The round, which included Siemer Ventures, Telegraph Hill Group and Dr. Lyle Dennis, a neurologist and founder of HealthKeep, brings the startup’s total amount raised to $1.9 million. Previous investors include FF Angel, Practice Fusion CEO and founder Ryan Howard and former president of One Medical Group Sharon Knight.

The startup launched in 2010 as a service for providing on-demand telephone and video chat access to physicians. For $40, consumers could use Ringadoc to connect with doctors anytime, day or night. But earlier this year, in a bid to bring more doctors on to its network, it pivoted to its current product, which targets physicians with an after-hours messaging and phone service.

Typical after-hours messaging services require patients with after-hours questions to leave messages with a non-medically trained operator, who then looks up an on-call doctor and passes the message along. When the doctor calls back, the patient needs to recount her symptoms all over again.

With Ringadoc, patients leave a secure message with a cloud-based answering service that automatically finds the appropriate physician – patients only need to explain their issues once and the cost, Ringadoc says, is cheaper than most existing systems. To date, the company said it has handled more than 100,000 phone calls for physicians.

With the new funding, CEO and founder Jordan Michaels said the company plans to beef up sales and marketing, as well as enhance the product so that it could integrate with other tools used by doctors’ offices, including practice management and electronic health records systems. Since Ringadoc is capturing valuable patient engagement data through its telephone calls, Michaels said, they want to enable doctors to make the most of that functionality.

“We’re tracking a lot of two-way conversations and that’s an important piece of the health care conversation,” Michaels said. “Our vision is to be on the frontline of virtual care for patients.”

For now, the company is focusing on its physician-focused product. But, later this year, he said, it could start expanding to patients and restore the startup’s initial mission of providing on-demand physician access to patients.

Recognizing the need to address the shortage of doctors in the U.S., other companies are also working to streamline physician-patient communication and promote virtual health care. For example, PingMD targets physicians with a mobile app for more efficiently communicating with patients and peers, HealthTap offers consumers a mobile- and web-based service for messaging and querying doctors and Sherpaa works with employers to help patients and doctors connect via video chats and phone calls.

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PingMD, a New York startup, initially launched a few years ago as an app to help digitally-savvy parents communicate with their kids’ pediatricians. But after analyzing how tens of thousands of patients and doctors were communicating during their pilot, they decided to expand their scope. This month, they relaunched their app for iOS and Android as a service that enables doctors to securely communicate with their patient, as well as peers. And on Wednesday, the company said it had raised $2.5 million from angel investors, including Matthew & Stewart Greenfield, Ernest Pomerantz and Jessica Nagle. The round follows $1.33 million raised last year.

According to a 2010 New England Journal of Medicine study analyzing communication in a Philadelphia doctor’s practice, the average doctor in that practice took 24 phone calls a day and wrote 17 emails on top of seeing a full load of patients, processing their prescriptions, reviewing lab reports and completing all the other tasks that come with the territory.

“There’s a lot of call volume going on,” said CEO Dr. Gopal Chopra, who co-founded PingMD with his wife Dr. Manju Chopra. “And the indirect cost is the time spent trying to get you [the patient] an answer.”

Even though electronic medical records and digital practice management tools can enable doctors to look up patient information and history more efficiently, Chopra said the call volume can be difficult for doctors. And that’s especially true for those doctors who are open to emailing or messaging with patients through mobile phones or other more secure services.

Through PingMD, doctors can enable patients to securely message them with text, as well as relevant pictures and video, and they can easily loop in other doctors and nurses in their practices as well as other specialists.

For example, if you have a weird rash on your arm, you could send a note and picture to your doctor and then she could reply with her feedback, as well as add a dermatologist to the circle.

While Chopra estimates that response times on email and other secure messaging systems tends to average 72 hours because the message is routed through an administrator and then the doctor, the average response time on PingMD is an hour (although it can take from a few seconds to several hours depending on the severity of the case).

To make money, PingMD takes a software-as-a-service approach, billing itself to hospitals and physician networks as a way to gather data about how doctors are communicating and spending their time and how the hospital should allocate their resources. At the moment, Chopra said they’re piloting PingMD with several institutions and physician networks.

