The Rails Rumble qualifying round began last night and our panel of expert judges are currently hard at work reviewing the 161 entries that made it into the qualifying round. Damn, that’s a lot of 48-hour micro-apps. They’ve got their work cut out for them, that’s for sure.

Anyway, assuming that all goes to schedule, our finalists should be announced sometime Thursday — probably in the evening — and public voting will then commence and continue throughout the end of the week and into the weekend. It’s gonna be a nail-biter!

In the meantime, check out our updated competition homepage which features rotating site snapshots and statistics from the contest.