If you don’t know about Filtrbox already, you should. In simple terms its like google alerts on steroids, but really its more than that. I was introduced to the company by my friend Brad Feld, and was really impressed with the service and figured “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”. So I made an investment and am excited to be working with Ari and the rest of team.

I am not a power user (working on it though), but my friend Brad Feld is one . Here is what he has to say:

Last week I deleted all my alerts. I was able to do this because Filtrbox – one of the TechStars companies from last year – is now finding much more than 100% of the information that my alerts were picking up, including 100% of what I got from the alerts. I’d been running the two in parallel for about six months and saw the lines cross about two months ago, but went ahead and had both run just in case. I’m now confident that I won’t miss any of the alert stuff.

Dealing with Filtrbox is so much easier and more pleasant. I enter my keywords into one UI instead of Google, Yahoo, Technorati, and others. I get a daily email digest of everything Filtrbox found. I have a history of all the data so if I want to go find an article from a month ago, I can easily find it in Filtrbox. And I get a bunch of cool data visualizations.

Filtrbox does some cool things that make it a powerful tool for keeping up with lots of information without having to sift through a million RSS feeds or read 100 sites a day. Some of the features I like are:

• Integrated monitoring of mainstream news, blogs, twitter and friendfeed
• Ability to search within your results and show/hide articles
• Daily Briefing emails with noise control – using their FiltrRank scoring you can decide to only have articles sent to you from the most popular sites or that are very relevant
• Collaboration – I can set up searches (Filtrs) and then share them with others, and the subscribers see the same articles

They have a free version and paid versions for heavy usage. People are using the service to monitor brands, reputation, twitter mentions, companies, and sales pros are using it to find nuggets of info that help them close more deals. You can sign up on their site here. The Pro subscription version is way cheaper than most of the other social media monitoring services out there and you get a ton of functionality that is easy to use once you get the hang of it. I think there are a ton of other applications and markets for Filtrbox, which is what got me involved.

Obviously I think it is fantastic to cover all my investments in start-ups and is great for the entrepreneur that wants to monitor the conversation around his/her company brand and get work done. I am also looking to see how we can apply the service to the stock and financial world. I see big potential for this. I will be looking to integrate Filtrbox content into StockTwits.com to provide related news and chatter on the stocks.

The gang over at Filtrbox just put out a new release with a number of enhancements they are excited about. I’m glad to have the mark-as-read support and the ability to block sources I don’t like. Good work guys!