filtrbox blog

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!

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 proud to announce a partnership with Guy Kawaski’s Alltop to provide as-it-happens news on the worlds most interesting people.

Alltop helps people explore their passions by collecting stories about “all the topics.” It is, in effect, a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet.  At each Alltop site, Alltop displays the headlines of the latest stories from dozens of sites and blogs.

This approach works well from a topical perspective but is less effective in aggregating news about individuals.  As Guy put it “The bulk of our topics are organized by subjects like politics, autism, iPhone, and food. Filtrbox was the best technology we found to cover specific people that do not fit into typical categories. VIPS.alltop would not exists without Filtrbox.”

VIPS is unique to Alltop because the feeds are based on our persistent search technology, rather than being blog/publisher driven. This allows readers to track news and information about specific individuals from any online source rather than just a few!  Take a look for yourself here.

The Olympics start tomorrow and in support of Team USA’s bid for Olympic gold we have released new widgets to keep you up-to-date on news and buzz surrounding your favorite events and athletes. The widgets are powered by the same technology as the Filtrbox.com media monitoring service and can be customized by sport and/or athlete. There is a desktop widget that runs under Adobe AIR, and a Flash widget for your blog. Both are totally free and easy to install. Get them here.

Java + LAMP Developer

Join a dynamic, growing software company in Boulder, Colorado.

Basic requirements:

• Solid experience with Java and LAMP
• Experience developing and operating a web application
• Working knowledge of Information Retrieval and/or NLP (a plus)
• System administration skills (a plus)

You are:

• Energetic, motivated and creative
• You learn new skills fast and apply them immediately to get things done
• Always wanted to work for a start-up, or be part of a nimble, fast-moving team

Send your resume or sample work to: jobs [at] filtrbox.com

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.