The startup is one of several companies attempting to help doctors improve their productivity and prepare for an influx of new Obamacare patients. American Well and Sherpaa, for example, work with employers to help patients and doctors connect via video chats and phone calls. HealthTap targets consumers with a service for messaging and querying a network of doctors. And Ringadoc offers doctors a simple service for handling after-hours calls and streamlining patient communication.

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In a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Clinical Breast Cancer, Stanford researchers demonstrated that breast cancer patients who had been treated with chemotherapy improved their cognitive function after using exercises developed by brain training startup Lumosity. Created by neuroscientists, Lumosity offers dozens of games (to paying subscribers around the world) that claim to improve their memory, attention and creativity.

In the last few years, several studies have demonstrated that up to 75 percent of cancer patients can experience cognitive impairment and mental dullness, that can last five years or longer, after undergoing chemotherapy.

But research led by Shelli Kesler, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, found that breast cancer survivors who trained with Lumosity four times a week for 12 weeks significantly improved in measures of executive function, word finding and processing speed.

“For [breast cancer] patients, it suggests that this could be one possible avenue for helping to improve their cognitive function,” said Kesler, who did not accept money from Lumosity for the study. “Even if they’ve been suffering with this for years, they can still show improvement.”

Improving cognitive function has long been a subject of fascination among psychologists. But interest among academics and entrepreneurs seems to have intensified in the last decade. Since 2000, companies including Lumosity, Posit Science, Dakim and Cogmed have launched, promising to improve cognitive abilities like memory and attention through mental workouts. And they’ve not only attracted interest from investors, but eager consumers, including pro-active parents, aging adults and others looking to boost their brainpower.

Earlier this year, for example, Lumosity, which has raised more than $60 million, said its revenue had increased more than 100 percent each year since its launch.

But despite strong interest, scientists’ perspectives on cognitive training have been mixed. An often-referenced study in 2008 by psychologist Susan Jaeggi found that memory training increased intelligence and supported the notion that fluid intelligence can be improved.  But a later attempt to replicate those findings by psychologists at Georgia Tech found no increase cognitive improvement from brain training exercise. Other studies published in the past couple of months have supported and critiqued cognitive coaching.

“There’s a long history of people trying to raise intelligence and make people smarter,” said Douglass Detterman, a professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University. “And it usually ends in disappointment.”

Skeptics of cognitive training argue that while the exercises may help people improve on specific cognitive tests, they don’t necessarily improve general intelligence or lead to benefits that transfer to the real world. They also argue that in studies where there is a wait list control group (that doesn’t participate in any kind of additional mental activity) instead of an active control group (that is tasked with some kind of mental activity), cognitive benefits demonstrated in studies could simply be due to extra mental stimulation.

Kesler’s study attempted to measure how well the cognitive benefits of Lumosity training transferred into the real-world and found that the training group’s memory improved more than the control group, as well as their executive function and mood. And it jibes with previous research exploring the benefits of cognitive training on chemotherapy patients.

But Detterman said that not only was the small sample size of Kesler’s study a shortcoming (it included 41 people), it also included a wait list control group and relied on self-reporting for a couple of its measures.

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After holding chief technology positions with the District of Columbia and the State of Maryland, last year he was appointed Chief Technology Officer for the Department of Health and Human Services. Ahead of a trip back West, Sivak talked with me about how open data (an increasingly hot topic in government) can drive big changes in health care, where digital health is evolving and why entrepreneurs should give DC a try. Take a look at a (lightly edited) transcript of our chat.

GigaOM: You went from fast-paced Silicon Valley to bureaucratic Washington, DC, what was the biggest adjustment challenge?  

Sivak: The most disconcerting thing, at first, is that because you’re working for an entity that is essentially operating on behalf of the taxpayer, there is this constant spotlight shining on the work that you do. I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. In fact, I think it’s great — it’s the reason that, I think, I and a lot of other people actually do it. But you very quickly get used to it — you just kind of take it in stride.

GigaOM: At the SXSW Interactive conference you talked about how government can learn “Lean Startup” principles and other Valley-style ways of thinking. What can the Valley learn from DC?

