filtrbox blog

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.

Yesterday was the TechStars investor/demo event in Boulder, CO.  It was the grand finale event for the program, and we worked our butts off to get ready. We demo’d our new user interface and some of its key features that enable noise control and activity analysis, and gave a pretty good pitch based on the feedback we’ve received so far. Thanks for the great questions at the end as well! The whole day went very smoothly and was really well run, which is pretty impressive for a 1st time event with people flying in from all over the place. iDay is over, time to crack a beer and then get back to work…

Filtrbox got a nice write up in GigaOM, and there was overall coverage by Don Dodge of Microsoft, echoed at TechCrunch also. Check out the techstars blog for some more info too.

Tom and I are really fired up about growing the Filtrbox team and getting the product ready for our Preview release later this year. Feedback from our early users (testers really) has been awesome - keep it coming ppl!

One of the things that motivates us at Filtrbox is helping solve the problem of information overload. There is a difference between “nice to have” information and “must-have” information. The ability to separate the two, and consume it accordingly is surprisingly difficult. If you are reading this, you probably spend enough time online to have that uneasy sense that there are a million other sources, articles, or conversations happening online that you might be interested in, or even REALLY need to know about.

Blogs and the social Internet movement as a whole have exacerbated the problem by creating an opinion layer on top of the core news and activity that drives much of this chatter. There is a ripple effect, much like a rock being thrown into a pond, where a core story or piece of news gets picked up and reposted with opinion and commentary. Some of this meta-info is really valuable and the authors are highly influential. Sometimes, it’s just noise. This noise will continue to grow to a roar over time, and it is already eroding the efficiency that search, broadband, and news alerts were meant to give us in the first place. We (Filtrbox) are focused on restoring Information Efficiency by creating tools that filter out the “must-have” side of the information stream and bring it to you. To us, there is a big difference between picking off articles in an RSS reader or portal that look relevant to your interests, and processing a “must-read” list of daily intelligence.

Tru.Vu is no longer, we changed our name to Filtrbox, Inc. a few weeks ago. We liked Tru.Vu, but it just didn’t stand out enough and there are a number of other companies out there with similarly named products or services (some in our space, others not even close). Filtrbox is a great summary of what we are all about, and we love our new look. Check out the new “holding” site we just put up at http://filtrbox.com. We’ll be posting more often now that we have the new site up and the name announced. In the last few weeks we’ve been making great progress in terms of the business side and product development, but haven’t said much while we transitioned from the old name to the new one. Stay tuned for a few more posts this week to get caught up, and update your RSS readers with our new feed url.  

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…

Welcome to TruVu. Now that we have the website up and a blog going we’ll be able to communicate a bit and share some of our thoughts and ideas.We recently found out we got into the TechStars summer program, which has us all fired up and losing sleep already. We are really excited to be a part of the program, and it’s a real compliment to be one of 10 companies accepted out of a field of 300.We plan on posting bios for the founders, Ari and Tom, shortly so you can learn a bit more about us.Thats it for now, thanks for checking in!