Filtrbox promises a new way to solve your information overload challenges. Taking a cue from Google PageRank, Filtrbox takes persistent search to the next level. Instead just collecting and compiling, Filtrbox will sift through search results and rank them using its proprietary FiltrRank.

The company, founded by founded by Ari Newman (CEO) and Tim Chikoore (CTO), was selected as one of the TechStars companies back in April 2007. It changed its name from Tru.Vu to Filtrbox in July 23rd 2007 went into private beta late February 2008 and was in public beta since June 30th 2008.

Beyond Persistent Search

To set up Filtrbox, enter keyword(s) or Filtrs, which you want Filtrbox to monitor. This is similar to Google Alerts, where you key in the desired keywords and Google will search latest news that carry your keywords. This persistent search is useful to stay current on your interests. Compared to Google Alerts, you can refine your search term. As shown in the screen shot below, you drag-and-drop the suggested keywords to the Include and Exclude fields.

Filtrbox takes persistent search a step further. Instead of just searching for news and blogs with your keywords, it will filter them for you using its proprietary FiltrRank. Its FiltrRank is used to rank articles, based on 3 dimensions, namely contextual relevance, popularity and feedback.

Assessing each article, it will rank it from 0 to 10 (10 being the highest). You set your tolerancy to the level of FiltrRank. For example, if you set the filter at FlitrRank 8, only news ranked 8 and above will be shown to you. You can get fetch and filter old articles too, unlike Google Alerts. For each result, you can click on it to read the source article, rate it and share with others (via email).

Built on Flex, it’s interface is intuitive and responsive, once you in the Dashboard (see above). However, I experienced notable slowness, while launching the dashboard.

Filtrbox is designed for application in professioanal environments. Currently, it offers three packages – Free, Pro and Team. Free package comes with 5 search terms (or filtrs), up to 15 days of history; Pro costs $20 per month ($200 per year) and you can set 25 flitrs and 45 days of history; Team offers up to 100 filtrs, 1 year of history and up to six users, cost $100 per month ($1000 per year).

Collect and Sort

Filtering of search result is the value-add of Filtrbox. Rather than presenting users with a list of results, Filtrbox add a layer of ‘intelligence’ to rank articles, in terms of relavancy. Will Filtrbox replace your RSS reader? I don’t think so. Filtrbox will be use to complement existing RSS readers and Google Alerts too.

Filtering Out ‘Noises’ with Filtrbox originally appeared on GreyReview on July 6, 2008.

Sense-and-respond, a key organizational trait in today’s dynamic marketplace. To be an agile enterprise, it is imperative to install sensors to monitor the macro- and micro-pulses; macro being the industry and micro, the competitors.

With business activities migrating online, it is now possible for executives to feel the industry pulse and keep tab of their competitors’ activities using various freely available web applications. It is becoming easier for companies to compile market intelligence data and conduct competitive analysis. Rather than the conventional episodic capture of competitive information via market research, it is now possible for companies to build a steady flow information stream.

Forewarned is Forearmed. With better and up-to-date information, businesses can strategically position themselves in the marketplace, and continuously adjusting their business theories to sync with prevalent market realities. The followings are some of the free and highly useful sensing tools for executives to stay ahead of the competition (Note: Your competitors may already use these tools to monitor your company!).

Monitoring Conversations in Twitter-ville with…

• Summize and Twitscoop are two search engine for Twitter messages (or tweets). Use these tools to follow what Twitter users are saying about your competitors (and your company).
• Twitter, a microblogging site with over 2 million users (with 200,000 of them a week), composing over 3 million tweets a day! (TechCrunch, April 29 2008). It is a fantastic tool to boost your company customer-interactivity quotient.
• Major corporations like SAP, Yahoo!, Disney, Mozilla, and Microsoft are using Twitter to interact with their customers. For more on Twitter-enabled customer service, read How to Get Customer Service via Twitter (ReadWriteWeb, Apr 10 2008).
• An example case of Twittter’s usage: I wrote a post describing how the authors of Groundswell interact with me on Twitter, upon discovering my tweets related to their book (read the post here).

