We’ll be doing demos at TechCocktail Boulder tomorrow night (March 6th). The event is at the Foundry on Walnut and starts at 6:30. Should be a cool event and Filtrbox will be showing off the application and giving out private beta accounts so stop by! We’ll even buy a few drinks, seeing that its a cocktail party and all…
Filtrbox announced today at VCIR it has closed its seed financing round, led by Flywheel Ventures and True Ventures. We also have a wonderful group of angels on the funding team, including Steve Eskenazi, John Zeisler, David Cohen, and Ron Bloom. We could not be happier with the investors we have brought together and are excited to have support from both the rocky mountain region and silicon valley.
We also announced the start of our private beta today. If you have already registered on the Filtrbox.com site, you will receive an invitation code in the coming weeks. We gave out 250 accounts today to the VCIR attendees as well. If you want access to the private beta, just sign up here and we’ll invite you as soon as we can.
After a few very busy weeks and many late nights we have released the new Filtrbox.com site!
The previous site didn’t have all that much information about the service or what we were really up to, so we took a big step forward and have now included screen shots, product information, FAQs and more. We are in private beta, so you can sign up for the beta and we’ll send you an invite in the coming weeks. Like everything in an early-stage startup, its a work in progress and we’ll be making constant updates and improvements.
Let us know what you think!
Our team has grown again with the addition of Brandon Harper. Brandon is a senior software developer with 10 years of experience in software development. His background and technology base are a great fit for Filtrbox, and we are thrilled to have him on board. Brandon also runs a popular developer blog, devnulled and is a published author.Welcome aboard Brandon - now get crackin’ 
Despite all the snow in Colorado this winter, things are starting to heat up here at the Filtrbox office. We’ll be participating in a number of events in the next few months as we start to share Filtrbox with more people and open up the private beta to more users. There are other events in the works as well, and we will announce them here as they become public.
Venture Capital in the Rockies - February 26-28th - Filtrbox is a presenting company. Its a great event that brings together top-drawer investors, service providers and interesting companies based in the Rockies.
Under the Radar Conference “The Business of Web Apps” - March 19th - A great showcase of interesting early-stage companies with a focus on business-oriented web apps and SaaS.
From the UTR site…
After nearly a decade of massive upheaval, traditional software has taken a backseat to “in the cloud” web apps. From SaaS to virtualization and business operations to communication tools, the proliferation of web apps is changing the way business gets done. An ecosystem of entrepreneurs, developers and corporate players is being born, creating a wealth of opportunity for the few who find the future…today.
Under the Radar Spring will uncover 32 bleeding-edge startups that have launched within the year, showcasing the newest web apps created by developers with a quest for innovation and a plan for disruption. Having launched numerous companies into startup stardom, Under the Radar is the most discerning and reliable platform today for discovering tomorrow’s leading technology companies.
P.S. If you want early access, please register here and we’ll invite you as soon as we can.
At Filtrbox, we are on a quest to create powerful, easy-to-use software that helps people “know what they don’t know”. If you want to know how we do it, and share our passion for creating great products, come and join us because WE ARE HIRING. If you meet the following requirements, you have an opportunity to be part of the best* software development team in Boulder, Colorado:
Please send inquiries to jobs (at) filtrbox (dot) com
* as defined by us, of course…
Techstars is now accepting applications for the 2008 edition. Filtrbox had a great experience in the program and we would highly recommend it if you are serious about starting a company. TechCrunch just covered it here and provides many of the details. Of course check out the shiny new Techstars site as well.
The application process is simple, but take it seriously as the bar is high. Martin at Brightkite has a great post providing some tips on the application process, and Tom has some excellent advice if you are thinking about applying.
If you are committed to starting a company and building a real product but lack the experience or relationships to do it right the first time, Techstars has a lot to offer. We feel the added motivation, guidance, and access to resources and investors is well worth the price of admission.
On a personal note, Filtrbox wasn’t the first company I’ve been a founder of, and even so, I got a lot of value from the program and learned new things about myself and how to start a business.
Tom and I would be happy to talk to you if you are considering applying. Just drop us a line at info (at) filtrbox.com.
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startup, techstars, venture capital
Just a quick post to mention that Ari will be speaking on a panel at the University Venture Summit on Friday, January 19th. The panel topic is raising your first round of funding, and the other panelists are Anthony Soohoo from Dotspotter.com, Dan Farr from DAZ 3D, John Edwards from Move Networks, and Michael Levinthal (ex. Mayfield). Robert Conybeer of Shasta is moderating, and it will be a great panel discussion about how to survive the fundraising process and what to be aware of!
There is a press release on the conference also. If you are reading our blog and happen to be attending, please look Ari up and say hi.
Happy New Year!
