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What We Learned By Watching The Crunchies
Last night Techcrunch held their 2nd annual Crunchy awards. The evening was a near mirror image of last year’s event. Sixteen awards were given and big congratulations go out to all of the winners. CBS Interactive’s Josh Lowensohn attended the event and has a good recap of each of the awards handed out in San Francisco.
I kept notes on each of the winners from my office in NYC on a scratchpad. I’d like to share some of my general thoughts about the event.
The first award went to Google Reader for best web application. Accepting the award was Marissa Mayer from Google. In a company that has many thousands of employees and a Google Reader team that probably has more than a dozen employees, did Marissa really need to accept the award? It’s clear from past experiences that Google is a very controlling company when it comes to their public face, but why not let someone actually on the Google Reader team have the spotlight. One of my Twitter followers wondered if she was asked by the Crunchies to accept to make sure a woman accepted at least one award. I don’t buy that – I think it’s just Google’s controlling behavior at work.
During the Crunchies event, there were 3 "quick Q&A" and VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall spoke with Mayer. It immediately became apparent to me and the Twitter audience that the questions were staged (for all of the Q&A bits) because Matt started to joke around (seemingly off the script) about cupcakes and when he switched back, Marissa started to answer before Matt even finished his question. Why does Marissa get such fluff interviews? Back at LeWeb, Marc Canter called the interview fluff and last night’s discussion was fluff as well. I don’t know if Marissa demands easy questions but there are plenty of topics that the people in the audience care about. Techcrunch writer Steve Gillmore has been very vocal lately about FeedBurner – why not ask her about that? There are plenty of other topics as well that the audience and the Ustream viewers care about.
Let’s now move to location… that is, where does your company need to be located to win a Crunchy? Loic LeMeur noted on stage that there was only one award given to an international company and all of the companies in that category were from Europe. LeMeur has a longer post today about the valley vs. non-valley topic with regards to the awards show.
As each winner was announced, I took a look at where the company is located and noted it on my scratch pad. Every single startup company, outside of the international award which went to eBuddy, went to a company in California. In fact, all of the award winners are located in Silicon Valley except GitHub which is located near San Diego. Take a minute and think about that…not one company won from NYC, Chicago, Denver, Boulder, St. Louis, Portland or anywhere in between. Internationally, Techcrunch runs blogs in France, UK and Japan and there was no winners from any of those locations or any other city around the world except one winner from Amsterdam.
Does all of the "great" Web technology only come out of California? Absolutely not. I am going to have a lot more on this topic early next week.
Dennis Howlett made a comment that’s worth repeating. "If they were being honest then the Crunchies would be renamed as the Consumer Crunchies". In fact you should read his Twitter stream for some good, honest commentary on the overall event. He’s right and when I looked at the nominees last month I was disappointed that the only startups in the running were those who basically get pushed around in the early adopter crowd. Where are all of the (()#@*&^%% companies that are creating real value for their users and have business models? Where are the web utility companies? I could name 100 companies that deserved to win an award last night. We see this behavior on a daily basis from the valley and I will have more on this topic as well next week.
In closing, it’s great that Techcrunch puts on this award show and gives the community a chance to celebrate their combined success. My hope is that for their 2010 show they will consider some of the points above and make some positive changes which will benefit the Web community worldwide.
All the web companies outside of silicon valley were too busy working on real business plans and making money, and not so concerned with getting featured on TechCrunch. :)
Allen Stern does some of the best critical (in the sense of evaluative rather than negative/cynical) pieces on the tech industry. This discussion of California-centricity reminds me of the piece that made me want to subscribe to the centernetworks feed in the first place – the one in which he pointed out the closed nature of the NY Tech meetup selection process. Great stuff.
WOW – thank you for the compliment!
Just to add some numbers to the discussion
I nominated (in a very unbiased way ;) ) Blogcatalog for Best Bootstrapped Startup.
I also posted a link for voting on their discussion forum, and within a short while there were 50 or 60 clicks through to vote from members.
I also tweeted a couple of times a link – later on in the voting it was pointed out that it was possible to vote every 24hrs, so a few people on BC might have voted 2 or 3 times.
In total the were maybe 200 clicks through, possibly from 100+ individual people, though the end result was they didn’t make it through to the top 5.
It was a little disappointing not to get through to the final 5, but some of the sites that did make it were well deserving of recognition.
I am glad that the winner of the category was one that had a business model
Can’t wait to see CN start their own awards and take the time to make it important to the wider community at large. Next year maybe?