Monitoring Website Traffic Flow with…

• Google Trends, Quantcast, Compete, and Alexa provide website traffic monitoring services. These sites enable you to see the traffic patterns / volumes of your competitors’ websites. You can do a comparative analysis between yours and your competitors’ website traffic.
• Of course, results differ among the providers, as each has its own measurement methodology. Nevertheless, these web traffic measurement tools can give you useful indications of your website, relative to your competitors.

Monitoring the Popularity of Feed Subscription with…

• FeedCompare is useful to compare feed subscribers base of different websites. Its Statistic Chart displays the total subscribers and its patterns over a time period; you can define a time period view – 1-month, 3-months, 6-months, 12-months and 24-months.
• This tool is particularly useful for content-oriented website, where the number of subscribers (readers) correspond to the value of the website (in terms of advertisement revenue).

Monitoring Blogs and Social Contents with…

• Technorati Watchlist monitors over 112 million blogs and over 250 million tag social media. You can request Technorati to monitor your competitors by creating a watchlist of your keywords or URLs (eg. your competitors’ company names and brands). Technorati compiles blog postings that carry the defined keywords or URLs.
• Bloglines Saved Searches also enable you request to automatically search and deliver future articles that carries your desired keywords.

Monitoring Google Results with…

• Google Alerts send you an email alert, when there are new Google results of your choice of search query terms or topics.
• It is an excellent complement to Technorati Watchlist and it mainly monitor your defined search terms in Google’s properties (web, news, videos, groups, blogs)

Extending your customer service with…

• GetSatisfaction offers a ‘context’ for consumers to air their comments / complaints and for companies to respond to them.
• Anyone can submit queries, comments, complaints about any company and product. Other users can email the submitted entry and also send it directly to Twitter and Facebook. Anyone can also follow a particular entry, which is useful if one is interested to know the outcome of a particular issue.
• Here, you can do a search and find out what your competitors’ customers are complaining about them.

This list is just a sample of online applications, which businesses can exploit to sense-and-respond to the marketplace dynamics. No doubt, there will be even more powerful online applications in near future that enable us to cost-effectively collect competitive information and make more informed decisions.

If you know of any tools which are useful for competitive analysis, appreciate if you can comment this post and add your suggestion.

Free and Awesome Tools to Sense and Respond originally appeared on GreyReview on June 29, 2008.

StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Faviki, LoopLinks, Instapaper, LinkRiver, Diigo. These are some of the bookmarking web applications. Such market niche with so many choices for users. How do these app merchants stand out and make themselves, well, “special”? How to encourage take-up among the digital dwellers? This article aims to describe the imperatives of social apps and key competitive factors to thrive in the dynamic web marketspace. The imperatives are presented in the form of Social App Adoption Equation.

Social App Adoption Equation

Social App Adoption equation, Adoption = f (Cost, Utility, Social Effect), where Adoption refers to the propensity and motivation to use a particular web app

Cost is expended, which refers to the time, effort and dollars spent during the period of adopting and assimilating the web app into one’s life. At his talk at the recent Netbash @WCIT 2008 in Kuala Lumpur, Vinton Cerf mentioned about the creation of risk-free environment for your prospects and customers to try out your products/services. He gave the examples of Google and Xerox. Google created AdWord, which customers don’t get charged until their text ads were clicked. Xerox charged its customers on per-copy print. Both Google and Xerox lowered the adoption barrier.

Web apps can be offered as free and thus, minimize or eliminate the cost factor. It is common for many web-based startups to let users use their products and services for free. Think Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Lastfm, Plurk, and many, many more. Generally, these providers launch first, build a critical mass of users, and eventually, discover later the right revenue model. Only quite recently Facebook start monetize its user-base with ‘social ads’

Another flavor of free is the versioning strategy, where software/service are chunked into different versions. The ‘free’ edition usually with limited features compared to its ‘pro’ version. Of course, there is also the try-out strategy, where companies offer limited trial period e.g. 30-days and allow users to freely try out the products. After the trial period, users will need to purchase license to continue using it. Also, the web apps must come with built-in simplicity.. from sign-up process to mastering the product. Tedious sign-up process can discourage users. The rule is, as little effort as possible to master the app.

