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!

One of the most exciting things about working at Filtrbox is hearing new ways people are using our persistent search technology to make them more productive in their daily lives.  We often hear of people using Filtrbox to track their brand or keep an eye on competitors and sales prospects but we also hear about people tracking medical issues or looking for new fitness workouts or gaming tips. In fact the list seems virtually endless!  Below are a few or our favorites that we’ve come across recently.  Feel free to use them for inspiration and by all means keep filtring and sharing your experiences with us. Drop us a line and let us know what YOU Filtr!
————————-
Filtrbox is the best application I have ever used to watch the trends. I do not use it for business purposes but am following the discussions around the net on three issues: Deleuze, as my favorite philosopher, and Khatami (the former President of Iran, sometimes I forward the findings to his advisors), and “dialogue among cultures and civilizations”.
I do not check my account at filtrbox.com often, as it is filtered by some ISPs here in Tehran; I check it for certain tweaking in the keywords when I find access. The daily email briefings are marvelous as they lead me to fresh information as well as new connections.
I use google analytics but Filtrbox is more powerful.
————————-
I work in the public relations department for HomeAway, Inc. the largest vacation
rental marketplace that currently has 11 sites in all. Given the number of
sites and the unique key words associated with each such as  HomeAway.com, VRBO.com
and VacationRentals.com - it is important that we have a tool to monitor everything said with each site.
With the ever-expanding media landscape – Filtrbox helps us
identify moves by competitors, comments by users and praise by
customers. Typically, I am fully aware of the news that comes from
traditional media (dailies, magazines and broadcast) — however, social
media is when it becomes hard to predict when and what gets said - this is why I use Filtrbox.
—————————
I have been using Filtrbox to find information on employers I was applying to, as well as for the less serious/more fun use of trying to find information on Blu-Ray releases of more obscure/art films I am a fan of.
————————-
I use Filtrbox to stay on top of news for work and for personal growth.
Mainly around the topics of Deliverability for email (Work), Forex
Trading (personal), Venture Capital News (both personal and work).  The
daily emails that I receive really help me scan through and grab the
information that I find interesting for the day.  Keep up the good work.
————————-
Great tool! One of those ideas that are obvious and implemented, but not well. I filter for just a few terms, mainly related to the python programming language.
The signal to noise ratio is quite good. I have found many posts that I would not have easily found, and many that I would not have thought of searching for. I have developed several business relationships from articles found from filtrbox.
Keep up the good work!
————————–
I use Filtrbox to track two websites I work on. I’ve found it more useful and reliable than Google alerts
which sometimes sends me alerts for links that are months old!
——————–
I’m a PR guy, so I’m trying to keep an eye on what the Internet is saying
about my clients. The difference with Filtrbox is Twitter conversations. Not
even Twitter’s own search features pull in as much as Filtrbox does. Also,
Filtrbox seems to pull info from places Google Alerts can’t find. I like it.

—————————

We are a start-up in the PaaS (Platform as a Service) field.  Though a much hyped technology right now, being a part of the cloud computing bandwagon, it is still fairly new and often, the target of scathing put-downs that go with the praises.  We use Filtrbox to monitor our company brand through keywords.  With it, we can listen to the conversations surrounding it and if possible, be able to allay such fears to drive trial deployments and eventually, adoption and do away with the ‘hard sell’ as much as possible.
Like most start-ups, non-techies like me have to wear a bunch of hats and one hat requires that I do the part of social media for our company.  This involves listening, listening and listening as well as timely responses to issues raised about us and even for the industry in general.  With Filtrbox, you reduce the time to go through online researches and it’s like having another staff present taking care of such a big task without the accompanying cost. [Not that we're cheap, just saving resources.  Already asked for budget to get a Filtrbox paid account.  Hopefully, soon!]

FiltrFeeds (custom RSS feeds) are down for maintenance for several hours as of 6 PM Mountain time, January 22nd. We are fixing an issue that was affecting some of the feeds. We’ll update this post as soon as they are back online. Thanks for your patience!