Right on about the fluff questions for the interviewees Allen and I also noticed the “valley meme” of the evening.
Allen, thanks for the writeup. Surprised too that all of the awards went to CA based companies (except for the International award)
What I don’t like about the Crunchies is that its awards aren’t about the actual business of the companies but rather the hype and userbase – which doesn’t always mean that these are sustainable companies.
Thanks Darren – was a semi-shock to me. As for the userbase hype versus actual business models – this is a bigger problem than just with the crunchies. I am going to write more about this later on but basically by pumping these userbase companies it pushes new develoeprs into creating more of these companies.
In regard to your statement: “Does all of the “great” Web technology only come out of California? Absolutely not. I am going to have a lot more on this topic early next week.”
I would love to see a series on a tech blog with guest posts by folks all over the U.S. and the world talking about tech in their neck of the woods. I think it would be compelling and shine some much needed light on companies and tech scenes that typically don’t get covered solely because of their geographies.
Thanks for the comment Amy – I was thinking of something similar – was going to put it in my post next week but basically I’d like to create a way to push other blogs in other areas and vice-versa. It’s time for the rest of the world to stand up and especially startups that have business models and aren’t just spamming google to get traffic.
ebuddy – international winner – is a sponsor of tc!
Well that really doesn’t matter considering it was all done by votes. Yes they could have smudged them, but its a stupid award that probably means nothing. The real prize is getting nominated for the award and getting a little 4 sentence advertisement in.
Yes, pretty much all good web startups come out of California, and you only need to take a quick glance at Alexa or Quantcast to verify that fact. As an example, take a look at the top web startups in Seattle – http://is.gd/fgWz . None of them come anywhere near the top 100 web companies.
For a true global audience, the Open Web Awards had blog partners representing 25 countries and 10 languages. The true global scale definitely indicates that much of the activity resides outside of the “Valley”: See the winners at: http://mashable.com/2008/12/16/open-web-awards-2-winners/
You want to look at how the voting took place (which decided the shortlist, and then the finalists).
Anyone could vote (fine) but you could vote as many times as you liked (up to one time a day).
Someone at the part afterwards (off-the-record) quipped that any large company or smaller company with a large dedicated fan-base, could co-ordinate mass voting for their products with ease.
As much as I’m into everything ‘community’, I’m actually thinking it would be better of Crunchies was judged by a committee of experts, not the public — where v clear distortions can easily take place that do not represent the true reflection of public feeing.
I thought a lot about the idea of public voting vs. an expert panel. From the TC point-of-view, the public voting gets TC way more press than a panel. I saw tons of press releases from the nominees and finalists all pointing to how great the crunchy award is. If they went with a panel, they lose that press. Maybe there’s a balance in the middle.
As for the voting, you don’t need to look any further than FriendFeed to see how they pushed their users to vote. Paul (founder) setup a thread to remind people to vote and people kept replying to it, keeping it on top of the FF page of practically every user. What other finalist has the ability to do that?
I had no idea (as you noted) that a person could vote 1x a day. In my days running online contests with millions of entries, anytime there was a public vote as part of the contest, it was one vote period.
Listening to Jason Calacanis, it is clear he doesn’t read much outside of TC, Describing their people as the best analysts around is laughable. I could provide a ton of examples of quality analysis but then I remember this is a SV only event. Nobody outside that circle really cares. The decision takers I meet most certainly don’t care.
The last year I’ve had several clients ask if they should pitch at TC. My answer is always the same: if you want your servers killed for a day then fine. Otherwise forget it because people who are making serious buying decisions don’t read TC. Or Techmeme.
One point Loic LeMeur made which is important – there are companies the US has never heard of that are making huge revenue and are profitable. They haven’t needed the valley to establish a strong market.
The lesson is clear – SV is not the beginning and end of the world.
Jason has to be nice to them – they are the ones who were very nice to him on his Answers launch :)
From the feedback I’ve heard and saw, the "servers killed" is no longer true.
Loic is right – there are tons of startups in the US and elsewhere that are generating revenue but don’t need or want SV press. They are just building great things.
With the crunchies I am not sure that the best were even nominated for the awards . How could yammer have 2 nominations when all it has done is cloned twitter and made it for companies. I believe that the nominations / awards were not fair.
Yes, the companies were selected by Techcrunch. I think that the best ones were picked popularity wise, but there are some cool ones I found that didn’t make the list