Hasta La Gadget!

Back in September, Glooko announced the release of a new version of its iOS app, a digital logbook which helps people with diabetes track their blood glucose levels from their smartphone. The new app brought support for six additional glucose meters, meaning that Glooko is now compatible with more than 17 different devices — a sign of the headway the startup has made in its march toward meter agnosticism. Diabetes, as with any condition that requires constant monitoring and tracking (often via multiple devices), has been in sore need of better data and device interoperability, and Glooko is on a mission to do just that.

While there are a ton of digital logbooks in the app store for those who regularly check blood sugar levels, most require users to enter data manually. Since launching in late 2011, Glooko has set itself apart by allowing them to download readings from multiple devices automatically. However, up until now, Glooko’s Logbook Charts — an app that gives users robust analysis and visualizations of glucose data — has only been available in Europe, but that changed today, as Glooko announced that has received 510(k) clearance from the FDA, allowing it to expand distribution and bring products like Logbook Charts to the U.S.

This is a significant achievement for Glooko, especially considering that FDA approval isn’t something that comes easily or that happens overnight and can require months or years of effort to meet the government’s stringent regulations. But now that it has regulatory approval as a Class 2 device, Glooko is clear to sell its products over the counter as well as directly to consumers. It also allows the startup to begin courting healthcare providers, which gives them access to a huge market of potential institutional customers.

With the nod of approval from the FDA, the startup is also announcing today that it has new leadership at the helm, as Rick Altinger joins Glooko as CEO and Dean Lucas as its new VP of product development. Altinger is the company’s first CEO and brings over 15 years of industry experience in healthcare services, serving most recently as an executive at Intuit Health, where he led the company’s acquisition of Medfusion.

Lucas, too, is a veteran of the healthcare industry with 17 years of experience under his belt, having led interface and product design for both Doximity and Epocrates — the latter of which was recently acquired by Athenahealth for $293 million. He will also reportedly has plans to help bring Glooko to Android, which is welcome news to Glooko users who have endured a long wait for an iOS alternative.

The Center for Disease Control has reported that 25.8 million Americans — 8.3 percent of the population — have diabetes and an estimated 79 million have prediabetes, making it one of the most pervasive diseases in the U.S. As a result, there’s a huge opportunity for digital health startups in leveraging technology to help those who suffer from the disease to better manage its symptoms. Startups like Glooko and Omada Health represent the next generation of care and prevention, finally helping the country address a critical disease that costs it $200 billion each year.

“Lack of support across multiple meter types and differing data transfer methods have long withheld a truly unified diabetes management solution,” says the company’s new CEO. “By creating a universal diabetes management platform, Glooko is beginning to crack the code, and I look forward to continued innovation and implementation of Glooko across healthcare as a unifying force in a disjointed ecosystem.”

To date, Glooko has raised $3.5 million in funding from The Social+Capital Partnership, Bill Campbell, Vint Cerf, Judy Estrin, Andy Hertzfeld, Venky Harinarayan, Russell Hirsch and Xtreme Labs.

Canon today officially launched a new initiative including a pilot location in Calgary, Alberta, Canada that follows the experience of physical retail projects like Apple Stores and Microsoft’s recent brick-and-mortar locations, giving consumers opportunities for hands-on experiences in a space not shared with other brands. Canon’s new “Image Square” isn’t a store per se, but it is a showroom and learning center that sounds like it borrows a lot from the Apple model. Canon first piloted the Image Square idea in India last year, and it appears to have been successful enough to merit further expansion.

The store that isn’t a store will be located in downtown Calgary, and offers hands-on experiences with Canon products including sculptural exhibits for testing point-and-shoots, DSLRs, lenses and accessories all on interesting visual subjects. The idea is to give a try-before-you-buy experience, but one that actually involves flexing those photographic muscles on something other than other cameras or boring electronics displays, as you might find in your average camera shop or Best Buy. Staff on hand can provide advice and give demos, and there’s a fully functional photo studio on site with access to pro photo software. All purchases are still made through Canon’s retail partners, however; this is just about show, not sell.

One of the more interesting elements involved in the Image Square is a photo gallery curated by 500px, the Toronto-based photo sharing website that’s popular among professional and enthusiast photographers. In the Calgary location, it’ll display works from Alberta-based photographers using Canon kit to show what’s possible using their gear.