The rest of the Filtrbox system is online.

Update: FiltrFeeds are back online. Feeds will not be quite up to date for a few hours until our databases catch up but will be totally current shortly.

You may have noticed banner ads in the header of your Daily Briefing emails from Filtrbox lately. We introduced these about a month ago and are now on our 3rd sponsor. We had a few reasons for doing this…

• Filtrbox Daily Briefing emails go out to thousands of professionals every day. These customized emails are widely read and highly anticipated by our users, so they are a great vehicle for communicating with an engaged audience.
• Experimentation - we were curious to learn how much click-through traffic the ads could generate, and what kinds of ads people like the best.
• Requests - we had received a number of inquires about sponsoring our Daily Briefings, and it was something we had hoped there would be demand for.

Note: If you are paid subscriber, your Daily Briefings are ad-free!

We don’t have an Ad page/rate card up yet, but its on the way. If you would like more information on sponsoring our Daily Briefings just drop us an email.

This week we are featuring Lijit as a sponsor. We use Lijit’s search plugin on the Filtrbox blog, and on a number of our personal blogs as well. Their blog search platform lets you deliver better, more relevant results to your visitors (better engagement) and you can now even advertise with Lijit. Many of our customers are bloggers and content producers too, so we think it will be a great match!

In the past few weeks we’ve added two features to enhance our support of Twitter monitoring within Filtrbox.

1. Tweet This - From within the dashboard, you can now tweet any article in your account. Just mouse over an article and you’ll see the new “tweet this” link on the action bar. This is a super-easy way to share articles found in Filtrbox with the Twitter community. All you need is a twitter account, and as long as you are logged into Twitter in your browser it will work seamlessly.




2. Twitter links in your Daily Briefing - The ability to monitor conversations on Twitter in Filtrbox isn’t new, but the Daily Briefing emails have now been updated to show you who posted the tweet. Its also a live link so you can visit that person’s twitter page very easily. Here’s what it looks like in your daily briefing email.

Let us know what you think!

You asked, and we listened! Log into your dashboard and check out the new features we have just released. Many of these enhancements are the result of direct customer feedback, and we addressed a number of issues that have been nagging us too. If you haven’t logged into your dashboard in awhile, take a few minutes and refine your Filtrs or add a new one and give the new version a test-drive. Details on the enhancements follow;

• Improved Filtrs and live search
• Better charting
• Mark-as-Read support
• Delete article support
• Block source
• OPML file import
• Action bar

Improved Filtrs and live search
The way that Filtrbox runs its searches has been improved to provide more accurate and comprehensive results. You may notice some changes in the articles the system finds for your Filtrs. In almost all cases this should be an improvement, in the case of very general filtrs you may now want to refine them further to get more relevant results.

In order to provide better instant-feedback and a more consistent experience, Filtrbox now runs live searches for your Filtrs as you set them up and provides sample results from a broader range of sources. Click and drag include or exclude terms from the tag cloud or add additional terms yourself and click search to get realtime feedback reflected in new sample articles. Check out this quick screencast to see it in action.



Better Charting
This release introduces a new charting component that looks a bit different, performs better, and will offer more flexibility as we expand the display options. What’s new is the date box and calendar pop-up to control the date ranges, and the “show for the past days” box where you can just type in how many days of data you want. Much easier to use than the sliders that were there before.

Mark-as-Read
After you have clicked on an article in the Filtrbox dashboard, the title of the article goes from bold to regular text. You can mark an article as un-read also if needed.



Delete article
There are cases where you might want to remove an article from your account. Perhaps the article is not relevant to your Filtrs, or it’s a splog that slipped through our defense systems. If you are in PR or web marketing and you are using FiltrFeeds, you can also use this feature to cleanse an article out of a feed that is getting published or shared. Once articles are deleted, they are removed from your account and cannot be recovered. There is no “un-delete” - once its gone its gone!

