The nomination process for the Crunchies, a joint effort between us, Read/Write Web, VentureBeat and GigaOm, is now complete.
82,000 nominations were made for thousands of individual startups. The top startups in each of twenty categories have made it to the final vote. Starting now, you can vote for the startups you think are most worthy in each of twenty categories - from “best technology achievement” to “best overall startup.”
Each category has five finalists to choose from. A few startups made it to the finals of multiple categories, but there are still nearly 100 to choose from for the various awards. Voting goes until January 10. The Awards Ceremony will take place on Friday, January 18 at the 1,000 seat Herbst Theater across the street from City Hall in San Francisco, followed by one hell of a party.
Thanks to sponsors Adobe, Charles River Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Microsoft, OurStage and Sun for assisting us with the event - we could not do it without them. Thanks as well to WeBreakStuff for building the site (they also did our Tech President site), and Media Temple for hosting.Contact us if you’re interested to sponsor an award or other part of the evening festivities. It’s sure to be a great evening.
Go vote now! If you are a finalist, you can also grab a badge to let your users know and vote for you to win.
And finally - tickets to the event will be going on sale in the next week or so. Stay tuned.
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How boring… these are all well-known companies!
Justin.tv best Video site?
Is that a joke?
..but I guess that was required to give the contest a good name. Maybe next year you will take some more risks in your selection.
I think next year we’ll guide the nomination process a little more from the beginning - perhaps by suggesting 10 or so companies per category and allowing a blank option as well for write ins. There was a lot of fraud in the nomination process that was easy, but time consuming, to strip out. Narrowing the list from the start may help reduce that fraud in the future.
I couldn’t make a vote on most of the categories due to not knowing anything about the companies in the category.
I guess that’s the way start up culture works, but for next year, you could rethink the categories (fewer?) and ways to introduce the companies better before allowing voting.
I’d rather make a vote on, say 5 most important dimensions of start ups, than waddle through all the current categories.
GO KDICE!!! Hah!
http://vote.crunchies.techcrun.....w/timesink
KDICE? No way. Kongregate FTW!
http://vote.crunchies.techcrun.....w/timesink
Jim - Kongregate has the benefit of hosting desktop tower defense, which makes it a serious time waster site.
I’m with #1.Tim on this one. Most of these are well established sites that have been around for many years. Yawn.
Link the startups to their sites plz.
Congratulations to all of the nominees and to the winners ahead of time!
I think this award is great, but there should be some standards as to which company can participate. Isn’t this to be about Startups?
Hulu? Feedburner? GrandCentral? Sure, they are not in a “start-up” category, but if the award starts to be about Apple, Microsoft and Sony, it becomes way less about entrepreneurialship and more about the power of money. They have enough awards already.
Going to vote now…
I like the idea of guiding the nomination process more. I see a ton of large companies, and then the obvious fraud (Justin.tv).
Either way, I’ll vote this year! And I love the name Crunchies
Mike I know they’re were a lot of people wanking about the crunchies process and I don’t want to add to it, but maybe the solution next year is less about narrowing the already narrow field of people you consider and more about transparency. I think a lot of people were bummed, not because you delayed the posting (which obviously was dealing with fraud) but because there was such little communication about it, during the week delay.
For example, between myself and my small team we sent out hundreds of emails to our friends, family, and contacts to get nominated for the best bootstrapped startup. I don’t mind not getting nominated, thats the way it goes, but what was a bummer, was for the last week, all the people we rallied to vote for us, telling them how important the competition was, all of a sudden seemed kind of silly when no one knew what the deal was with the delay.
82000 startup entries - is this a joke ? can you release the list of them? …if 82K is true then this year should be marked as the year of century.
How about a subset ’special’ award in future Crunchies: For example, the guy who said adios to his company with a bong-in-hand video … I’m too lazy right now to search archives for his name. A few special awards could be given for unique contributions, like the lifetime achievement Oscars, call them the ‘Munchies’.
It’d really be great if SmugMug did away with that freaking Comic Sans.
I think the “82000 startup entries” is a web 1.0 way of announcing how many suggestions they got for the Crunchies, including multiple suggestions for same companies. So no 82k different start-ups, but 82k suggestions, surely.
web 1.0 - yes. tried to make that clear above “82,000 nominations were made for thousands of individual startups.” And while there were thousands of unique entries, a lot of these were very much stretching the definition of “startup.” Still, many of those, even, were appropriate for the bootstrapped category.
