VCIR - FiltrBox

I have to say out of the gate that I like FiltrBox and know a little about the company before the presentation. FiltrBox was a techstars company last summer and they have made steady progress on not too much money. Ari Newman is the President and Founder and there are currently 4 employees. The company is pre-revenue. To date they have raised a modest $500K and are currently looking for a $3M series A investment.

FiltrBox watches the information that is being published on the Internet, scores it, and provides it in a way average people can understand. Their product is a subscription based product and focused on mid-size business. The idea is fit between large buzz monitoring solutions that are expensive and free products like Google Alerts.

Here's what I think, FiltrBox's competition seems to me to be the free service from Google, Google Alerts. Some see this as a deal killer for FiltrBox. I completely disagree with this. Google Alerts was basically an afterthought constructed by Google they will likely never really do anything with. Anyone who uses Google Alerts for any length of time quickly finds out that the amount of noise makes it completely useless. If FiltrBox can sort out the noise, they will have a great product and great business.

 

Comments

[thompsa6]

I came across FilterBox through ColoradoStartups.com (and this blog as well). I have to say that initially I wasn't sold/excited about the idea but this post by Alex Iskold really put what they are trying to do in perspective for me:

http://alexiskold.wordpress.com/2008/02/25/rethinking-recommendation-engines/

Alex is an amazing blogger/technologist and I think FilterBox could be putting together an extremely valuable service based on concept of "rethinking recommendation engines".

I signed up for the FilterBox a little while back and I can't wait to get in and give it a test drive...