The partnership is significant for 500px, since it gives it a place of prominence with an established player in the photography world, right alongside big players like Adobe and others. Canon also seems to be keen on rolling more of these out over time, which means this could become a good way to get the photo sharing network in front of even more active and practicing photographers all around the world. And for Canon, it means a possible answer to the question of how to keep consumers buying cameras in a world where the smartphone is taking over much of that market.

As someone who devours way too much science fiction, I’ve always secretly believed that I’ll be wearing giant VR goggles at some point in the future. (I’m patiently waiting for my jetpack, too.) Now it looks like I might not be crazy after all — Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus, is hoping to take VR goggles out of the lab and put them into the hands of gamers at an affordable price.

The company held a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign for its Oculus Rift headset last year, raising $2.4 million (nearly 10 times the original goal) from 9,522 backers. The company plans to ship its first developer kits in a couple of months, and Luckey dropped by the TechCrunch booth at the Consumer Electronics Show with an early version of the goggles.

He compared the experience to “having an enormous screen suspended in front of you,” which is true enough, but doesn’t quite do justice to what it’s like to put the headset on, watch the game respond to your movements, and feel like you’re moving through a real space. I’m eager to try it out in a real game, but it sounds like I might still have a while to wait on that front.

“It wouldn’t be really responsible for us to go out and say, ‘This is when we think it’s going to be done,’ when we haven’t gotten any developer feedback on what they think should be in the consumer version,” Luckey said.

The developer kits are still available for pre-order for a price of $300 on the Oculus site. When the consumer version is released, Luckey said he’s aiming to deliver it at the same price or lower.

For many startups, creating the educational platform (and learning experience) of the future began with reinventing the presentation, distribution — really, the essence — of educational content. And what is the most familiar package for that content? The good ole textbook, in all its rigid and bulky glory. As such, startups like Kno, Inkling and Boundless have been helping to make textbooks and learning content digital, interactive and personalized. Of course, generally speaking, these startups have had to fight tooth and nail against the incumbents of the space — the controllers of content — the big, bad publishers.

Self-publishing platforms and open content resources have grown in popularity and startups have begun experimenting with new ways to present learning material, all of which has threatened the old guard, forcing them to make moves. Adapt or go the way of the dinosaur. Although they’ve been known to stand in the way of innovation. This morning, textbook publishing giant, McGraw-Hill, showed that it’s been taking these changes seriously and may just be ready to play ball. Not your average CES startup, the company unveiled its new suite of interactive and adaptive learning products that aim to personalize the learning process and help students improve their performance.

The suite leverages adaptive learning technology — one of the hottest topics in education this past year — which, simply put, seeks to personalize the educational experience by collecting data on student comprehension (knowledge, skill and confidence), employing algorithms to create customized study plans/paths based on that data. The goal being to keep students engaged (and improving) by helping them to identify and focus on areas where they’re struggling.

Traditionally, adaptive learning tech has focused on study tools, but with its new suite, McGraw-Hill is looking to go beyond that to create a fully adaptive course. The company launched its own study tool, LearnSmart, back in 2009, which gives its new products the advantage of a ready-made user base and a ton of data to work with thanks to its one million unique student users, who have answered more than one billion questions to date.

While the suite will include products like a “before-the-course” adaptive resource (that lets students warm up before difficult classes begin), a “photo-realistic virtual lab” and a comprehensive adaptive learning system, the stand-out was its unveiling of SmartBook, an adaptive eTextbook for laptops, desktops and tablets that adjusts to students’ comprehension and speed as they go. It’s not quite the Textbook of the future, as the experience is comparable to reading your average textbook, but it’s a clear sign of which way things are going. Instead of having to quiz yourself, your SmartBook will assess your knowledge as you read, highlighting content and concepts that students need to master.

In fact, the book will actually talk to you, offering voice instructions and coaching students on the most effective way to read the material. If they answer incorrectly, it guides them to the material they need to re-read. Pretty cool.

McGraw-Hill says that it expects to launch its SmartBooks this spring on Mac, PC, iOS and Android. Collectively, the SmartBooks will cover 90 different subject areas and cost $20 and up (per book).

From what we’ve seen, the product isn’t the sexiest out there, but it does make good use of innovations in digital textbooks like those we’ve seen from Kno and Inkling, offering dynamic text and, unlike the others, voice instruction. To be sure, it’s a space that’s becoming more crowded and competitive, with Pearson employing Knewton’s adaptive learning technology to upgrade its digital learning tools — and Wiley, for that matter.

