filtrbox blog

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. 

Now you can monitor online video content for critical mentions with Filtrbox. As of today, the service automatically searches sources such as The New York Times, Bloomberg, AP Business, Fox News and many others for fresh video content related to your Filtrs. You don’t have to do a thing to enable this feature, but you might want to add a few more Filtrs for some popular topics to see it in action! Content found in video clips will be included in your Dashboard, Daily Briefing and FiltrFeeds just like any other source.

We have partnered with ClipSyndicate for this content. They have been great to work with, BTW. Note: video content may take a few minutes longer to appear in your dashboard after adding a Filtr than text content, so please be patient!

Today we also released an improved Filtr editor. We got some great feedback from all of you and have made it easier to create and tune Filtrs. The changes should help eliminate some common mistakes and improve the quality of your results. Several enhancements to the persistent-search logic were also made to help improve results quality and consistency.

Also in this release:

• look for these buttons in the dashboard to show/hide major content sources - they were under a tab before and not always visible. Since they control what you see in the dashboard, we wanted to improve accessibility.
• new icons for content sources: is for “mainstream” sources such as New York Times, Mercury News, Reuters, etc. and is for blog sources such as GigaOm, Feld.com, Filtrbox blog, etc.
• improved status messages: a few minor improvements to the detail and accuracy of the status messages that let you know Filtrbox is searching for articles for your new Filtrs, and letting you know when new content comes into your dashboard.