Well, it's been exactly one month since we announced Ångströ at TechCrunch50. We've spent the last few weeks building out the product and making it robust enough to meet our customer service standards.

To date, we've collected over a million news stories about over ten thousand professionals. In the process, we use an immense amount of computing power -- at least by comparison to other pub/sub projects we've worked on. To migrate our setup from prototype to production, we're relying on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Elastic Block Store (EBS). We can now bring up more slaves to handle our newspaper rendering code while also gaining great snapshot-based backup and even better availability than our current colo solution. We still rely on our own tuned hardware platform for NameSense, but we've moved everything else into the cloud...

We've learned a lot from the feedback we've received from that over the past month, but most of all from our first batch of beta testers. Our first group of post-TechCrunch50 users have been busy kicking the tires and pushing the boundaries. Thanks again to all those participating - your feedback has been extremely helpful. We're busy documenting reactions from the initial users and are feeding those back into our product development cycle as quickly as possible.

We'll be opening up Ångströ to the next group of users in the coming weeks. Thanks to everyone for their enthusiasm — and patience!

Looking back on TechCrunch50 a week later, it was an amazing event -- we're still working our way through all of the new opportunities it helped create for us! It confirmed our key reason for applying to TechCrunch50 in the first place: our customers were in their audience. "Working the booth" to talk to the attendees one-on- one was incredibly informative because we got frank and immediate feedback from potential beta testers and even a few investors.

Well, after over a year of stealth development, Ångströ finally launched. The TechCrunch50 panel questions were great and despite some tough wifi issues we managed a good presentation. People are saying we did a pretty good job!

Rohit did an awesome presentation and I drove the tech demo/presentation. We got excellent feedback. The panel got that we have unique technology, that's it's defensible, and that the big question was about our business model.

We think that's quite simple: if we can deliver news that matters about your professional network, that will be useful to every single business professional. The business model will follow from that...