What’s more, it will be interesting to see what the launch of McGraw-Hill’s SmartBooks means for relationships it has with startups like Kno, which has been helping to digitize the publisher’s textbooks and make them more interactive. McGraw-Hill instead turned to its adaptive tech partner Area9 to help it develop its SmartBooks.

Not to be outdone by its publishing partner, Kno announced a new product today at CES as well, unveiling “Kno Me,” a personal study dashboard that helps students monitor their progress as they read. The dashboard allows students to check-in to view realtime stats on their study behavior, time management, interaction levels and progress. Users can then share these results with peers or follow the engagement levels of their peers.

The product will complement Kno’s interactive, digital textbooks, which now span over 200K titles and contain content from 65 of the top publishers. The smart textbooks offer more than 70 interactive features designed to boost engagement and help students reduce the amount of time they spend studying by improving efficiency.

With Kno Me, the startup is trying to take that efficiency one step further by giving students deeper insight into their reading habits. Kno Co-founder Osman Rashid says that the idea is really to help students answer the question, “how much am I really studying?” Generally, the only assessment in this regard is a grade, and by that point, it’s generally too late anyway. It’s not exactly adaptive learning, but it does personalize and add granularity to the learning process, allowing students to see the average time they spend interacting with textbooks, the percentage of pages annotated, glossary terms mastered, and so on.

Kno Me is now available on all Kno interactive textbooks for iPad, Windows 8 and web browsers and will soon be available for Android and Windows 7.

And, for good measure, Pathbrite — the educational portfolio startup that allows students and teachers to collect, organize and present their learning achievements, course completion and so on — also got in on the action today, announcing a new product and a new agreement with textbook behemoth Pearson.

As a result of the partnership, the startup will be integrating its portfolio platform into Pearson’s personalized learning environment, now used by more than nine million students each year. It’s a big win for the young edtech startup, giving it access to a huge new audience.

Quantified Self enthusiasts are getting their fair share of excitement at CES this week. Basis first unveiled its intriguing health-tracking watch at the event last year, but after hiccups and lawsuits, the company finally launched its product on the market in November. At launch, however, the band looked great and the entire package was very promising.

Unfortunately, the company hasn’t yet launched the mobile apps that will accompany its tracking band and web dashboard, yet today the company gave a glimpse into its first app — for Android — which will be made available in March.

For those unfamiliar, Basis’ band and dashboard allows users to continuously monitor skin temperature, heart rate, motion, calories burned and sleep patterns, among other things. The watchband comes with an LCD display that shows the date and time, BlueTooth support (to be activated once the apps launch) and, most impressively, is laden with sensors.

The watch has a 3-axis accelerometer that measures sleep patterns, an optical scanner to track blood flow and heart rate, skin and ambient temperature trackers that measure heat dissipation and workout intensity, etc. The startup then uploads all this information into the cloud, applies its algorithms and allows users to view heat maps and activity patterns, and then allows them to accumulate points, unlock habits (meant to gamify the experience), and so on.

The idea behind the accompanying mobile apps is, as one would expect, to be able to view all that health data on the go. But, beyond that, it’s been unclear how the company’s mobile apps will supplement its web experience. Thanks to Basis’ demo at CES today, we’ve got a little bit more of an idea. As the startup made clear in its blog post today, its new Android app will include automatic syncing, allowing users to sync data from their bands wirelessly to their dashboard.

Users will be able to sync the app with the dashboard “automatically in the background and on-demand” so that the dashboard is always up to date. On top of that, users can view their habits and insights from their phones and receive notifications, which will alert them when they hit targets and achieve goals, or offer reminders when in need of a push in the right direction.

The app will be available for beta users “by the end of March,” and Basis says that an iOS version is “also in the works” but would give no timeframe for its release. It will likely hit sometime this summer.

Again, it’s an active week in the activity space at CES, as Basis’ announcement follows Fitbit’s launch of its new $99 Flex wristband, which gives the popular health tracking device a new form factor, taking it from clip to wrist. Find out more here.

The new product isn’t available yet, but it’s clear the space is heating up, and some of these companies are already launching multiple product lines. Meanwhile, Basis is taking its time to roll everything out. It remains to be seen whether this approach will work to its advantage. So far, we think it looks great.

Check out our big year-end list of healthtech apps, gadgets and startups here. Full review here.