a 20,000-mile fiber-based network throughout the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Midwest, with connections to critical landing sites and exchanges internationally. The combined network will provide access to more than 6,600 on-net locations, including commercial buildings, data centers, financial exchanges, content hubs and other critical interconnection facilities.

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Led by founders who previously worked at IDEO and Google, the San Francisco-based company last year graduated from health startup accelerator Rock Health and raised $800,000 from investors including Esther Dyson, Kapor Capital and New Enterprise Associates. On Tuesday, the startup launched its first product, Prevent, a web-based program for helping people at risk for diabetes lower their chances of developing the chronic disease.

According to the CDC, 1 in 3 American adults have prediabetes, meaning that their blood glucose levels are higher than normal but not high enough to be diagnosed as diabetic. But potentially 90 percent don’t know their risk.

Omada Health’s new product lets people assess their risk with a series of questions online and then sign-up for a 16-week program that includes personalized guidance from a health coach, social support and digital health tracking to encourage the behavior and lifestyle changes that can reduce risk. (In the future, the company plans to sell $25 A1C tests so that people can measure their blood glucose levels at home.)

Sean Duffy, the startup’s co-founder and CEO said that nationwide, the CDC is deploying community diabetes prevention programs based on an NIH-sponsored study, called the Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP), which showed that comprehensive weight loss programs can prevent diabetes.

“Our goal is to serve as a complement to those efforts and expand the reach to more people with fun and beautiful experiences that represent the best of the consumer web,” Duffy said.

The program costs $120 per month, for four months, and includes the curriculum, health coach, a digital scale and online and social networking tools. When participants sign up, they’re placed into small groups with others with similar BMIs (body mass index), ages and locations and they’re sent a welcome kit with a wireless scale, intro guide and food diary (for those who prefer old-fashioned pens and paper).

As they progress through the 16 weeks and learn about diet, exercise and other healthy habits, they’re guided by a web-based program with a simple, friendly Facebook- or LinkedIn-like interface. In creating the program, Duffy said they focused on the design of the software, as well as the experience, with the goal of making it sticky and enjoyable for users. For example, the program uses subtle peer pressure by showing all the members in a group how much weigh loss progress each person has made, but never shows each person’s precise weight. The program also includes surprise packages that are mailed to users’ homes.

Given the growing epidemic of diabetes, it’s encouraging to see more startups – Ginger.io and Glooko, for example, in addition to Omada Health – bringing technology to bear. Omada’s plan isn’t cheap and some people might feel that they could participate in other kinds of weight loss programs instead. But it mirrors the programs in use by the CDC specifically for diabetes and its small group and coaching approach produces results. In a 230-person pilot of Prevent, the average participant lost 13.7 pounds after 16 weeks.

Image by Gts via Shutterstock.

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1. Social media revenue conversion measures how many people become customers through social media referral channels.

Challenges: Social media is great for creating awareness and engagement, but it is hard to measure how many people convert to customers. Facebook’s last click attribution attempts to measure customer conversions by tracking which Facebook links sent people to other websites. However, this doesn’t work well either because there is a delay in the conversion.

For example, someone might see that a friend has posted a link to a brand’s website on Facebook. However, the brand has no way of tracking who clicked on the link, or finding out the social influence of her friends, or if she ultimately made a purchase. Privacy rules also limit companies’ ability to track the entire social shopping cycle. And unfortunately, Facebook Insights (which provides Facebook page metrics) does not offer any context to help the brand discover what motivated someone to click on a link.

Best practice: As the associate director of social practice at Moxie Interactive, Daniel Cho has tackled the problem of measuring social media conversion. When Moxie was tasked with developing social media programs for Verizon Wireless, Cho says, “We focused on total ROI. We put a social metrics layer on top of web metrics. We measured social media conversation volume, sentiments and engagement, which is the number of comments, links and Facebook shares.”

Cho used Wildfire to build a Facebook tab for a Verizon Wireless sweepstakes promotion. Although he could not measure which channel was a better referral channel, he was able to successfully track the social media conversion rates. To do this, he used the number of sweepstakes entries as his main metric. For the secondary metric, he used Wildfire and Google Analytics to calculate the number of tab visits (equivalent to impressions) and opt-in emails.

2. Facebook engagement measures a brand’s ability to communicate successfully with their customers on the social network.

Challenges: Most global brands have multiple Facebook fan pages. Different products and specific regions have their own pages, which are managed by different groups within the company. Businesses need an integrated view of engagement across all fan pages and Facebook app campaigns, so that they can understand what increases their numbers of fans and how this growth compares with industry standards.

