I have a very patterned daily information consumption routine.  The left-most tab in my browser is called "Daily" and contains a set of web sites that I open up each morning and look at as part of my routine.  Recently, Filtrbox – one of the TechStars companies – graduated to be part of this tab.

I try virtually every news alerting system that I come across.  I have a set of about 100 keywords that I track daily – all of the companies we’ve invested in, a number of people that I follow, and a handful of random things I care about.  My current staples are Google Alerts, Yahoo Alerts, and Technorati.  I can only seem to get Google and Yahoo via email, so they show up in my inbox and get moved to my "Daily" email folder (which I read – er – daily.)  Technorati comes via RSS so I read it each morning in FeedDemon.

The vision for Filtrbox when they started at TechStars last summer was to create an integrated single dashboard of all this keyword alert information.  The tagline "more knowledge, less noise" says it all.  My partner Seth Levine and I totally resonated with this – Seth has a great post about Filtrbox up titled Know what you don’t know which addresses how he thinks about the problem and how Filtrbox solves it for him.

For a while I found the Filtrbox data interesting, but not really that additive. In addition, the UI was "ok" but there where lots of little things that slowed me down.  About three months ago I noticed I was finding new information from it that wasn’t appearing in my other keyword searches and that it was streamlining this information in ways that I hadn’t expected, such as eliminating duplicates (e.g. the same alert coming from Google, Yahoo, and Technorati  – which happens many times each day – only appeared one in Filtrbox) and allowing me to filter based on thresholds for each keyword.  In addition, as the UI evolved, I found I was spending less time scanning the alerts and more time clicking through onto the interesting ones.

I hit a tipping point about a month ago where Filtrbox became more useful to me than Google+Yahoo+Technorati.  I haven’t turned off the other alerts yet, but I find that I’m not getting much additional info from them anymore now that I use Filtrbox as my top level sort.

Filtrbox is still in private beta, but if you are interested in playing around with it you can get a golden ticket by clicking on the special magic Brad Feld Filtrbox link.  I’m really proud of Ari Newman, Tom Chikoore, and team.  They have reached the point where their service is very valuable to me and gets noticeably better every single week.

You’ve got three more days – the application deadline closes on 3/31 at midnight!  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, take a look at www.techstars.org or some of the past posts I’ve written about TechStars.  TechStars 2007 produced some cool companies, including several that have been making plenty of noise lately such as SocialThing, Intense Debate, and Filtrbox.  Apply now to be a part of TechStars 2008.

The application deadline is 3/31/08.  Applying is easy.   The mentor list continues to grow.  And Somewhat Frank has a cool three minute video tour of the Bunker (TechStars new facility for 2008.)

Interviews with some of last years TechStars founders are up.  It’s a short video but gives you a great feel for the experience.

We are hosting "TechStars for a day" in Boulder next Wednesday March 5th.  Apply to TechStars by Monday March 3rd to be invited to come.

I am delighted to see the addition of several new mentors for the 2008 edition of TechStars including Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC), Matt Mullenweg (Automattic / WordPress.com), Dick Costolo (FeedBurner/Google), Eric Marcouller (MyBlogLog/Yahoo), Jeff Nolan (NewsGator), and Josh Hug (Shelfari).  They join the incredible list of 50+ mentors for 2008 just waiting to help your new company this summer.

Eight of the ten companies from last summer are now profitable or have been funded beyond TechStars. Based on the applications and interest we have seen so far, this summer looks like it may turn out to be even more exciting.

The application deadline for TechStars is March 31. If you apply by March 3rd, we’d love for you to come and hang out with us on TechStars For A Day on March 5th.

The TechStars 2008 Applications are now open.  Last year we had 302 applications and accepted 10 companies.  8 of the 10 companies are now either financed or profitable and several have received acquisition offers.  If you apply before March 3rd, you are invited to come to our TechStars for a Day program.

We are having a TechStars party in the Bay Area this Thursday evening January 24th from 6pm to 8:30pm at the Plug and Play Tech Center (440 N Wolfe Road in Sunnyvale, California.)  Space is limited so if you are want to come, please sign up for the event on Facebook or drop the TechStars folks a note.

We’ve got some great new mentors for 2008, including Eric Marcoullier (the co-founder of MyBlogLog which was acquired by Yahoo) and Dick Costolo (the co-founder of FeedBurner which was acquired by Google.)

If you are in the Bay Area, I’m looking forward to seeing you Thursday night.

I’m having such a great time watching and working with the TechStars companies.  As we get ready to launch the application process for TechStars 2008, it’s really gratifying to see how the 2007 class is growing up.

Today I noticed two blog posts from co-founders of TechStars companies that made me smile.  Jon Fox (Intense Debate) – wrote a post titled Decisiveness and Matt Galligan (SocialThing) – wrote a post titled The Hype Machine and Admitting When You’re Wrong.

Both of them are good, introspective posts.

David Cohen – the creator and ringleader of TechStars – has started a blog series of his Top 12 Startup Tips from TechStars.  His latest tip (#2) is titled Find and engage great mentors.  I think this series is going to end up being required reading for any first time (and many multi-time) entrepreneurs.  Tip #1 was Be the Best in the World at Something.  Great stuff David.

I just wandered down to Seth’s office to see if he managed to get tickets to the World Series.  He asked everyone in the office to fire up the Rockies website and keep hitting refresh until someone got on to the ticket buying site.  No luck – and Seth has a big frown on this face – but he’s still cuddling his Red Sox jacket.

The Boulder Daily Camera has a great wrap up story on the TechStars experience this summer.  Of course you have to have a stupid login to be able to read it – but at least it’s free.  Oh – and yet another TechStars company got funded – this time it’s SocialThing.  Congrats guys!

Finally, I’d be doing all the people in the world that eat things a disservice if I forgot to mention that Kimbal Musk’s restaurant The Kitchen was written up in USAToday as one of the 10 great places to break bread and make friends.  Now that our office is in downtown Boulder, I occasionally have days where I eat two of my three meals at The Kitchen.  I know Kimbal and his co-founder Hugo are pleased.  As am I.