I’m usually not one for writing about myself but thought I’d share the link to the video interview I did recently with Entrepreneur.com about Filtrbox. Its short (about 2 minutes) and covers a lot of ground. Best of all we did it in one take!
If you can’t see the video, try this link
Tom Chikoore (Filtrbox co-founder) has written a great post titled “The Death of the Rocky Mountain News and the Rise of Filtrbox“. Its a good perspective on how content is king, and its the mediums and their models that are evolving.
Several weeks ago, while purchasing a commemorative copy of the Rocky Mountain News, I came to the realization that two distinct stories, symbolic of the shift in media landscape, were playing themselves out on both ends of US-36. In Denver, The Rocky Mountain News, a symbol of traditional mainstream media, was closing down after almost 150 years of publishing. In Boulder, at Filtrbox, a young new media company, we were celebrating the release of the latest version of our service, Filtrbox G2. While the people at the Rocky Mountain News were probably not aware of Filtrbox, I had a keen eye on the daily goings on at The Rocky and I looked at the whole situation at the Rocky as a symbolic passing of the media torch.
Read the entire post here, and let him know what you think about content vs. medium!
I’m heading to SXSW (south by southwest) today to check out the conference. It’s been blowing up the last few years, especially the Interactive conference. Getting there on the tail end of things, as I had a few too many demands on on the calendar. Yes, I’m a newbie. No, I won’t be drunk the while time.
Filtrbox is co-sponsoring the CO interactive party tonight, should be a god time. Http://Colorado-interactive.com
Things I’m looking forward to checking out @sxsw…
1. Is there real dialogue on topics or just polite agreement? (note: based on the apparently awesome #specwork09 panel I missed, the answer is yes on the realness)
2. Are people talking about the future of search? What are the other emerging trends (aside from filtering and semantic intelligence).
3. New/breakout apps launching -what’s got people interested and what flops? Apparently AT&T’s cell network blows in Austin, to the point where Wired has written about it and iPhone peeps are pissed! Might make it hard for mobility apps to get the adoption they need.
What are the don’t miss panels/parties/apps/topics? Let me know.
Its been a busy few weeks (or months) for me and I haven’t had much time to write here (not for a lack of desire however). Lots going on but these are the highlights that I can share…
Filtrbox announced some funding and a new version, Filtrbox G2. To me, the biggest news was that we cut the price in half and are offering UNLIMITED use. The team did a great job and reworked quite a bit of the platform to accomdiate what we want to do with G2 and the new usage model. Sign up for a free trial here http://www.filtrbox.com/signup.html
Recent coverage…
TechCrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/17/filtrbox-raises-14-million-launches-revamped-market-intelligence-tool/
WebWorkerDaily: http://webworkerdaily.com/2009/02/19/filtrbox-g2-expands-service-and-cuts-pricing/
AppGap: http://www.theappgap.com/filtrbox-provides-market-intelligence-for-the-rest-of-us.html
Filtrbox blog: http://www.filtrbox.com/blog/2009/02/18/filtrbox-launches-g2-proactive-market-intelligence/
VCIR
I’ll be up at VCIR Winter next week Tuesday through Thursday. VCIR is an awesome event and I always look forward to it. Filtrbox pitched last year and it went very well for us. This year I’m just there to network and support the presenting companies. I set up a FiltrFeed to track news and buzz around the presenting companies. This FiltrFeed can be added to any RSS reader and will automatically update when Filtrbox finds a new article that mentions the company name AND VCIR. I turned off Twitter monitoring for this feed to keep the noise down. http://www.filtrbox.com/rss/WUuPMw8dtTUIz4G10SlTSg==
VatorTv
I was just out in SF with the Filtrbox team for a few meetings and we got to stop by the Vator.tv offices. Meeting the team was great and I was able to record a new video pitch for Filtrbox. You can check it out here: http://vator.tv/pitch/show/Filtrbox?document=aris-pitch. We’ll be doing more with them in the near future, so stay tuned! Thanks to Bambi, Kedric and Meliza for all the help.
Techstars
Techstars-for-a-day is coming up on Tuesday. Its a great even that helps shed some light on the process and creates an opportunity for the candidates, or those thinking about applying, to meet the mentors and graduates. Seeing as how the Techstars office is about 50 yards away, you can bet I’ll be there to mix and mingle.
SocialLeverage, LLP.
