January 4, 2008

Next generation info tracking

BOULDER – Rob Johnson, co-founder of Boulder’s EventVue, is addicted.

“If I don’t get my daily dose I realize it’s gone. I admit I’m hooked.”

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Johnson is talking about his “critical morning briefing” from Boulder-based Filtrbox, a content-monitoring system that tracks news in blogs and media in a comprehensive manner. As an entrepreneur Johnson relies on Filtrbox to “keep me up to date on our industry’s progress and development.”

Ari Newman, Filtrbox’s president, and Tom Chikoore, chief technology officer and lead architect, founded Filtrbox out of their own frustration. With a background in advising startups through Newman Venture Advisors, Newman found it hard to track reliable content for various industries.

“While Google and Yahoo! search and news alerts were functional, there had to be a better way to stay on top of things,” Newman said. Although Google sends articles through keyword searches, Newman said it’s a one-way content alerting system. “There’s no aggregate information gathering, content control or making sense out of the information. You have to carve out time to search for and bookmark links.”

In early 2007 Chikoore and Newman realized they could fill a void. “People encouraged us to build something more effective than what’s out there,” Newman said.

Filtrbox became a reality at TechStars, a Boulder program formed last summer by serial entrepreneurs and investors David Cohen, David Brown, Jared Polis and Brad Feld. The program gave several entrepreneurial teams office space, seed money and access to mentors in exchange for 5 percent equity in the startup. Filtrbox received $10,000 from TechStars and another $100,000 from friends, family and two unnamed angels. They expect an additional $250,000 angel round to close in January 2008. The company will also bring in three to five more investors, which will help them hire five development and operations employees in the next few months.

For its official launch in March 2008, Filtrbox is targeting small- and medium-sized businesses. The Filtrbox users in these businesses might be executive teams, investors, public relations and marketing communicators, product managers and research analysts.

Through the Filtrbox Dashboard individuals define a number of criteria, including keywords to use and keywords to exclude in any number of categories. They also can use tagging, which is a way to mark, store and retrieve Web content that a user wants to track. Tagging is the next-stage search phenomenon, according to Washington, D.C.-based Pew Internet & American Life Project.

“Unlike other search engines Filtrbox is proactive instead of reactive. It constantly searches and finds a list of articles relevant to you on a broad reach,” Newman said. “You set it up once then get daily e-mails that rank the relevance based on source credibility and your feedback.” Filtrbox also provides customizable RSS feeds, and it plans to add mobile access in future releases. “Our model changes as we go along. We react quickly to feedback.”

Lisa Rutherford, founder of Redwood City, Calif.-based Two Fish Inc. and formerly with Boulder Vista Ventures, is one of 100 Filtrbox business testers.

“I love the visual references in the Dashboard. It’s easy to see what kind of discussions are going on and trace them back to how the conversation started. Filtrbox offers so many ways to get aggregated data. If I see a trend it guides my thinking. Compared to amount of information I glean in five minutes it saves a lot of time.”

EventVue’s Johnson, another business tester, uses Filtrbox to “find stuff outside my sphere of attention. Recently Filtrbox found a blog post I wasn’t expecting. I don’t normally track or subscribe to that blog. As a company founder knowledge of the competition is important to how we develop strategy. Filtrbox is an added value that we wouldn’t normally receive.”

Filtrbox plans to offer a free, basic service with a limited number of e-mails. The company’s Pro version will enable higher levels of usage, keywords and more for $20 per month. Unlike traditional search engines Filtrbox doesn’t rely on paid or sponsored results.

“We’ll get the word out through combination of building buzz, online media and guerilla marketing. We anticipate healthy and swift adoption from the interest and demand we’ve seen. We’re optimistic that we’ll get good viral marketing,” Newman said.

Even though Filtrbox is a relatively new competitor in the market – Umbria in Boulder, AideRSS in Ontario, Canada, Nielsen BuzzMetrics in New York City, and San Francisco, Calif.-based BuzzLogic – Newman said Filtrbox is solving different problems with diverse slants. “No one is doing what Filtrbox does. We firmly believe we found an opportunity.”

BOULDER – Rob Johnson, co-founder of Boulder’s EventVue, is addicted.

“If I don’t get my daily dose I realize it’s gone. I admit I’m hooked.”

Johnson is talking about his “critical morning briefing” from Boulder-based Filtrbox, a content-monitoring system that tracks news in blogs and media in a comprehensive manner. As an entrepreneur Johnson relies on Filtrbox to “keep me up to date on our industry’s progress and development.”

Ari Newman, Filtrbox’s president, and Tom Chikoore, chief technology officer and lead architect, founded Filtrbox out of their own frustration. With a background in advising startups through Newman Venture Advisors, Newman found it hard…

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