filtrbox blog

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.

On a few occasions I’ve been asked how Filtrbox is different from persistent search. The question is typically poised immediately following a brief discussion of what we are up to and how people and businesses will consume our service. Not surprisingly it’s the tech-savvy folks that already know the content monitoring or attention economy industry pretty well that ask the question.

For the non-experts, persistent search is the ability to save a search after you’ve run it, and have the software re-run the search on your behalf on an ongoing basis. This can be really useful in many cases as it’s a time-saver and can help you find items the search missed previously. You can even subscribe via RSS to your search results to stay abreast of the new content. Persistent search is step forward for search in general, and pretty soon we’ll see more features exposed in search engines and browsers that take advantage of the capabilities. Fundamentally, you still need to know what you are looking for (you have to enter a keyword or combination of keywords), and it is up to you to analyze the search results for the data you want. How this technology is applied to specific areas is where it gets interesting…

Filtrbox has elements of persistent search built into it, as does any content monitoring or tracking application that has to constantly look for new articles in published content, but where things start to differ is what the system does with the data it gathers and how that information is filtered, sorted, validated and presented to the user. Searching, or re-searching, is only one step of a multi-step process and by itself is not sufficient. In order to improve our ability to handle the content explosion happening online, the other half of the process is critical. Filtering, packaging, delivery…

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…

The Boulder Daily Camera did a nice piece on TechStars and some of the companies in the program. TruVu is the only Boulder-based company to make the cut, so we got a mention in the article (here). Note: The Daily Camera requires an account to read the article, so if you don’t feel like signing up but already have a Furl account you can read it here.

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!