Block source
Here’s another very handy feature that helps remove articles and content you simply don’t want to see going forward. Perhaps you consistently see articles from a domain you don’t care for, or is of little value to you. Just click “block source” and the domain gets added to your personal blacklist.



You can even modify or remove the blocked domains. Filtrbox looks at the FQDN, not just the domain. This means you can block “notagoodblog.wordpress.com” without blocking the entire domain. If you wanted to block all of wordpress.com, you can add this to the blocked domains list manually. You can also modify a blocked domain or remove previously blocked domains. This is done on the Account/Manage Content Sources tab.




OPML file import
Filtrbox already persistently searches millions of blogs, thousands of mainstream sources, and social networks such as Twitter and FriendFeed, but if you want to ensure the system monitors specific feeds you care about, you can add them to your account. Filtrbox now supports OPML file import to make it easy to add a large number of feeds at once. This can be found on the Account/Manage Content Sources tab also.



Action bar
We cleaned up the dashboard a bit by moving a number of functions to an “action bar” that appears as you mouse over each article. From this bar, you can provide feedback, share the article, delete, or block the article’s source.

In addition to these features there are a number of “under the hood” improvements you shouldn’t see, but from which you will benefit. We hope you like these enhancements, and are hoping to hear from you on what else you’d like to see to help you get even more value from Filtrbox! Just leave us a comment on the blog, or drop us a line at support [at] filtrbox.com.

Previously, Filtrbox treated any two words together in a Filtr as a quoted phrase automatically. While this was helpful early-on for our users, it also created its own problems because it was more difficult to obtain results where the two words you wanted to search for existed in the article, but not together. We followed this pattern based on the user behavior we observed and wanted to be pro-active in helping our customers get the results they were looking for. We’ve kept an eye on this area for awhile because we knew it didn’t conform to search box standards. For example, if you set up a Filtr for Apple Computer and did not use quotes, the system automatically treated your Filtr AS IF it was “Apple Computer”, where only results that had those two words together would be considered valid. In the image below, there are no quotes even though on the back-end the system applied the quotes.

Old way:

The Filtrbox search system was just updated to allow more flexibility with quotes and handle multiple words in the Filtr (without quoting them automatically).  We should have done a better job of explaining the way this worked before, and we’ll communicate more proactively in the future on this topic. This updated approach gives you far more control and granularity for your searches. As of today, if you want to search for something specific such as a company name, a person, or a popular phrase, you need to use quotes to identify that you only want results that have the exact match.

New Way:

Alternately, if you want to find  articles that have a several words in them, and not necessarily together, you can just leave a space between the words in the Filtr. For example if you are interested in green building projects in California, your Filtr would look like this;

In this scenario, you’ll see articles that have all of these words present, but you are not looking for any exact phrases. In the near future we will further enhancing the Filtr manager to obtain better results for more complex searches, so stay tuned for another blog post on this topic.

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!

We love the community we work and live in, and could not think of a better way to give back than joining the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado.

Through a stock donation, we are able to be philanthropic and supportive of the community while still using our capital for building the business. To us its a win-win, and we are happy to join the other great companies in the program.

The EFCO program is cool because it creates a great, low-risk, low-cost way for companies like Filtrbox to set up a potentially highly valuable donation.

The foundation does a better job explaining this on their website:

“Colorado has a vibrant entrepreneurial community. A group of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, lawyers, and The Community Foundation Serving Boulder County have created the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado to work with local entrepreneurs to help endow Colorado.

Since entrepreneurial success is uncertain and the vast majority of entrepreneurial endeavors fail, we decided to approach the problem in a unique fashion. Rather than wait for success to encourage philanthropic activity, at which point the successful entrepreneur is likely to be besieged by requests, we decided to create a new program to help all entrepreneurs contribute early in the creation of their companies to the long term health and sustainability of Colorado.”

You can read the full news release here. The team at Filtrbox is committed to building great software, and we hope to someday repay the community that helped us achieve our goals!