Congrats to Howard Lindzon (a Filtrbox investor) and the rest of the team at SocialLeverage – they just announced a new seed fund for social apps. Howard has been great to work with and is a prolific entrepreneur and invesor so I can’t wait to see what they get involved with. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/howard_lindzon_and_friends_lau.php
Almost every day it seems a new service or mashup for Twitter comes out. Some will stick, others won’t. That’s the great thing about the internet is that everyone gets to try! Twitter has reached a point of critical mass now where mining the data and the trends around what’s happening on Twitter is as valuable as the messages themselves. I use twitter for both business and personal pursuits, and have tried a ton of the apps and services that have come out. Here are my favorites;
Totally worth the 3 bucks. Here’s one of the menus…
There are a ton of others out there, but these are my faves and what I rely on. Let me know what I missed or what you like better!
When the #motrinmoms thing blew up recently I added the keyword as a Filtr to my Filtrbox account. After skimming the results for a few days and noticing the volume of conversations were dying down quickly wanted to see what that would look like visually. Here’s a graph for the last 15 days…
Net-Net: Don’t piss off mommy bloggers…ever. I wasn’t even tracking tweets with this account and there were 60 posts on this topic in a single day.
Its been a busy few weeks for us in the office at Filtrbox. We just put out a new release with some big improvements we’ve had in the works for awhile. Between defrag, a board meeting, the boulder.me job fair, and the new version – the lights have been on late at the new digs. Even the dog is doing code reviews…
The Filtrbox team is pretty excited about the new release for a lot of reasons, but the biggest thing is the new search functionality. Previously, we had a pseudo-realtime search mechanism that went off and ran a one-time data collector when you added a Filtr. If content was found quickly you’d see new articles in the dashboard, but in many cases if the search took awhile or timed out due to slow sites, and you wouldn’t get immediate results. The lack of instant feedback on your new Filtrs was a big frustration of ours. In this new release its totally different and the system runs a realtime search, hitting our mainstream news index, blog index, and twitter (if you have social media enabled). It takes a few seconds but returns the same articles you’ll get with the ongoing persistent search.
Personally I’m also glad to have the “delete article” feature in the new release because its something I like to use to get rid of articles I never want to see again. Feedback has been good so far – check out the “filtrbox love on twitter”…love to hear from you too!
I’m at the Defrag conference today with lots of other folks who care about “accelerating the ah-ha moment!”, according to the conference. Really, this conference is all about putting meaning and context around the insane amount of information available online. What I care about, even more, is how we find the RIGHT information in a timely and painless manner and deliver that in a way that is effective.
I just saw a screenshot-demo for a product called Sxipper, the current version holds your passwords but I already use 1Password for that. The new version brings a vast amount of meta-info to the browsing experience – this is being called a “flow app” and I think it has promise (think “adaptive blue” for social info).
As I listen to the discussions, there is an underlying conversation around doing better filtering, separating information, dealing with information overload, and finding the value in all the info. Of course this all is very much related to Filtrbox’s mission and is why I’m here. There is much we can (and should) do at Filtrbox to deliver valuable meta-information around the content we discover. Presenting the right meta-info without just amplifying the noise problem is something we are focused on. It will be interesting to see if “flow apps” like Me.dium or Sxipper can figure out how to do this in a more streamlined manner. I don’t think sidebars/sidecar browser apps are it. For me these are too distracting and make the problem worse, even though the info they provide is helpful.
What is clear to me is that as smart as we humans can be, and no matter how good and intelligent we try to make the filters and the software, there is, and will be a NEVER-ENDING quest for the better, smarter filter.
Although humans can be predictable, the brain is not a binary system, and predicting what we care about or don’t care about at a given moment is non-trivial. When the information and its profile is contstantly changing, and the attention, interest and focus of the mind is changing – finding those patterns programattically is a “holy-grail” mission. Lets see how far we can get…
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“Google on Wednesday said it has seen 50 times more search requests coming from Apple iPhones than any other mobile handset — a revelation so astonishing that the company originally suspected it had made an error culling its own data.”
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AppleInsider | Google iPhone usage shocks search giant
Note: This is significant for a few reasons. One it confirms a long running suspicion that the gatekeeper to explosive mobile internet usage is the USER EXPERIENCE, not the network or access speed. The fact there is a real browser in there, and google search is the default search engine has a lot to do with it. Jut wait until the 3G phones come out. The other big thing here is that it validates mobile search and mobile commerce will happen as soon as the UX catches up on more platforms.
Uncategorized, filtrbox, iphone, startups, tech bits, the bike