Salim and I decided to launch Ångströ to find the needles in the haystacks to stay on top of the news that saturates our professional networks.

We’re serial entrepreneurs — and also investors and writers and managers. In each of those roles, we have to work our professional networks to succeed.

We need to stay on top of who’s funding what, who’s starting something new, who’s making money, and who’s not. It’s not a matter of social gossip; this sort of information is critical to making better business decisions and better professional relationships.

We needed a better way to discover and share the news we needed to know about our colleagues. That’s why we created Ångströ, to discover and share the news you need to know about the people and companies in your professional network.

Like many of you, we're keeping up with each other on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc.
We also get a kick out of reading what others have to say about us on our Google alerts ;-)

But we were having a hard time connecting our "personal" and "professional" worlds ... our success depends on staying on top of our portfolio of investments, scientific breakthroughs, etc -- in other words, keeping track of what people in our professional network are up to.

Also, many of the people in your professional network aren't necessarily your “friends”. They may not have a presence on the same services your friends are. We love Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., but jumping back and forth doesn't make sense ... plus, more times than not, the information isn't professionally useful.

We don't want to give up using these products ... but we're finding ourselves wanting more ... something that's actionable. We want to build a better mousetrap -- as technologists, we're often looking for technical solutions to our business problems.

This is an issue that impacts about 100 million professionals worldwide: we all need to be able to keep up with relevant, newsworthy information, and more so about people we know.

Lots of folks are heavy bloggers and use Twitter constantly, but there's a terrible noise/signal ratio. We can be alerted instantly about what they're are eating for breakfast using Twitter; or to debate the latest election polls on FriendFeed; or to see the latest photos shared on Flickr from all over the world.

But if one of them is quoted in the NY Times, I have no way of finding out.

Getting social news from “friends” is fun to flip through,but finding relevant, *business news* about our colleagues is a challenge. This is a critical resource for every professional, but usually doesn’t come from a corporate blog; new mentions of people or companies can come from anywhere at anytime.

When Salim joined Yahoo! to build out Brickhouse he found himself searching for information on the Tahoe VC Robert Goldberg. This yielded tons of news mentions of many, many Robert Goldbergs:

... 410 of them on Zoominfo...
... 69 were on LinkedIn ...

...and he still hadn't found what he was looking for.

As it turns out, I was experiencing the same problem.

When I left Silicon Valley to move to New York City, I found it really difficult to stay on top of the Valley's incessant loop of gossip, deals, hacks, and hiring. Perhaps more than anyone, I was trying to keep in touch with my colleague, Adam Rifkin, who co-founded KnowNow with me a few years back. Our investors said we should consider merging KnowNow with PubSub.com, the company that Salim co-founded.

Adam was now heading up a new startup, Renkoo, that was still in stealth mode. I wanted to let him know how proud I am of the new clients, new hires, and new funding he’s led as their CEO.

Adam is a movie nut. So you can imagine my surprise/curiosity when I learned that he was being interviewed for the documentary “The Legend of Ron Jeremy”!

As any geek would probably do, I hit his Twitter stream, but the movie quotes that he published almost exclusively there didn't help me much. And 95% of the Google News Alert results that I had set up on his name were on the Hollywood director also named Adam Rifkin!

This really bugged me. That it’s hard to find news ‘about’ somebody.

Those Google Alerts were irrelevant because they didn’t know which Adam Rifkin I wanted to know about. Ångströ results are better because they’re tuned into the fellow I’m connected to on LinkedIn.

Our system automatically figured out that he’s working at company named Renkoo; that they make Facebook applications; and so on.

The matching results aren’t merely of social interest to me, they are also professionally relevant: Because we are connected to the same angel investors, we know the same past and present employees, and we even have similar revenue models, knowing what’s with Renkoo proved useful to us while building Ångströ.

This sort of information wasn’t written by him, on his personal or corporate blog; this information was written about him by other journalists and entrepreneurs and analysts. This is a crucial difference between our service and other kinds of social feeds: New mentions of people or companies can come from anywhere at anytime.

So why can’t my computer figure out that I’m only interested stuff about that Adam Rifkin, the one who’s my colleague on LinkedIn? This is the entity disambiguation problem, it’s a notorious problem, and we’ve solved it.

How? I developed an algorithm for Ångströ that’s distinctly different from all of the “people search” projects on the Web today: We analyze the biographical details of your colleagues, the people you already know, and apply user feedback to help us track mentions of people, not just their names.

It’s easy to track Mike Arrington, because there’s only one; it’s hard to track Rifkin, even when there are only two; but what about a name like “Robert Goldberg” where there are hundreds? Our unique approach is the first product to solve this problem.

Now multiply this problem for each of the thousands of professional connections we have in real life.

Ångströ automatically finds news about every single person a user is connected to on LinkedIn. This may sound like a minor detail, a sort of “setup wizard,” but this is actually major advance. Even among folks tech-savvy enough to know about Google Alerts, and of the few who actually set one up, they typically only set up an alert for their own name and are hard-pressed to use more than two or three alerts.

Our vision for Ångströ was a sort of newspaper about our colleagues’ professional lives. Instead of sections like “Sports” and “Business,” we have sections for “Investors” and “New York” with stories about the people we know and follow in those networks.

Of course, a real newspaper has an editor, someone who picks the most important stories for the front page. Just because someone has more to say, or more people are talking about them, doesn’t mean that you have more time to hear all about it. Our second major breakthrough at Ångströ is a way to rank stories based on the strength of your professional relationships.

This graph of my friendships on Facebook reveals some of the complexity that most “social” applications haven’t really taken full advantage of so far. Here, we are illustrating our approach to measuring influence by using distance.

The closest individual in my graph is Adam Rifkin, based on the strength of all of our mutual connections; and those colleagues’ mutual connections; and so on, recursively. Since real relationships develop over time, as our algorithm reacts to new stories that connect multiple professionals and as it adapts to how much users interact with each other, we have found that the “celebrities” fall away and our closest collaborators and most respected leaders rise to the top.

Today, we announced a private beta that will drive us to scale past the thousands of professionals we’re already tracking and to include additional sources of business news. Just as LinkedIn started in startup circles, but grew to encompass 26M professionals in all sorts of industries, we think Ångströ can help connect over 100M professional worldwide across all of the major networks.

After all, sharing information far and wide is what makes anyone a professional in the first place: someone whose connections to his or her fellow guild members are even more significant than to any one employer or client. With apologies to Sun Microsystems, we’d say the Network is the Professional — and our mission at Ångströ is to enrich your professional network by discovering and sharing relevant, timely information about the people and companies that matter most to you.