It's the eve of a certain holiday we all know and love, and we're celebrating here at Ångströ by releasing the last of our invitations to our Beta testing program for 2008! We have a long way to go, but we're glad that we can “begin to begin...”

Every day that we log in to our intranet, we're reminded of our waiting list of volunteers to help design our product — as well as how long it's been since they signed up. That clock tells us it's been fifteen weeks since we first unveiled our plans at the TechCrunch50 conference. The world has certainly moved on while we've had our heads down programming! It's hard to recall that we used to have these institutions called investment banks in our country back then...

At TC50, we invited folks to “join us this Fall.” Well, it took us right up until the Winter Solistice to make good on that promise, but we made it. Getting that done on time is a testament to our lead developer, Ben Sittler (and, not least, to his family). My sincerest thanks also go out to Venky, Salim, Martha, Kragen, Avery, Omar, Adam, Sally, and Artur for all of your help to bring this project to life during the past year.

As for the next year, we have high hopes for 2009 and look forward to staying in touch with our readers, colleagues, users, and everyone else in our professional and personal networks that we'd like to do a little bit better at keeping in touch with.

So get out there and help us out by aiming high and making news of your own in 2009... news that we can discover and share and celebrate with your network!

While we've spend the last two weeks quietly working on scaling up our service — a hearty welcome to our latest batch of invitees! — it has hardly escaped notice that several other folks are scaling up as well.

Congratulations to Socialmedian, first of all, on their successful acquisition by Xing. Not only did founder Jason Goldberg pull together an amazing slate of investors, he and his team quietly, then publicly scaled their service out at an astounding pace. Even better, one key strategic reason they partnered up was to open up an application development platform at Xing, which we would love to work with to broaden the range of people Ångströ can help you stay in touch with.

Welcome, too, to Zentact. They're scaling up from an invitation-only beta to a public beta phase. Their Firefox extension watches the pages you're reading for mentions of people and their interests to prompt you to keep in touch with them.

Ångströ does something that's a bit harder to scale up: we watch the entire Web for new mentions of people you know. If there's a name mentioned in the news media, in weblogs, or on new Web pages, we grab that text and then we analyze it to see if it's actually the person you know. Our NameSense approach to estimating that relevance is based on where they work, where they went to school, and other keywords that typically appear in context with their name.

With help from our beta testers, we're finding out how to scale up to our ambitious target of delivering news that's (only) about people in your social networks... stay tuned!

About a third of the recipients in our most recent batch of beta invitations took the time out of their Thanksgiving holiday to create an account on Ångströ so far— and we learned a lot from the first wave of feedback. User feedback isn't just a matter of bug reports though. Looking over the most recent trouble tickets and changes, I wanted to call out several folks for their help, and to illustrate the range of issues that come up when growing a prototype into a product...

We're celebrating Thanksgiving this year at Ångströ by sharing our first batch of beta test invitations today. We're giving thanks for the kindness of strangers who signed up on our waiting list after our debut at TechCrunch 50 and are willing to share their time and entrust us with their data to give us the feedback we rely on every day.

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...