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!

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!