Best practice: Many companies use a hybrid solution to track fan page engagement, such as Mediaplex or Google Analytics tags embedded in their Facebook apps combined with Facebook Insights.

SocialBakers the only provider of social media analytics tools that offers an integrated Facebook leaderboard for all brand pages. Their key engagement metric, called “page score,” consists of a combined index score of Facebook page fan growth, content quality and post quality for each fan page.

Ami M. Blaire, senior vice president of marketing at Social Games International, says, “The engagement ratings, the ability to test against and within a competitive set from SocialBakers as well as the contextual metrics are the most valuable tools. Secondarily, the ability to segment by territory and market is and will continue to play a valuable role as we define the best set of programming and promotions.”

3. Social customer support metrics measure the impact of customer support on brand health and the cost of staffing a social support program.

Challenges: Today, people expect their favorite brands to have customer service representatives available on Twitter and Facebook. Companies are trying to figure out how many staff members they need to devote to social customer support and how to best measure the success of such programs. There are several tools commonly used by companies that measure the ROI by counting the number of users supported via social media, but this does not reflect success at a strategic level.

Best practice: Best Buy provides support via Twitter and measures customers’ feedback on the quality of support through a proprietary survey.

Gina Debogovich, a social media lead at Best Buy, told me about how the business shifted focused from measuring return on invested capital to return on engagement.

In 2009, 3,000 Best Buy employees volunteered to answer customer questions on Twitter (@twelpforce) as part of their daily work responsibilities. Through this program, Best Buy was able to estimate the volume of questions from customers and develop consistent, quality answers from its employees. In three years, 50,000 questions were answered. The concept of using employee engagement as a key metric led to the residual value of highly-engaged employees becoming a great social support staff and customers becoming evangelists for Best Buy.

Sudha Jamthe is a social media strategist at eBay, where she focuses on social commerce and social metrics. She has built social media teams, organizations and partnerships for PayPal, AOL/Bebo, Intuit and Network World. She blogs at coolastory.com and tweets as @sujamthe.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Kevin Steinhardt.

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But with all the bad news about recent outages from Amazon, the high-profile consumer data breaches like that from the Sony’s Playstation Network and continuing disruptions to services like  Tumblr, it’s time to ask: Could consumers start to lose confidence in the cloud?

While there’s no real hard data today about whether consumers are losing confidence in the cloud — other than possibly looking at trending of search terms about major outages — I have to wonder if the continuing string of outages, breaches and overall high-profile downtime is starting to tarnish the larger cloud brand. After all, chances are, at some point most consumers have been affected, either by downtime to a favorite service or something more serious like a data loss or (God forbid) their personal data compromised; at some point, those users might start to distrust this fuzzy concept they think of as cloud.

Part of the problem here is one of education. It’s difficult in the consumer world, where many have a nodding acquaintance with technology but no real hard understanding, to explain why the evolution of web architecture is better off with such things as Amazon Web Services. Most don’t have time to really grasp these finer points, nor would the technology world expect them to.

And that’s why the cloud could ultimately experience a branding issue.

Right now, the cloud brand is still probably strong and still, despite the spate of bad news, holds a certain cachet. At the same time, however, the noise around high-profile cloud outages, breaches and failure has been getting steadily louder, reason enough for the industry to collectively take notice and, perhaps, collectively take action before the word “cloud” becomes a dirty one.

So what should it do? First off, I think many of the services that experience problems — the recent Gmail and Netflix outages come to mind — would benefit from faster and more transparent communication of the problem. Often, hours or days go by without any real communication of what is going on, leaving many wondering what exactly the extent of the problem will be. If there’s anything to be learned from politics, it’s to get ahead of the problem by communicating early and often.

But perhaps more important, the industry could collectively communicate how they’ll protect consumers from these types of problems in the future, either through concrete steps they lay out, or issuing a series of best practices that consumer cloud services could follow.

What would this collective look like? Hard to say. Possibly working within existing groups such as the Open Cloud Consortium, who offers reference architectures, but could also incorporate best practices for web-services companies around outward-facing communication. The same companies could also create a consumer-facing group that could explain the benefits of cloud computing vis-a-vis other technologies as well as provide consumer “best practices” (such as back-up).

Clearly, it’s not an easy issue to tackle, but it is one that needs attention. With new services being launched almost daily, it’s time for the industry to act before “cloud” becomes a dirty word in the mind of the consumer.

For more analysis on how recent outages could impact consumer behavior, see my weekly update at GigaOM Pro (sub required).

Image courtesy of flickr user edvvc

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