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I am thrilled to announce the close of a new round of funding for Scout Labs! Full press release here.

I am happy about the pace at which we’ve been adding new data, features and insight in the last seven months, since launch. (Has it only been just over half a year?! Time flies when you are having fun!) But this new influx of capital will help us go even faster. New data sources, new visualizations and reports, new integrations, new ways to uncover the mind of your market. And until now, our customers have been our ONLY marketing and PR resources. We hope to continue to call you our best evangelists, but we’ll be adding a few more troops to the army.

Of course the big bank account is quite nice, but I am just as excited about the amazing new team of partners that we have gained from El Dorado Ventures and Javelin Venture Partners.

Thank you for making our first seven months so stunningly successful. We promise to keep up our end of the bargain — being the best at finding signals in the noise to help you understand the mind of your market.

New Palette: The first and most visible change you’ll see when you next login is a much lighter design palette. We pulled back on the darker background in part because we’re working on some new search dashboards that really require more whitespace to breathe. Stay tuned for more visual tweaks and dashboard enhancements!

Folders for Searches: We have had a lot of user requests for better ways to organize quantities of searches, so we’ve provided a way to easily group searches into folders and navigate between them. You can create and name a folder, then drag and drop searches into and out of it. Here’s how to get started: Go to the Manage Searches page by clicking the starburst icon at the top right corner of the left nav.

You can create a folder by clicking on the “New Folder” link at the top of the page. Once you create and name a folder, you can drag existing searches into and out of it. Just grab a search and drag it to the folder you want to place it in, or drag it all the way to the left to pull it out of a folder altogether.

My favorite part is that once you’ve set up folders and sorted some searches into them, you can collapse and expand the folders into the left nav to browse. This feature makes it really easy to browse lists of searches and get to all your content fast. The collapse and expand state of the left nav isn’t something you have to set up on Manage Searches page, you can just collapse and expand at will.

A couple notes:

• The buzz value that is shown for a folder is the highest buzz value for any search in that folder. That way you can see if there’s something going on within a folder that you might want to expand and check out. Take a look at the buzz on Eric Munson- pretty much what you’d expect when someone gets called up out of the minors!


• Folders can be deleted, whether they contain searches or not (you’ll be warned if they do) but they cannot be renamed.


• You can’t drag and drop in the left nav itself, only on the Manage Searches page.


• When you create or edit a search, you can’t specify the folder to drop it into- you have to drag and drop it on the Manage Searches page to move it around.

Those improvements will have to wait for another, later release. If you have other suggestions or comments, we’d love to hear them! Leave a comment here or in our GetSatisfaction forum.