Here’s an article that compares Filtrbox with Alltop, two services that are almost polar opposites. Mary Fallon at demo.com does a good job outlining the how different the approaches to media monitoring are.

Info Aggregation Without Aggravation
by Mary A. C. Fallon
Alltop and Filtrbox - the flipsides of next gen news searching
Online information aggregation without aggravation could be the mantra of new products Alltop and Filtrbox – polar opposites in all ways except their simplicity of use.
Alltop is for those wanting to scan top stories on popular Web sites and Filtrbox, now in private beta, is for anyone whose job depends on efficiently searching and tracking explicit information.

Click here to read more

We’ll be doing demos at TechCocktail Boulder tomorrow night (March 6th). The event is at the Foundry on Walnut and starts at 6:30. Should be a cool event and Filtrbox will be showing off the application and giving out private beta accounts so stop by! We’ll even buy a few drinks, seeing that its a cocktail party and all…

Despite all the snow in Colorado this winter, things are starting to heat up here at the Filtrbox office. We’ll be participating in a number of events in the next few months as we start to share Filtrbox with more people and open up the private beta to more users. There are other events in the works as well, and we will announce them here as they become public.

Venture Capital in the Rockies - February 26-28th - Filtrbox is a presenting company. Its a great event that brings together top-drawer investors, service providers and interesting companies based in the Rockies.

Under the Radar Conference “The Business of Web Apps” - March 19th - A great showcase of interesting early-stage companies with a focus on business-oriented web apps and SaaS.

From the UTR site…

After nearly a decade of massive upheaval, traditional software has taken a backseat to “in the cloud” web apps. From SaaS to virtualization and business operations to communication tools, the proliferation of web apps is changing the way business gets done. An ecosystem of entrepreneurs, developers and corporate players is being born, creating a wealth of opportunity for the few who find the future…today.

Under the Radar Spring will uncover 32 bleeding-edge startups that have launched within the year, showcasing the newest web apps created by developers with a quest for innovation and a plan for disruption. Having launched numerous companies into startup stardom, Under the Radar is the most discerning and reliable platform today for discovering tomorrow’s leading technology companies.

P.S. If you want early access, please register here and we’ll invite you as soon as we can.

At Filtrbox, we are on a quest to create powerful, easy-to-use software that helps people “know what they don’t know”. If you want to know how we do it, and share our passion for creating great products, come and join us because WE ARE HIRING. If you meet the following requirements, you have an opportunity to be part of the best* software development team in Boulder, Colorado:

• Solid Java skills
• Solid web application development skills
• Experience with Natural Language Processing concepts (a plus)
• Actionscript 2 or 3 (a plus)
• Admin or development experience on the LAMP stack
• Note: We are looking for highly motivated, energetic and innovative individuals

Please send inquiries to jobs (at) filtrbox (dot) com

* as defined by us, of course…

Just a quick post to mention that Ari will be speaking on a panel at the University Venture Summit on Friday, January 19th. The panel topic is raising your first round of funding, and the other panelists are Anthony Soohoo from Dotspotter.com, Dan Farr from DAZ 3D, John Edwards from Move Networks, and Michael Levinthal (ex. Mayfield). Robert Conybeer of Shasta is moderating, and it will be a great panel discussion about how to survive the fundraising process and what to be aware of!

There is a press release on the conference also. If you are reading our blog and happen to be attending, please look Ari up and say hi.

Happy New Year!

I realize we’ve been fairly quiet on the blog the last two months, but rest assured we’ve been working hard. We gave a demo of Filtrbox in December at the Boulder NewTech Meetup event and got a great response. We’ve spent the last two months focused on adding test users and new features. Today the BCBR, (local business paper) just published an article profiling Filtrbox.

Here’s the link: http://www.bcbr.com/article.asp?id=90785

Check back in a month or so for additional updates, and be sure to pre-register for Beta accounts here for early access to Filtrbox. As the article mentions we’ll be launching in the spring!