By the way, I didn’t put the full list of finalists into the post for space reasons, but here it for those who are interested:
Best technology innovation / achievement
Earthmine
Like
Move Networks
Twine
Viewdle
Best bootstrapped start-up
FriendFeed
PoliticalBase
ProductWiki
Techmeme
UpNext
Best new gadget / device
iphone
Kindle
Ooma
Pleo
Wii
Best business model
Glam Media
Imeem
Prosper
Weatherbill
Zazzle
Best design
Etsy
Jackson Fish Market
Netvibes
Smugmug
Songza
Best enterprise start-up
37Signals
Attributor
EditGrid
Ribbit
Zoho
Best consumer start-up
1800FREE411
23andMe
LinkedIn
Meebo
Zillow
Best mobile start-up
AdMob
Fring
Loopt
Shozu
Twitter
Best international start-up
Atlassian
Gizmoz
MusicShake
Netvibes
OpenAds
Best user-generated content
Digg
Facebook
Geni
Instructables
Yelp
Best video site
Aniboom
Hulu
Joost
Justin.tv
Tokbox
Best clean tech start-up
A123 Systems
Ausra
Gridpoint
NanoSolar
Tesla Motors
Best use of viral marketing
Flixster
iLike
iminlikewithyou
RockYou
StumbleUpon
Best time sink site
College Humor
Duels
kdice
Kongregate
Pandora
Most likely to make the world a better place
Causes
DonorsChoose
Kiva
One laptop per child
ZeroFootprint
Most likely to succeed
Kayak
Mint
Slide
Wordpress
Zivity
Best start-up founder
Reid Hoffman
Max Levchin
Kevin Rose
Evan Williams
Mark Zuckerberg
Best start-up CEO
Gina Bianchini
Dick Costolo
Toni Schneider
Rob Solomon
Lance Takoda
Best new start-up of 2007
Hulu
iMedix
Joost
Ribbit
Tumblr
Best overall
Digg
Facebook
GrandCentral
Twitter
Zillow
What would be more valuable to a small start-up: being nominated for a Crunchie, or the mere fact of being linked from TechCrunch?
haha what a joke - you call these startups ?
Facebook - a startup ? WTF ? 250+ Million funding.
Hulu ? 200 Million + Funding
Joost ? 50-80+ Million Funding
Zillow ? 50+ Million Funding
Grandcentral ? Acquired by google - 50+ Million
Tesla Motors? 100+ Million Funding
Admob ? 15+ Million Funding
Twitter ? 5+ Million Funding
23andMe? 5+ Million Funding
LinkedIn? 20+ Million Funding
Meebo? 10+ Million Funding
Zillow? 80+ Million Funding
You call these startups ? What a joke. So much for techcrunch reviewing “startups” - more like “well funded and connected companies”
My 2 Cents….
Wow, justin.tv made it to the top 5. Did its founder(s) do something desperate again this time
What is the definition of “boot-strapped” when FriendFeed is founded by three guys from Google who EIRed at Benchmark?
Boot-strapped to me means you take no funding and need a business model that delivers cash flow early-on to sustain and grow the business.
All are great startups.
I wish if LimeAll (www.LimeAll.com) could have made in to crunchies…..may be in 2008
Heard they are working hard on couple of exciting features…..
Please visit http://www.LimeAll.com
there are a lot of cool companies on this list.
LOL.
The best CEO category includes at least one who will be fired, another one who has already lost his job. And another who should.
And FriendFeed has 69 daily active users on FB– any college senior with a degree in CS could outperform that
I wonder if any of the complainers here can actually name a startup that isn’t listed that’s worth mention. One would think that if Mike had truly slighted some notable startups that the comments here would be filled with mentions of them. And yet in the 30 comments here so far not one has been.
Added because of spam filter.
I can’t believe that you forgot Zoooooomr! How could this have happened?
I listed my Crunchies votes here: http://scobleizer.com/2007/12/.....ies-votes/
“Crunchy” sounds very similar to “deadpool”.
I am somewhat disappointed in this list. Not that we didn’t make it, but rather who was considered our competition. There is no way our site could ever compete with the likes of Digg, LinkedIn, and Facebook. When I hear of “annual awards” for “startups”, I was really thinking this was for companies that have sprouted up in the past year. I also think there should be seperate categories for companies with significant funding vs. those without. Otherwise, you really can’t compare.
lol @ Digg being nominated for best overall site/product of 2007. That alone just threw any credibility of this out the window.
Check out the Google-Zero:The Eco-Friendly Search Engine
Best Time Sink Site - Where is WIKIPEDIA?????