Sivak: I’m a big fan of disruption and bending or breaking the rules to do interesting things. But, at the same time, I think it’s important to realize that there are some rules that are there for a reason and, in many cases, disruption needs a partner called sustainability. I exist in this massive agency right now — 90,000 people work for HHS — and while I’d love to activate the potential of every person there, it’s important to recognize that there are people who are well-suited and who actually should be working on the sustainability aspect … keeping the trains on time and that sort of stuff.  That’s something that’s often overlooked by people who come to it strictly from the Valley mindset.

GigaOM: You’re speaking to a group of entrepreneurs, programmers and designers at the Health Refactored conference [this] week about innovation in health care. HHS has put a lot of effort into opening up health data – which is obviously an important first step – but what else needs to happen to spur innovation?

Sivak: It’s a massively complex ecosystem and environment. [And] one of the things we can do as experts in this area and the government is help by educating people, by doing a better job of describing our data sets, by doing a better job or doing a job or basically explaining the problems that we have and the problems that we want to see solved. There are millions of examples out there of things that can be worked out but people just don’t know there are problems and don’t know it’s something that should be worked on. And that’s a place we can help.

GigaOM: It’s barely a year into your tenure at HHS. But when you look at where we need to go, how far along are we on the progress bar?

Sivak: We’re just at the very tip of the iceberg here. We’ve been working on this for a few years now, long before I got there. My predecessor Todd Park, now the CTO of the United States, kicked off the idea of the data that HHS has as being critical to revolutionizing the system. A few years ago, we started the process of data liberation — changing the default setting from closed to open within the department. That’s been the big focus and I think we’ve been successful with that but there are still pockets of resistance where people just don’t really understand what the value is and there are other complications, such as privacy restrictions and things we have to take very seriously.

GigaOM: What has to happen next?

Sivak: There are two other phases we have to start working on. The first one is around dissemination of that data – we have a website called healthdata.gov and it’s the one-stop shop for HHS data. To date, we’ve probably catalogued 40 percent of the data sets that exist at HHS, about 400+ data sets, and a much smaller number, 34 or so, have APIs attached to them. There’s still work to be done of the dissemination side, and that also includes some questions we’re wrestling with now. For example, an important feature should be an area where people can come and collaborate and discuss and ask questions and get answers. And we’re trying to decide whether that kind of forum should happen on our government website or on a third-party website that’s charged with potentially building that community.

The [other] piece is data education – explaining data better, teaching people how to work with the data in a better way and connecting people with experts in a relatively regular fashion so they can get answers to their questions, understand the best ways to use the data, etc.

GigaOM: Judging by booming investment, accelerator programs, startup launches, and other activity in the sector, digital health seems to be seeing a lot of innovation, but what kinds of innovation do you think are missing?

Sivak: The beauty of it is that it’s a massive industry and there’s so much room for people to innovate it’s insane. Some areas that I’m personally interested in and I think are interesting to the department, off the top of my head: there are tons of people running around right now with devices generating personal health-related data from Jawbones, Fitbits (see disclosure), mobile phones that capture stuff, you name it. But that data, right now, is very inactionable. There’s no advice, no pro-active suggestions, none of that – that’s one big area.

And integrating that personal health-generated data with clinical data, i.e. the stuff that your doctor generates, is massively interesting. Imagine that you have some kind of chronic condition, like diabetes, wouldn’t it be interesting if you stepped on a scale every morning or took your blood glucose everyday and that got automatically transmitted to your doctor? And the system that your doctor has in his or her office alerts him or her if you have some kind of a problem or if your stats are going in the wrong direction, so they can intervene early? I think that’s a massive area.

Also, nobody has figured out patient engagement yet. And there are some people out there, myself included, who believe that the patient is the single untapped resource in healthcare right now.

GigaOM: How can open data help support health reform and Obamacare?

Sivak: Data is one of the absolutely critical components to reforming our health care system. The big challenge with our system today is we exist in this transactional, fee-for-service environment. When you see your doctor see you in [her] office or he or she performs a procedure or test, they get paid for those things. The problem with that is the incentives are somewhat backward – it incentivizes transactions. It incentivizes people to go in to be treated when they’re sick, as opposed to being kept healthy. In order to fix it, we have to move to a system where we pay for value and outcomes.

In order to do that, we need the data. If we don’t have the data in terms of what happens when somebody gets treated with a certain drug or what kind of drug interactions exist or how effective a specific treatment is, then we’re never going to be able to incentivize the providers to do the right thing, And if you’re a provide or a doctor you’re not going to be able to figure out what the right thing to do is. Liberating this data is incredibly important to fixing the system.

