Comments on: What We Learned By Watching The Crunchies

By: JimmyLA

JimmyLA — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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. :)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Right on about the fluff questions for the interviewees Allen and I also noticed the “valley meme” of the evening.

By: Darren

Darren — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

By: centernetworks

centernetworks — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

By: Amy Ziari

Amy Ziari — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

ebuddy – international winner – is a sponsor of tc!

By: centernetworks

centernetworks — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

By: chacha102

chacha102 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

By: Michael Hoisie

Michael Hoisie — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

By: Adam Hirsch

Adam Hirsch — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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/

By: Ben Metcalfe

Ben Metcalfe — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

By: Dennis Howlett

Dennis Howlett — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

By: Sidharth

Sidharth — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

By: Chacha102

Chacha102 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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

By: centernetworks

centernetworks — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.