I like the concept - that whether you are logged in or not governs how the site is personalized.

I have quite a number of thoughts and will address each separately as I come across them, rather than providing a full review of the site in one go.

When on the home page of the site (the public view, ie not logged in), we need to understand what the target audience is looking for - I would be looking for the online version of the magazine, ie current issue's theme, leading articles, table of content or headlines of major articles, etc, which I think the old version of the website does better (though really not all that well either).  The beta version has swung too far towards the 'social networking' theme in that everything is presented in a running dialog/ blog style - it is not that easy to notice whether an entry is a 'Fast Company Feature', 'Fast Talk', 'FC Now Staff Blog' etc etc.

The 'featured' article from each section is pre-determined, and rather than making visitors scroll down and navigate to the Table of Contents of the current issue, I think the home page should have the TOC of sorts.  If that is the intention of the current design, then it does not do the trick - it looks like a blog site.

After some looking around, I figure out that the top row menu items (Home, Innovation, Technology) are the subject areas of FastCompany and not topics of the current issue, vs the 'main section' of the home page which features the "most current things", some are from the latest issue of the magazine, some not.

So fundamentally how is FastCompany positioning itself in the Interactive Space - 1) a business community that has a magazine, or 2) a magazine with an online community?  And you can do that with the 2 perspectives, ie view 1) is after log in, whereas view 2) is not logged in; but currently you are not making that differentiation and I find it confusing as you are trying to be both under both circumstances

Ian.