filtrbox blog

One of the motivators for starting Tru.Vu was our frustration with the sheer volume of news and content available online and the challenges associated with dealing with it. In the private/consumer online world users have the luxury of deciding what to read or track based on time and interest, but in the business world knowledge is power (ok, this is true in the private sector too but stay with me here) and if you aren’t paying attention your competition is. The social web has exacerbated the problem by providing an opinion layer on top of online news articles and trends. Thus, the “knowledge” is spread out over 6m+ sites, and what’s new and relevant is in constant flux.In a previous life as a product manager I was amazed at how much time could be spent staying up to date with industry trends and keeping track of analysts, press, competitors and customers. It’s part of the job, and required knowledge that impacts decision making. When time got short, reading online magazines or prints to keep up to date was the first thing that got dropped. My inbox got clogged with Yahoo or Google alert messages I didn’t have time to review. Just keeping up with online “mainstream” news required a real time commitment. Enter the social web, with it’s frothy opinion layer sitting on top of all the news and the challenges are now growing exponentially. There are many new tools and portals available but many of them fall into the “by techies for techies” category. Some are very impressive but equally expensive.Our mission is to create a web based service that acts like an intelligent filter on top of all of the content sources relevant to your world. We aim to keep it simple, but also really improve the signal v. noise ratio so that Tru.Vu actually saves you time and improves your knowledge without having to master RSS, persistent search subscriptions, context filtering, and boolean search strings. Oh, and the 35 Google alerts you have set up that send you every mention of the keyword…

Tom and I have been working hard to get Tru.Vu ready to share with a few lucky people sometime soon (is that vague enough?). I spent most of last week getting our new box set up, which was fun in a total geek kinda way, but also time consuming and reminded me of my deep respect for hardcore sys admins. Tom is cranking away on core functionality and we are getting close to having enough of the plumbing in place to claim “it’s working”. We are moving the site and blog over to the new production server this week. In fact, this blog was just moved over last night. FYI - We changed the url from tru.vu/blog to blog.tru.vu.Note: The tru.vu blog is now also part of the TechStars FeedBurner network. You can subscribe to the network feed and get posts from every TechStars company. Could be more than you want, but pretty useful if you want to stay updated with all of the TechStars companies.The TechStars teams are starting to arrive in Boulder - We just had lunch with the guys from Villij, who drove straight thru the night from their hometown to get here. They documented the whole trip on camera so that should make for some entertaining footage. It’s happening…