GigaOM: Every though there’s been a lot of buzz about the Affordable Care Act, there’s still a lot of ignorance out there. A recent survey found that 42 percent of people polled didn’t even know it’s a law. How can data help people understand health reform?

Sivak: What that [survey] indicates is that we need to do a much better job talking about it and marketing the value of it. I think the way we can do that is through interesting and creative uses of the data. People don’t remember statistics… but when you tell the stories with the data, that’s what they start to remember. I heard a great quote the other day, which is perfect for this: the singular of data is anecdote. That’s what we have to get to if we want to sell the value of this thing.

GigaOM: What are some of the most interesting or promising uses of the data you’ve seen so far? 

Sivak: For the first time [last week], we released [hospital pricing data] in an easy-to-access public format. [It’s] the actual prices that hospitals charge Medicare for the top 100 procedures across the country and [it shows] that the prices that hospitals charge, even when they’re right next to each other are wildly different. It’s crazy. But here’s a fun little statistic: in the first day that this data set was available online, we had 110,000 downloads.

Another one of my favorite examples is what [healthcare data journalist] Fred Trotter is doing. I love [it], not necessarily because the work that he’s doing to build this social graph of doctors will determine anything interesting, but the fact that he had this idea. That he’s not a medical professional or a subject matter expert and he had this idea to take these two random numbers in a claim and use them for something that could potentially be interesting is what I think is incredibly indicative of the power of the stuff and bringing people in who are not subject matter experts.

GigaOM: You’re not just trying to convince entrepreneurs in the Valley and elsewhere to work on digital health, you’re trying to recruit them to work in government (at least temporarily).  What does DC offer that the Valley can’t?

Sivak: This is actually a very simple answer: because we can give you the opportunity to solve, literally, the most pressing problem in American society today.

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At the American Telemedicine Association conference this week, a psychologist at the Baylor College of Medicine described how he’s using the Zephyr BioHarness wireless vital signals monitor to track cardiovascular and respiratory changes in cocaine users, according to Mobihealth News.

Developed for the military, first responders and athletes, the BioHarness is a chest strap with a battery-powered sensor that monitors a person’s heart rate, breathing rate and other vital signs.

At Baylor, Dr. Jin Ho Yoon is reportedly leading an NIH-funded trial using the BioHarness to see how well it can measure changes in heart and lung function when people are exposed to cocaine. According to Mobihealth, as part of the trial, volunteers who had been addicted to cocaine were administered low-dosage intravenous cocaine in hospital beds, while a control group received saline solution. Among those exposed to the drug, the monitor detected sharp increases in heart rates and breathing rates.

That the device detected an increase in those indicators isn’t as significant as the finding that the monitor could generate more data and at a lower price than typical hospital monitors – and that it could work remotely to monitor people recently discharged from care facilities to make sure that they don’t relapse into abuse. (Although Mobihealth suggests that the battery life would need to be extended for effective remote monitoring.)

Cocaine abuse represents just a small percentage of all illicit drug use, but it leads to more than 40 percent of emergency visits related to overdoses from street drugs, Dr. Yoon reportedly told the conference. And, he plans to continue studies with the BioHarness to determine whether it has applications for helping people to quit smoking and fight obesity.

As we’ve reported previously, sensor technology is a hot area in digital health these days, with companies receiving funding for devices that track everything from sleep disorders to head impacts to medication adherence.

When it comes to using sensors to detect and treat substance abuse, the BioHarness isn’t the only device psychologists are studying. The iHeal, developed by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, is a wristband that detects changes in the electrical activity of the skin, body motion, skin temperature and heart rate to determine when the user might be on the verge of risky behavior like substance abuse. According to reports, it communicates with a smartphone app that prompts users to provide information about potential triggers when the sensor detects a certain stress level and provides timely personalized drug prevention interventions.

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For technology to make meaningful improvements in health care, it has to penetrate communities across the country — so it’s a positive sign that digital health hubs are popping up nationwide (even though it could intensify the much-discussed “Series A crunch.”)

In total, April was an off-the-charts month for health technology funding, according to data from Startup Health. The sector raised a total of $322.72 million, which is an increase of 404 percent over the same period last year.