Blogworld has been good so far. The event is very well organized and there are a few thousand folks here, including a pretty solid Boulder contingent. Not surprising given how many blog/web 2.0/social media companies are based there…

A few quick hits:

• I (Ari) was on on a panel this morning with Howard Kaushansky from Umbria Communications and Robin Seidner from Collective Intellect. Topic was “Tracking Reputation in the Blogosphere”. What made the session interesting was the engagement from the audience and the dialog. There was good conversation between the panel and the audience as well as audience to audience.
• David Cohen mentions many of the Boulder-based companies over at Coloradostartups.com
• While this isn’t Filtrbox related in the least, I ran into “iJustine” today. I’ve followed her on twitter for awhile, so it was pretty cool to meet her ITF.
• Best meeting so far was a 60 second conversation over the lunch table with Jeff Yolen of Sphere. I hadn’t met him before, and we just-so-happened to sit accross from each other at a table. A quick question turned into a rapid fire conversation that covered more ground in a minute than most hour long biz dev meetings do! Nice…
• Ran into Leo Laporte, nice to put a face to a name after listening to TwiT for so long.
• Oh, and Dave Taylor was wearing a sportcoat, this is a sighting on par with seeing the loch ness monster. Forgot to grab a picture however.

I’m not much of a conference blogger, but given that I’m at Defrag today in Denver it was only fitting that I get at least one blog post out from the event. The event has been good so far, and very well organized and attended for it’s rookie year.  

One of the big focuses of the conference has to do with the “implicit web”, which is the implied side of the content world.  Another term thrown around by some vendors is the “attention economy”, which is similar in concept (or is it?).  As far as Filtrbox goes, I suppose we straddle the fence a bit between explicit and implicit content discovery. Both are necessary in our world, so it’s great to see what others are working on and how some of the other services define and derive implicit relationships in the world of related content. We’ve already had some great conversations with the folks from Adaptive Blue, Lijit, Yahoo!, and others. Great to see as many out-of-town attendees as locals, as well as some blogging illuminati like Don Dodge and Brad Feld.

Later this week I’ll be in Vegas at the BlogWorldExpo event. I’m speaking on a panel with Robin Seidner of Collective Intellect, and Howard Kaushansky of Umbria Communications on “Tracking Reputation in the Blogosphere”. We’ll be discussing the dimensions of reputation, if it matters to you, and how to take advantage of the data. The panel is Thursday at 10:15 in case you are there!

P.S. We just added Intense Debate’s blog commenting system to the Filtrbox blog, so check it out!

Tom and I are thrilled to announce that the Filtrbox team has just expanded by 50% thanks to the addition of Bruce Deen. Bruce is an awesome guy and will be heading up the front-end development of the Filtrbox application. Bruce has more than more than 10 years of experience in software and web application development and he’s worked in everything from Aerospace to Telecom.Bruce is as close to an expert in Flex as you get, and he’s got a cool Flex app for spell checking you can get here.FYI - we are getting close to migrating all of our test users over to the new UI, so if you are one of the lucky few to have a Filtrbox account already, you’ll get to see the direct results of Bruce’s work in a few short weeks.Welcome to the team Bruce!

Very early on in our development of Filtrbox we got the core system working and sending out daily email updates of new articles to a small group of test users. It’s been good to watch even the prototype service improve as we improve FiltrRank and our content reach. From early on, we started “eating our own dogfood” by relying on the system to keep us informed of new content related to Filtrbox and our market. Yesterday Filtrbox picked up an article talking about Google Alerts via RSS, which turned out to be great validation of the demand for some of the things we are working on. It was one of those cool moments that reinforces why we are on this mission!  Also mentioned was that G-A is picking up video content. It’s good to see that rich media is starting to work its way into the world of content monitoring, as this is going to become a big part of content ecosystem pretty soon.