How old does a company have to be to still be considered a startup? 37 signals has been around for ages (at least 3 or 4 years if not longer). Are they still a startup?
How do you distinguish a startup from merely a ’small business’ that might eventually grow one of these days and become bigger?
Wow, so many upset people.
How can anyone call this a sham when these nominees were selected by people voting?
TC, VB, R/WW, and GO were all presumably involved of sorting through the 82K nominations, so how can people make accusations about this event as a sham or fixed?
Sounds like lots of sore losers.
Get it? USER nominations?
Get it? 4 blogs all involved in the sifting to assure honesty?
Wow. This really has brought out the worst in people,. It even makes me uncomfortable to read the monologue of hate by what seems to be just a couple of really bitter people.
It’s just an award. The nominations make sense, some are more established but they are still startups and there is a decent mix.
Get on with your life. Go put that energy into your startup and maybe you will be on the list next year.
steve ballmer said…
btw.
I have been accused of spamming your little blog or whatever here. Gimme a break! Do you people know who I am? Do you have any idea what I can do? Spam? I don’t think so!
What I do, I do out of concern for my fellow man. It hurts me to my core to see you people sitting around using these little toy computers with candy looking interfaces.
I beg of you! Save the children! STOP this Mac madness now, Vista awaits you, reality is out there waiting for you to join it!
Just get up, slowly!
Back - away from the keyboard.
Now get the credit card, go to any electronics outlet and buy a Vista PC!
Now does’nt that feel better?
Glad to help.
fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
I’ve got ten bucks says the list will be on Valleywag day before the event.
Here are my votes - my trackback didn’t work - stupid drupal:
http://www.centernetworks.com/.....ies-awards
Who was the selection committee? Didn’t see it listed out.
Didn’t the Wii launch in 2006? I thought I remember some family getting it for Christmas last year.
i actually think that
http://www.wannago.com
is the best ever…
mr. Brooks
No hate being spewed here, but here is my defense to those offering their challenges to this awards feature.
1) This is a discussion forum, which would not be half as entertaining if everybody agreed, right? And those who post tend to me more passionate than those who read, so be prepared to read from those who are very opinionated.
2) TechCrunch was thrust into prominence by their readers. They were the ones who created the buzz. They were the ones who spread the word virally. They were the ones who came back day after day. If TC has decided to change their focus away from start ups and more to a general Silicon Valley industry rag, and strategically speaking, I am not saying this is the wrong decision, they have to expect some to feel jilted.
3) There is a realization among true boot-strapped start-ups setting in- and that is getting listed on TechCrunch is no longer a realistic hope. I saw an interview with Arrington once who said that TechCrunch listed 1 in 3 start-ups that were submitted (I think this was 2005). Obviously, when I see that the top 3 stories right now are about Wikia, YouTube and Mozilla, true startups have little chance to gain noteriety against such well-funded and established ventures. So maybe there is a slight amount of apprehension as to where the new guys are going to turn to help get the word out. Is someone out there ready to fill the void?
But its now the day before Christmas Eve, and there are other things to focus on for a couple of days. Including watching (hopefully) the Giants clinch a play-off spot today (c’mon Eli, step up for a change). So Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!
Its little confusing to choose who is the best.
TC apparently doesn’t want to be challenged on something obviously thrown together / refusing to hire someone knowledgeable at contests, just like they didn’t hire a real conference guru to run their conferencel. My guess is that although the awards name is obviously biased towards TC it also involves other industy voices with RWW/GO etc. - readwritewebbies? gigaommies? It just seems no surprise any more when they do something without thinking it all the way through, then are shocked by the response.
First: definition of a start-up was clearly missing. A small bootstrapped company cannot compete against 58M people voting on facebook.
Second: the system was easily gamable
Third: no way 1 human really went through 82,000 votes. Many of those were likely lumped, estimated or overlooked
This will be just another notch in Zuckerberg’s bedpost. For this new, slapped together sham of an awards show I doubt he’ll roll out of bed for it (it’s not the web2.0 conference after all) unless his PR person makes him.
Mike, why not address the concerns of the people who made you who you are: your readers for the audience, and the content - ie start-ups who are actually DOING the work and out there getting their hands dirty while the TC team just blogs opinions on them.
@Allen, just read your list, and one thing jumped out in addition: Digg and geni are not user generated content. Digg - voting on articles or images or videos and geni entering in some facts about dead people. Good catch on both of those!
its to bad TC doesn’t recognize the little guy….. Seems you have to be funded with millions to even get noticed. Seems they only report on Companies that have giant media relation companies greasing the pockets of someone.