Yesterday was the TechStars investor/demo event in Boulder, CO.  It was the grand finale event for the program, and we worked our butts off to get ready. We demo’d our new user interface and some of its key features that enable noise control and activity analysis, and gave a pretty good pitch based on the feedback we’ve received so far. Thanks for the great questions at the end as well! The whole day went very smoothly and was really well run, which is pretty impressive for a 1st time event with people flying in from all over the place. iDay is over, time to crack a beer and then get back to work…

Filtrbox got a nice write up in GigaOM, and there was overall coverage by Don Dodge of Microsoft, echoed at TechCrunch also. Check out the techstars blog for some more info too.

Tom and I are really fired up about growing the Filtrbox team and getting the product ready for our Preview release later this year. Feedback from our early users (testers really) has been awesome - keep it coming ppl!

One of the things that motivates us at Filtrbox is helping solve the problem of information overload. There is a difference between “nice to have” information and “must-have” information. The ability to separate the two, and consume it accordingly is surprisingly difficult. If you are reading this, you probably spend enough time online to have that uneasy sense that there are a million other sources, articles, or conversations happening online that you might be interested in, or even REALLY need to know about.

Blogs and the social Internet movement as a whole have exacerbated the problem by creating an opinion layer on top of the core news and activity that drives much of this chatter. There is a ripple effect, much like a rock being thrown into a pond, where a core story or piece of news gets picked up and reposted with opinion and commentary. Some of this meta-info is really valuable and the authors are highly influential. Sometimes, it’s just noise. This noise will continue to grow to a roar over time, and it is already eroding the efficiency that search, broadband, and news alerts were meant to give us in the first place. We (Filtrbox) are focused on restoring Information Efficiency by creating tools that filter out the “must-have” side of the information stream and bring it to you. To us, there is a big difference between picking off articles in an RSS reader or portal that look relevant to your interests, and processing a “must-read” list of daily intelligence.

On a few occasions I’ve been asked how Filtrbox is different from persistent search. The question is typically poised immediately following a brief discussion of what we are up to and how people and businesses will consume our service. Not surprisingly it’s the tech-savvy folks that already know the content monitoring or attention economy industry pretty well that ask the question.

For the non-experts, persistent search is the ability to save a search after you’ve run it, and have the software re-run the search on your behalf on an ongoing basis. This can be really useful in many cases as it’s a time-saver and can help you find items the search missed previously. You can even subscribe via RSS to your search results to stay abreast of the new content. Persistent search is step forward for search in general, and pretty soon we’ll see more features exposed in search engines and browsers that take advantage of the capabilities. Fundamentally, you still need to know what you are looking for (you have to enter a keyword or combination of keywords), and it is up to you to analyze the search results for the data you want. How this technology is applied to specific areas is where it gets interesting…

Filtrbox has elements of persistent search built into it, as does any content monitoring or tracking application that has to constantly look for new articles in published content, but where things start to differ is what the system does with the data it gathers and how that information is filtered, sorted, validated and presented to the user. Searching, or re-searching, is only one step of a multi-step process and by itself is not sufficient. In order to improve our ability to handle the content explosion happening online, the other half of the process is critical. Filtering, packaging, delivery…