Here’s a quick look at last month’s activity:

• Sensors again attracted a great deal of investor interest. In addition to the funding raised by Watermark, a company behind sleep monitoring technology, companies including MC10, which is working with Reebok on skullcap-like head impact monitor, and fetal monitoring system Sense4Baby raised funding.
• While it wasn’t among the top three sub-sectors to receive investments, telehealth also had a strong month in April, with companies like HealthSpot, PresenceLearning and Remote Medicine receiving healthy amounts of capital. That tracks with recent research indicating that the market is expected to grow 53 percent this year and six-fold by 2017.

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Or at least that’s the premise behind Ovuline, a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup that helps women track a range of health indicators to predict the days they’re most fertile.

Even before the Quantified Self movement became a thing, healthcare providers, health sites and iPhone apps encouraged women to track signals like their basal body temperature, cervical fluid, emotions and ovulation test results to figure out when they might ovulate.

But while most apps and traditional pen and paper methods typically rely on historical cycles to pinpoint a woman’s fertile window, Ovuline says it uses machine learning to more precisely predict ovulation.

“Now, it’s all based on what happened in the past. The problem is that a lot of people have irregular cycles,” said CEO and co-founder Paris Wallace. “We’ve created the first pro-active ovulation calculator. … We’re understanding your cycle based on information you couldn’t otherwise glean yourself.”

The startup, which first debuted its app in September, said it’s been used by about 55,000 women. Now that its algorithms have learned from more than 2.5 million data points (instead of the 10,000 data points it started with), Ovuline is on Thursday taking its product of beta and launching with a more robust service.

Like plenty of other fertility-tracking apps on the market, Ovuline starts by helping women track their health indicators. But it analyzes an individual user’s data within the greater universe of its entire database and clinical guidelines to identify meaningful correlations and advise her when she’s approaching ovulation. According to the company, its service can help women get pregnant three times faster than the national average (which is four to six months).

Its newest version integrates with wearable fitness trackers like Fitbit devices (see disclosure), provides push notifications with personalized advice and lets women easily view an entire timeline of their data. If a user frequently reports feeling “stressed,” the app might send a note alerting her to the negative fertility consequences of excess levels of stress, or if she records lower than normal hours of sleep, she might receive messages on how low sleep levels can result in fertility-impeding hormones.

Enthusiastic Quantified Selfers — who carefully log and analyze their health data to uncover helpful insights — tend to be men. But using machine learning to make sense of women’s personal health data points the way to a future of data-driven medicine and shows the meaningful application of health-tracking activities that some currently see as mere naval-gazing.

Ovuline offers a free app that predicts ovulation, but premium versions (which cost up to $49.99) give women access to fertility experts and personal advice, the option to share data with partners and doctors and other features. Later this year, the company plans to roll out another application for pregnant women that similarly helps them track symptoms and lets them see how common or rare their experiences are relative to other users.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Image by Valentyn Volkov via Shutterstock.

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The Series B round, which was led by Khosla Ventures and included current investors Mayfield Fund and Mohr Davidow Venture Partners, brings the company’s total amount raised to $37.9 million. In addition to the new funding, the startup added a new board member: former Square COO and Khosla Ventures’ newest partner Keith Rabois.

Since launching in 2011, the site has created a network of more than 38,000 physicians who answer anonymous patient questions on a wide range of health issues. As the health system readies for a “demand shock” of new patients in 2014, HealthTap CEO and co-founder Ron Gutman said his site can help alleviate some of the pressure.

“We’re putting in a technology multiplier that can enhance the number of patients every physician can serve,” said Gutman. “We’re using technology to clone the physician to make him available to more patients.”

Instead of rushing to the doctor each time they have a question, HealthTap enables patients to quickly reach a doctor online. If they just have a non-urgent, general question, they can ask a free question of the entire network (or search the site’s deep repository of questions and answers). And if they want more personalized, specific feedback, they can message individual doctors for $9.99.

Companies including American Well and Sherpaa also use technology to more efficiently connect patients and doctors (although those companies support video chats and phone calls, not just text messaging), but they work through employers while HealthTap goes straight to consumers.

