Andrew Hyde (@andrewhyde) of Startup Weekend and Techstars shows how to customize Filtrs to monitor individual Twitter accounts for specific topics. Check out the video.

Note: A Filtrbox G2 account is required for this hack. If you have a Basic account and want more power and more control, drop us a line and try G2 for 14 days for free!

We are excited to share some good news for Filtrbox customers. Today we are announcing a partnership with NewsGator Data Services to further expand our content coverage and giving you yet another reason to sign up with Filtrbox and engage in the conversation!

NewsGator has an impressive 4.9 million feeds indexed, and adds 9 million articles a day from their sources. That’s a lot of content! We have completed an integration that allows our service to monitor the NewsGator repository for new mentions related to your Filtrs. This means that you only get the new, relevant articles that match your Filtrs without having to sift through tons of feeds or irrelevant articles.

Last week we announced that Backtype comments had been added to the system, and now with the addition of NewsGator our coverage has never been better. If you are already a Filtrbox customer you don’t have to do a thing, NewsGator content is already live and will be categorized by Filtrbox as Blog, Mainstream or Social just like all of our other articles.

The full press release is on NewsGator’s site here.

We’ve got more product news coming soon, so watch this space or follow us on Twitter for updates.

I (Ari) am up at the VCIR Winter conference today along with a ton of great VCs and early-stage startups. We have set up two FiltrFeeds (those are the custom RSS feeds you can create in Filtrbox) to track the buzz from the conference. Grab these feeds and add them to your favorite reader or portal to stay up to date with the companies and what people are saying on twitter!

Presenting companies feed:
http://www.filtrbox.com/rss/W6Uhr9ENr0te1YtzL5li+A==

VCIR buzz feed:
http://www.filtrbox.com/rss/LsUZxzxWTwqW1TFaVeHP0A==

You asked, and we listened!

We launched Filtrbox publicly seven months ago, and have been constantly impressed with the wide variety of ways people use the service. Improving knoweldge and increasing productivity are the dominant themes, but the specific applications are almost endless.

One of the things that came through loud and clear (thank you for all of the feedback!) was the desire to do more and not be limited in what or how much could be Filtr’d. Our customers love the fact that Filtrbox does the work of churning through millions of sources to find the proverbial “needle in the haystack”, but they needed more.

We have been working hard over the last few months to build out an entirely new version of the Filtrbox service. We also wanted to provide unlimited usage, and given the economy, offer even more value. So we slashed the price in half too. You can see our new pricing model and feature set on the signup page. Give a free 14 day trial a spin!

We also heard from dozens of businesses and individuals that the service was paying for itself by delivering crucial nuggets of information. We call this Proactive Market Intelligence and believe it is a significant departure from the traditional way of absorbing information.  Instead of reading the same sources and hoping that you’ll come across that must-know nugget of info, Filtrbox covers ALL sources (well, almost) and delivers the crucial information to you.

We have already received some great feedback on the new dashboard and the application but of course we would love to hear from you as well.  Drop us at line and let us know what you think. Stay tuned for another post detailing everything that is shiny, new and different!

As you already know, Filtrbox is hiring! So are at least 19 other hot startups in the area, and that’s why we got together to sponsor the Boulder Job Fair (check out http://boulder.me for the scoop and apply directly on the site!). Great people make great companies,  so naturally we are looking for smart and motivated people to help us achieve greatness!

Apply on the boulder.me site, and if selected you’ll get a free trip to Boulder where you can meet the companies (including Filtrbox), check out the town, and see for yourself why the start-up community is growing and thriving here.

The Job Fair info  is on the site above, but here’s the 411 on Boulder:

• Ideal location - less than 1 hour from an international airport,  30 mins from Denver, close to world-class ski resorts, Rocky Mountain National Park, and more miles of hiking, biking, and climbing trails/routes you can imagine.
• Boulder has over 300 sunny days a year
• Easy to get around - everything is “10 minutes” away. Ditch the car and ride your bike, ride the bus, or walk! My stop-and-go commute in the bay area was over an hour, now I ride my bike 8 minutes to the office.
• Smart - with a high per-capital college degree population, the university up the street, and tons of smart developers and entrepreneurs running around town, there is clearly something in the water.
• Healthy - Boulder consistently ranks as one of the healthiest towns around. Between the Flatirons teasing you every day and the thousands of bikes zooming around, Fourteeners in your backyard, and trails everywhere it doesn’t take much to get motivated to go explore.
• Opportunity - take a close look and you’ll see there is a wide variety of industry-leading companies that call the Boulder-Denver area home. There are so many cutting-edge tech industries represented in the area; biotech, nano-tech, clean tech, aerospace, storage, web 2.0 sites, content/search, sports technology, activewear, and web marketing and design.
• Community - Yes, we are competitive, but this is a very collaborative community too. We support each other and thrive on seeing other local companies do well. Check out Techstars, the New Tech Meetup, the Open Coffeee Club, the Blogger Meetup or one of the 20 other weekly/monthly community events.

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch chimed in too!

If any of this sounds good, and you want to make a big difference at a growing company then you owe it to youself to apply at http://boulder.me and come see for yourself. Perspective is good. A free trip to a great place that could land you a new gig is even better!

Filtrbox has been nominated for an Industry Standard Innovation 100 Award!

The Industry Standard Innovation 100 Awards showcase the top 100 Internet innovators a group of which Filtrbox is proud to be a member.  Finalists are evaluated for their tangible user benefits and inspired use of emerging technologies across ten categories.

Now that we have been nominated in the productivity category we need your help and your vote.  Voting will run through October 3, 2008.  Please click on the link below and vote for us!

We did a quick podcast with Larry of w3w3.com the other day talking about getting startups funded and a little bit about Filtrbox. Podcast link is here (will open new window)

Thanks to Mark Weakly of HRO for bringing us all together!

Filtrbox is excited and honored to be selected as a finalist for the ninth annual Boulder Country Business Review IQ Awards.  The IQ Awards recognize the most innovative new products and services developed by companies in Boulder and Broomfield counties.  Past winners of the IQ Awards include Crocs, Webroot and Rally Software Development.  The winners will be announced Thursday August 14th, so wish us luck! Congrats to our co-nominees for the Consumer Internet category; Socialthing! and  Intense Debate. Its cool that all three of the nominated companies came out of Techstars.  Although Filtrbox probably should have been in the Business category rather than Consumer, we are in great company regardless. 

Filtrbox went public last Monday, and has been getting some nice pickups in the press and blogworld in the last week.  Thanks to everyone for your support and feedback so far!  The team really turned themselves inside-out to pull the feedback into the release and get it ready in time (thanks guys!).

It has been wonderful to hear from so many people and see the coverage. We love talking to customers and learning how people use Filtrbox to deal with Information Overload and monitor important topics.  If you haven’t had a chance please login to your account to see the newest version and keep the feedback and suggestions coming - we are listening!

Some of our recent coverage:

Inc Magazine - Searching for the next Digg

Network World - Managing the information flood

VentureBeat - Got information overload?

Mashable (podcast) - Offload your Info Over-Load

Fortune Small Business - Saving Small Business from Information Overload

Ari Newman of Filtrbox will be doing a live chat/interview session with the Boulder Daily Camera this coming Monday, 5/12 at 10:00 AM MDT. You can submit questions here http://www.dailycamera.com/chat/ or point your browsers to the same page on Monday to watch or participate in the live web chat. Hear more about Filtrbox and the company’s history and future plans. You can also email in questions to the Daily camera, just email: wallacea {at} dailycamera.com

 Update: chat transcript can be viewed here