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.

The conference went pretty smoothly, despite some well-publicized WiFi issues during the morning that we were presenting. The good side of going on stage that early was that we got the pre-launch secrecy out of the way. Being able to talk about our product in detail resulted in some amazing conversations, such as being grilled by one of the original inventors of Google Alerts...

Given our entire team's background in real-time publish/subscribe alerting systems, we were pleased to see Yammer win the $50K prize. Yammer, a sort of “corporate Twitter” builds upon the same pub/sub dynamics as Facebook's News Feed, lifestreaming, and Twitter itself to deliver another kind of “news about your network.” Congratulations as well to the QuantTheNews team, who won the ThompsonReuters award for financial & information services for StockMood.com, another pub/sub system for tracking the blogosphere's opinions of stocks.

We certainly think the organizers did an amazing job with this second- ever installment of TechCrunch as a conference. It's not that we might quibble with the structure of the panel judging format, it's that they were open enough to feedback and agile enough that by the next day, sure enough, it was solidly in an "American Idol"-like format where each company got some dedicated question and answer time (and they added name placecards under the faces to help out those of us watching at home on video!). It was also gracious of them to offer us a mulligan on our booth time by giving us a great location to pitch again, once the network was at full speed.

Thanks once again to Jason Calacanis, for ruthlessly polishing our presentation; to Mike Arrington, for fostering this community; and to Heather Harde and the entire TechCrunch team for making this such a successful event! We can tell how much this meant for them from the sheer volume of emails send well after midnight -- they worked startup hours over there, too. And finally, congrats to our entire team, who pulled together a heroic effort to nail down all of the last-minute details that go into a launch... now, back to work on scaling our beta test program!