Last Chance to Nominate Startups For the Crunchies (Nearly 72,000 Entries So Far)
Erick Schonfeld
29 comments »
Since we started taking nominations for the 2007 Crunchies Awards on December 3, there have been nearly 72,000 submissions so far, across 20 categories. The companies with the most submissions will have a greater chance of making it as a finalist (but that is not the only factor). The deadline for putting in your nominations is midnight tonight, December 12, pst. So if you haven’t already voted, here is your last chance. You have a little less than nine hours left.
After we sort through all the nominations with our co-hosts GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb and VentureBeat, five finalists will be announced for each category (probably on Monday). The categories include Best Bootstrapped Start-Up, Best Consumer Start-Up, Best Enterprise Start-Up, Best Mobile Start-Up, Best User-Generated Content Site, Best Clean-Tech Start-Up, Best Video Site, Best Time Sink, Best Start-Up CEO, and Best New Start-Up of 2007. Once the finalists are up, you will be able to vote on them as well at the Crunchies site. The winners will be announced on January 18 at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco.
Tickets will be made available soon. The theater holds about 1,000 people.
Thanks to Sun Microsystems Business Analytics, Microsoft and Charles River Ventures for sponsoring the Crunchies. Contact us if you’re interested to sponsor an award or other part of the evening festivities.
How are you going to sort through all those submissions?
what about “Best Stealth Startup” - just don’t announce the winner.
Your Crunchies Site link links to the Herbst Theater and your Herbst Theater link is dead. Might want to look into that
Forget it… I’m looking rocky startup without using VC money.
One fighter
One legend
One Startup
One Suicide Career
Yes, I would be huge fan and support his/her work.
Isn’t the real prize of being a startup success and making money?
These are businesses that are supposed to make a profit. What are these awards all about?
Do paper mills have awards too?
On the other hand, I see the need to create interest.
Vote WineLog.net as the best bootstrapped start-up!
And we’re out of Philadelphia, so we’ll need some money to fly out for the awards. I hope that makes our case rather than hurts it
tick tick tick tick
I would like to join my self
with my new website inovation but I don’t think as of yet I would have any chances to win
Since #6 opened the door to shameless plugging … please consider Fellowforce.com, an Open Innovation Platform, for best bootstrapped startup. No one else like us out there. Votes appreciated (and innovative ideas welcome as well in the World’s Largest Innovation Box)
Since #8 reopened and revisited the door to shameless plugging again, I would like to nominate Peeplr. The search engine I am working on. Of course phase 1 of it may not even be in beta by the time the Crunchies roll around, but that has never stopped Techcrunch before, so why should it now?
72,000???
I think nominating sites in this way is flawed. All it takes is a few companies who are willing to spam the system to cheat their way into nominations (although I guess the final nomination list will be at the discretion of techcrunch).
To me it seems that with Techcrunch’s influence, it shouldn’t be asking for 72,000 nominations from a random audience of wannabes and people trying to get a leg up, it should use a pool of say 100 of the web’s most influential entrepreneurs to nominate entries (nominating sites they have financial / business interest in disallowed). I’m guessing that out of those 72,000 nominations, 99% of them are going to be absolute rubbish.
Mashable is doing a similar award ceremony, using user-submitted submissions. At first I thought this was a great idea but after seeing how spammy some of the submissions threads got (100-odd nomination links for sites we’ve never heard of) some flags were raised in my head regarding quality.
Just sayin’
:/
75,000 submissions. Wow.
That’s one startup for every 8 TechCrunch feed subscribers.
Awards aren’t worth as much as some of you may think, I got two nominations (provincial wide and national) many years back, one of which I won and the only thing I got was an office robbery and a month later, everything was same-old. The press was great but too many people who wheren’t in the market I was trying to penetrate proved of little benefit to me. This does sound interesting but I already got too many things at hand to deal with for now. Maybe next year.
Jon
“Mashable is doing a similar award ceremony, using user-submitted submissions. At first I thought this was a great idea but after seeing how spammy some of the submissions threads got (100-odd nomination links for sites we’ve never heard of) some flags were raised in my head regarding quality.”
ETA: this doesn’t stop me from TOTALLY WANTING TO WIN MY CATEGORY. Vote please!!! (opensourcefood in the niche social network category) (won’t link directly as I guess these two award ceremonies are in competition with each other?)
I agree with #10. The whole process is flawed. Really, the ones who will get the most votes are the ones putting time into “spamming” or telling friends and friends of friends to nominate them. It doesnt reflect the best startup in each category at all.
If seen these people choice awards before, and they never work, much like online polls.
Awaiting tickets to go on sale! When should I check back?
Best of luck to all nominees!
http://www.whatshottoday.com
I nominate:
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
I wonder who will end up Winning
Along the thought thread started by #10, what if the voting was conducted by the founders of recent startups, the only rule being they could not vote for their own company.
only 72,000 submissions? That is such a low number, techcrunch must be loosing it’s edge.
So the votes don’t count really as the site says. What are the other criteria? Must be a close personal friend of TechCrunch? Showers endless gifts and praise upon its authors? Must have glossy Web 2.0 logo with reflected bottom? It sounds like a North Korean election
There is obviously a lot of spam in the nominations, although it is fairly easy to simply remove a lot of it via IP grouping and common sense.
On the Crunchies home page it says to check back today (13th) for the finalists, but then on the Crunchies blog, it says to check back on Monday. Can you tell us which date is correct?
Thanks!
It looks like it is going to be Monday before we get the finalists all sorted out.
#10: We’re being really smart about the way we’re looking at what people have nominated. Not going to spoil it for you (its all mathematics), but it’s not hard to figure out how we’re doing it either.
We’ve seen fraud (lots of it - some people blatantly cheated, no holds barred), and there’s even submissions where the fraud ratio (the percentage of people who cheat vs those who vote normally for them) is over 90%.
Naturally these people and companies (some who even have their employees behind the cheating process - I’m sounding like Captain Obvious here) will not go ahead to the next stage (that is, if their number of genuine votes doesn’t put them above others).
BLIPD.COM IS P2P VIDEO MARKETING
BLIPD.COM IS DISTRIBUTED VIDEO COMMERCE
BLIPD.COM IS DEMOCRATIZED ADVERTISING
BLIPD.COM IS LIVE
CRACK THE TUBE, EVERYONE IS GOING TO GET BLIP’D.
So thats 75k+ UNIQUE entries? Amazing.
I really don’t know why I got so excited about this award thingy while I ignore most of the others. I like the bootstrapped category because winning that category can get us some exposure that we miss out on because we’re not marketing or making big deals to get press about.
http://www.ejamming.com is my favorite startup this year! Musicians can connect to each other via the internet for free! Cool concept! Also, let it be noted that Sun Microsystem’s kicks ass in helping startups– they’ve gone to great lengths the reach-out to hungry startups with smaller budgets and have set them up with x64 servers, free tech support, conferences etc. I give them mad props this year!