Hey, you. Yeah, you – the fantasy football player who is using the company computer to try to win your own version of some pathetic Super Bowl. A small Lawrence-based technology company has its eye on you.

It’s also watching out for online porn viewers, Internet gamblers and slackers who would rather spend their time trying to buy Elvis memorabilia on eBay instead of putting in an honest day’s work.

Officials with FilterLogix, 3320 Peterson Road, are hoping their efforts propel them to the top of a $1 billion-a-year Web filtering industry.

“We think we could become the market leader in Web filtering in a short period of time, maybe two or three years,” said Witold Grzymala-Busse, a Lawrence resident and FilterLogix’s executive vice president of research and development.

The Web-filtering business hasn’t been slowed by the recession, Grzymala-Busse said, because companies are becoming more and more concerned about their employees’ use of the Internet.

“Everybody wants to be more efficient, and one of the ways to do that is to limit what your employees can watch,” he said. “One of the biggest problems in the business environment today is fantasy football.”

The company, founded in 2000, recently has been on a roll. It originally focused on selling its Web-filtering products to school districts in Kansas, including in De Soto and Baldwin. During the past year, though, the company has gone national with its sales efforts and is putting more emphasis on expanding into the business market.

In February FilterLogix received $150,000 in venture capital from the Kansas Technology Enterprise Corp. The company confirmed last week that it had inked deals with Nissan Motor Co. and the Food and Drug Administration.

Needle in a haystack

FilterLogix co-founder Witold Grzymala-Busse leads a team of Lawrence-based software engineers who have created a program that determines acceptable Web page content for schools and companies. Grzymala-Busse is pictured Tuesday at the company's office at 3320 Peterson Road.

Company officials believe they’re breaking ground in the Web-filtering industry.

The company’s programs use artificial intelligence technology to determine whether a Web site should be blocked, based on the criteria that the computer’s owner has set.

That’s a different approach than other Web-filtering products, said Chris Tozier, FilterLogix chief operating officer.

Most Web filters operate using a list of banned Web sites, which is problematic because constant changes on the Internet make it difficult to keep the list updated, he said.

FilterLogix’s program avoids that problem by using artificial intelligence to read each site quickly before the user accesses it. Tozier said a good example was the Web site whitehouse.com. It is a notorious porn site, but for about 90 days after 9-11 it was converted into a legitimate news site.

“The day they changed their content is the day that we started allowing it through the filter,” Tozier said. “I’m not sure any other product did that.”

Other Web filters also use a keyword system to block sites. Tozier said FilterLogix had an advantage over those programs because without the artificial intelligence the programs couldn’t put the keywords into the proper context. For example, a medical site might be mistaken for a porn site because it mentions certain parts of the human anatomy.

“We’re able to look at all the medical sites and even sites about sexuality but not about pornography,” Tozier said. “It is that ability to pick a needle out of a haystack that makes us different.”

The company originally focused on creating a program that would block sites for pornography, hate, making bombs and gambling. Grzymala-Busse said the company was adding about 20 more categories, such as news, auction, web mail and sports sites, to the program.

“We’re definitely adapting the technology to make it more applicable to the business environment,” Grzymala-Busse said. “We think it is a great market for us because we know the Internet is a double-edge sword for businesses. They can use it to improve productivity, but it also is very tempting for employees to use to entertain themselves.”

On track

The company may not have existed if it weren’t for a chance meeting of Grzymala-Busse and Tozier at a track-and-field event.

Grzymala-Busse was a shot-putter at Princeton University, and Tozier was a hammer thrower at Wichita State University and Kansas State University. The two got to know each other through meets, but it wasn’t until at a hammer-throwing clinic in the late 1990s that the two began to talk about business.

Grzymala-Busse had been studying artificial intelligence and had several ideas on giving the technology a commercial use. But he was looking for somebody with marketing and business skills. Grzymala-Busse said he approached Tozier after finding out that he had organized and found funding for the hammer-throwing clinic.

“I was impressed he was able to find sponsorship because it is the most irrelevant event in track and field,” Grzymala-Busse said.

FilterLogix has 12 employees. Its six technical and programming staff members are located in the Lawrence office. The other six employees are located in offices in Wichita and Minnesota.

Grzymala-Busse leads that part of the business and said it was in Lawrence because the community is his hometown. His family left Poland in the early 1980s and moved to Lawrence when his father became a professor in electrical engineering and computer science at Kansas University.

Grzymala-Busse said the company’s technology department would remain in Lawrence and likely would add two to three employees in the next six months.

In addition to traditional Web filtering, Grzymala-Busse said FilterLogix was in a good position to offer Web-filtering services to the next generation of wireless telephones that allow Web surfing.

“If that takes off, we could be talking about a payroll of 50 or 60 guys just in Lawrence,” Grzymala-Busse said. “Those would be 50 or 60 high-paying software jobs.”

Grzymala-Busse said the company generally started its programmers at a salary of more than $40,000 a year.

Industry talk

Some industry observers have taken notice of FilterLogix.

Lawrence Walsh, managing editor of Information Security magazine, said the company was unique because of its use of artificial intelligence technology for a Web filter. He said most companies have used the technology to create programs to filter spam or e-mail or to protect intellectual property.

“I think is a smart strategy,” Walsh said. “Anything that makes it easier for companies to implement Web filtering is going to be ahead of the curve. The approach they’re taking seems to make it easier and simpler to manage.”

Ben Crosier, director of technology for the De Soto school district, uses the company’s products on 2,700 computers. He thinks the company has a chance to end up being the industry leader because there are few other programs that give the computer owner as much flexibility to control what content gets through and which sites are blocked.

“Filtering is really about opinion, and they have a filter that adapts to opinion,” Crosier said.

But there will be plenty of challenges to the company’s growth, Walsh said. More competition is coming as other companies are using artificial intelligence technology and adapting it to Web filtering.

FilterLogix may find out how tough it is to convince businesses that they need to be spending money to limit their employees access on the Web, Walsh said.

“Security is often seen as a drag on business because it is not a profit center,” he said. “That is the real challenge for any security company. You have to be able to walk into a company and say, ‘Give me a wheelbarrow of money and nothing will happen to you.’ That is a pretty tough sale.

“What they’ll have to do is say we’ll improve your employees’ productivity by 20 percent because they won’t be able to access certain Web sites they shouldn’t be on. But then you have to be able to back that up when the client goes to look at the bottom line.”