To date, HealthTap has focused on building out its service with new products – from features that let users access peer-reviewed medical research to those for discovering and rating doctors. But Gutman said the new funding will enable the team to significantly expand the team with business development, marketing and data science staff.

A key goal for the business team will be new partnerships with other apps and health companies, Gutman said, adding that about 1,000 developers and companies are already on a waiting list to access their API. And he added that another focus will be hiring more data wonks to parse the site’s data and package it in more valuable ways.

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For the past couple of years, Qualcomm Life has helped doctors remotely monitor patients’ biometric data through its 2net platform, which provides a secure, universally interoperable network for collecting and sharing data from connected fitness and health devices. With the acquisition of HealthyCircles, the company will enable caregivers to integrate a richer set of data and share that data among a greater set of parties.

“It’s a great way to augment what we’re doing [around] biometric data with other sources of data,” said Qualcomm Life General Manager Rick Valencia. “It’s about creating the ties between patients, caregivers and family members.” The companies declined to share financial details on the deal.

HealthyCircles, which was founded by Dr. James Mault, a former executive behind Microsoft’s HealthVault, offers a software-as-a-service product for helping caregivers, patients and family members securely share information related to chronic care or outpatient care situations.

Through the HIPAA-compliant service, different doctors involved in a patient’s care can share and view medication history, lab data and other information provided by the care team, and the patient (and his caregivers) can share self-assessment data as well as view data submitted by doctors.

As more hospitals shift to an accountable care model encouraged by the Accountable Care Act and other health reform changes, they’re increasingly becoming responsible for managing patient care outside of the hospital setting. By bringing HealthyCircles capabilities onto the 2net platform, Valencia said, they can open up more sales opportunities for the platform and enable caregivers and patients to better communicate across settings.

As part of the acquisition, Valencia said Dr. Mault has become Qualcomm Life’s chief medical officer and he added that the company has doubled its headcount.

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But I, like a few of my colleagues and other users, soon discovered a downside to Fitbit’s (see disclosure) discreet design — it’s so inconspicuous that you can forget about it entirely. On several occasions, it ended up in my laundry hamper, on the verge of taking a dunk in the washing machine. And many days, I’d simply forget to re-attach it to an article of clothing.

So I was curious to check out Fitbit’s newest device, the Flex wristband, which the company debuted earlier this year at the Consumer Electronics Show and is available starting today.

Like the Nike Fuelband and Jawbone’s UP, the Flex is a sporty band worn around the wrist. It logs steps taken, distance traveled, hours slept and active minutes – a new stat measuring the number of moderate-intensity cardio minutes experienced a day. It syncs wirelessly via Bluetooth with Fibit iOS and Android apps and also displays data through an online dashboard.

I chose Fitbit’s One tracker over the Fuelband and UP precisely because I didn’t want an extra accessory on my wrist. But after wearing the Flex for a couple of days, I can see the benefits of the new design. It’s nice not rummaging through your laundry hamper to find the tracker or trying to find a suitable pocket each day on which to clip it. And while I loved the One’s sleep-tracking and alarm capabilities in theory, I rarely actually put it in the device’s nighttime wrist band so that it could do actually do its job. With the Flex, it’s easier to monitor sleep and use its wake-up feature because the tracker is already attached to your wrist (although you do need to remember to tap it into sleep mode).

I also liked the simplicity of the Flex’s display. With the One, I was constantly fumbling under layers to check my steps or loading the app and waiting for the Bluetooth connection to show my progress. But the Flex includes LED lights that indicate how close you are to achieving your daily goal instead of an actual screen that shares stats. With a couple of taps, it shows one to four lights, with each light representing 20 percent of your daily steps. When you reach your goal, the device buzzes in acknowledgement.

Still, despite the extra convenience I experienced with the new Flex design, I’m still not in love with its aesthetic. The band was more comfortable and unobtrusive than I expected it to be, but (like the Fuelband and UP) it’s still more of an accessory than I’d like it to be. It also took me a while to get the band to snap into place on my wrist (the company acknowledges that the clasp can be tricky but wanted to err on the side of making it more secure).

Those who already have a Fitbit or other activity tracking device might not be in a rush to buy another. But it’s an attractive, full-featured option for those in the market for an activity tracker — and its $99.95 price tag might be more appealing than the slightly more expensive Fuelbands and UPs.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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