I realize we’ve been fairly quiet on the blog the last two months, but rest assured we’ve been working hard. We gave a demo of Filtrbox in December at the Boulder NewTech Meetup event and got a great response. We’ve spent the last two months focused on adding test users and new features. Today the BCBR, (local business paper) just published an article profiling Filtrbox.
Here’s the link: http://www.bcbr.com/article.asp?id=90785
Check back in a month or so for additional updates, and be sure to pre-register for Beta accounts here for early access to Filtrbox. As the article mentions we’ll be launching in the spring!
This is my first post here on the Filtrbox blog. Since March, I have been so busy writing code to get Filtrbox from vision to product that I have not had enough time to come up for a breather and compose a coherent blog post. However, I am now confident that the ship is steadying and on course to making a significant contribution to restoring information efficiency. For those of you whom I have not met, I am Tom Chikoore the CTO and co-founder of Filtrbox. As the Filtrbox CTO, my responsibilities include product vision, product planning and product development. I would like to use this first blog post to give you a run down of where were are today and how we got here.
Today we have released a version of the Filtrbox Dashboard to our community of users that I think best mirrors our vision of how the seemingly incoherent data on the web can be collected, transformed and packaged into useful information for consumption by Filtrbox users. Although this is a milestone for us, it is only a glimpse into our vision of the future of information efficiency at Filtrbox. The most satisfying aspect of where we are today is how we got here.
From day one, we have made it a goal at Filtrbox to be scrappy, resourceful and smart. Being a team of two, for the most part, we were determined to solve the information efficiency problem while making the most out of our scarce resources. In order to effectively address the problem, we split the problem into two stages; the two stages reflected our final product design that is based on a complete separation of concerns. The first stage - data collection. The second stage - data consumption. The reasoning for this was that before we could present the data for consumption by the user we needed to have a solid foundation of data collection algorithms.
This past summer, during Techstars, we set out to build a solid, scalable and extensible data collection foundation based on a framework that we built and code named “Carnivore”. Being a small team, the decision to build a framework is now paying off because our development turnaround is now very short; we can build substantial features into the product without neither breaking any code nor breaking a sweat (this software engineering approach will be subject of a future blog post). “Carnivore” consists of distributable autonomous data collection agents that run 24 hours a day (“hard at work scouring the universe for new content for you”) cataloging and storing the data in the Indexer database. Engineering and building “Carnivore” has not been without its challenges, least of which is building efficient algorithms for our parser, code-named “Gormandizer”, for processing data off the Internet which by nature does not fit any consistent pattern a.k.a. “dirty” (this will be subject of a future blog post). One of the biggest benefits the “Carnivore” framework gave us earlier on was the ability to plug in data generators. We leveraged this capability to generate the “Filtrbox: XX new articles from XX topic(s)” e-mails that our users receive each morning. The ability to generate e-mail was huge for us because it gave us the opportunity to share the benefits of Filtrbox with some of our closest friends (However, it also came with that ugly Topic/Keyword setup interface, please forgive me for that, I had to give you something 
). The slow addiction to Filtrbox daily e-mails has resulted in a large amount of valuable feedback that we are leveraging to improve Filtrbox on a daily basis.
With “Carnivore” in place by the end of summer, we set out on our second stage, data consumption in early Fall. The data consumption framework is a framework that allows data collected by “Carnivore” to be distilled into meaningful information and packaged for consumption by the user via various data consumer tools. We cheated a little and started on the data consumption framework before its time when we added the e-mail delivery. E-mail was the harbinger for the data consumer. We learned a great deal from that and most of what we have learned, we incorporated in the designs of our second data consumer, the Filtrbox Dashboard. Armed with the design and prototype of the Filtrbox Dashboard, we needed someone to join the team to work on not just the Dashboard but the whole data consumer framework. So, we set out to hire the third member of the team. At Filtrbox we have the fundamental belief that a great product is built on the foundation of a more than excellent team. Excellence is what we were after and excellence is what we sought to find. After reading tons of resumes, numerous phone interviews, a few “get to know you” lunches and a couple of in person interviews, we finally found the person who fit our mission best, Bruce Deen. Bruce, the “Senior Code Monkey” (ask for Bruce’s business card, the next time to run into him), is a Flex (choice of Flex will be subject of a future blog post) ROCKSTAR who has stepped up to the plate, “owned” the whole data consumption framework and he is responsible for the Filtrbox Dashboard that we have today ……. as far as we can tell he has not even started to dig deep into his bag of Flex tricks. With Bruce working on the data consumer side and myself working on data collection, I believe we are finally on course to making a great product that reflects our vision.
That is a “short” chronology of how we got to where we are today. From now on, I will be keeping you informed through this blog on how we are progressing on our quest to take the complex unstructured data on the Internet today and making it simple and consumable by you and I. Lastly, I would like to express my gratitude to all the users who have been sending us feedback. You are definitely making a great contribution to making Filtrbox a better source of information. Keep the feedback coming.
- Tom