Utility is experienced and derived by exploiting the capabilities and features of a particular web app. In the Age of Dot-Com (1995 to 2001), web apps focused on functional aspects for enabling self-service. Key metrics include number of eyeballs and critical mass of users. The Age of Social Web (2001 – present) focus on interaction, relationships and shared meanings & experiences. ‘Web apps’ added with social-ness. This is not to suggest that social-centric sites didn’t exist prior the Social Web age. SixDegrees, a social network service, was formed in 1997 and was shut down in 2001. SixDegrees is ahead of the market’s adoption curve.

Eventually, sites like Friendster (founded in 2001), MySpace (2003), Orkut (2004), Facebook (2004), Bebo (2005) emerged and ignited the social networking wildfire. The functional utility, which can be derived by exploiting the capabilities of the web app. Bookmarking web app provides bookmarking, search engine provides search function, so on and so forth

Social Effect refers to the network effect of a particular web. The value of a social app is dependent on the number of people using the apps. The more people using a social app, the more ‘valuable’ the app becomes. Users also extracted value via experiencing of ‘social ties’ forged within the community. The social ties, in turn, emotional bonds, a user forged within a community act as a form of barrier to entry or lock-in for social app providers. First-mover advantage provide head-start but no guarantee of winning.

‘Social ties’ can be sticky. A user who has created a profile on Facebook with considerable number of friends is quite unlikely to move to MySpace. A user with hundreds of followers on Twitter is reluctant to move over to Plurk. This stickiness is good for the creation sustainable community of users.

Social App Adoption equation provides a simplistic conception of the critical components, which are utility, cost and social effect. The lower the cost, the higher the utility, the more robust the social effect will lead to higher adoption rate, fueled by positive feedback. The consideration of these elements is critical for merchants of social apps. Of the three elements, Cost is probably the element within the total control of the app merchants. Next is utility derived, which may differ from one individual from the other. Different users assign different perceive value to each function. The Social Effect element is beyond the control of the merchants.

Free is Never Enough

Free (Cost) is a commodity these days. The Free factor helps in getting users to try-out a web app but it’s not a compelling enough to develop social stickiness. For example, the growth of Facebook. The social networking site is certainly not the first one in the marketplace. Before Facebook, there are already established players like MySpace and Friendster.

However, Facebook managed to grab the spotlight and is showing impressive growth, mainly due to its innovative flair. The company open up its platform to the third-party developers in May 24 2007. To date, there are about 400,000 developers (e.g. Microsoft, Amazon, Slide, Rock You, iLike, etc.) have developed over 24,000 applications on the Facebook platform. Recently, it launched Facebook Open Platform, FbOpen, to make the developer platform open source. By opening up its platform, Facebook can swiftly enhance the value (Utility) of its site, at a speed it couldn’t have done if it goes alone. MySpace used to ‘dislike’ independent developers for its social networking site and usually either shut them down or buy them out.

The platform strategy worked well for Facebook and it is one of the key reasons it managed to grow at impressive rate (Social Effect), despite being late to the social networking scene. Such innovation makes Facebook the coolest kid on the block!

The Facebook example is a reminder to social apps merchants that lowering of adoption barrier is prerequisite in the Web world. Innovation that leads to better user experience and generation of social effect around the web app determines success.

Becoming Sticky Social Platforms

Here’s the simplistic steps of how social platforms evolve:

1. Imagineering Sit under a tree (or wherever) and think of the next crazy, sexy, cool social app to do and engineer it!
2. Set it Free Roll-out the social app and make it free (it’s more like a free beer, rather than free speech).
3. Scale the Crowd Entice the Web mortals to your virtual social world with your refreshing’ community context and concept (e.g. Zebo with people listing the stuff they owned) and ‘tools’ (web applets).
4. Swirl the Loop Get on that positive feedback loop by getting on the TIPPING POINT
5. Monetize the Social Streams Remember, the purpose of a business is to generate profit. So, monetize your crowd to foot your bills, finance your next project, etc

Understanding Social Apps Adoption originally appeared on GreyReview on June 5, 2008.