WebAwards Archive

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.

Tonight was the 11th Annual SXSW Web Awards hosted by Eugene Mirman. The ninja made a few appearances and I will post the videos later this evening but I wanted to get the winners out as quickly as possible. Here are the winners in each category. You can find all of the nominees at sxsw.com/web_awards. Don’t forget to check out all of our SXSW coverage.

• Activism: World Without Oil
• Amusement: Elf Yourself
• Art: Viscosity
• Blog: Passive-Aggressive Notes (NYC)
• Business: Wikinvest
• CSS: Ficlets
• Classic: Wired
• Community: Flock (CN Sponsor)
• Educational: The Story of Stuff
• Experimental: MetaNotes
• Film/TV: Animoto Productions (NYC)
• Games: Launchball
• Mobile: Mosio
• Motion Graphics: HL2
• Music: Minuit
• Personal: JLern Design
• Student: Paper Critters
• Technical Achievement: Twiddla
• People’s Choice: Kongregate
• Best of Show: Launchball

The Webware 100 Awards are now accepting votes and so far nearly 1,000,000 votes have been cast. I’d like to share my votes with you, please share yours in the comments. They are accepting three votes per category and my picks below are in no specific order. One note, I didn’t select any of last year’s winners — let’s allow some others to win this year!

Audio
View Nominees
My Picks: Pandora, iTunes, Critical Metrics

Browsing
View Nominees
My Picks: yourminis, Flock, Pageflakes

Commerce and Events
View Nominees
My Picks: MyPunchbowl, Amazon, ZocDoc

Communication
View Nominees
My Picks: Zimbra, SeatGuru, ooVoo

Productivity
View Nominees
My Picks: ConceptShare, Zoho, Wesabe

Publishing and Photography
View Nominees
My Picks: Drupal, Flickr, FeedBurner

Search and Reference
View Nominees
My Picks: FlightStats, Instructables, hakia

Social
View Nominees
My Picks: Dopplr, TripAdvisor, Yelp

Utility and Security
View Nominees
My Picks: Amazon S3, OpenDNS, OpenID

Video
View Nominees
My Picks: Viddler, Kaltura, Qik

Editor’s note: Flock and Zoho are current CN sponsors.

Tonight is the Crunchies awards show in San Francisco. You can keep refreshing this page to see the winners in real-time, we will bring them to you immediately as they are announced. The event begins at 7pm Pacific Time. Rachel Sterne (no relation) is doing some interviews – she’s from Ground Report. You will get me real color commentary here people! :) Newest is on top:

10:30 (1:30AM eastern) – Ok, I am done. Goodnight all.  

10:24 – Ben Metcalfe says that there was a lot of negativity in the twitter about the event – though after they thought the cameras weren’t rolling Ben said, “see i told you i’d bring the controversy” LOL :) Ben rocks.

10:23 – Mike says they did some things right and some wrong – wants it to 1 hr next year – personally I disagree - I may write more when I am back awake tomorrow :)  Mike loves a recession except that people lose their jobs

10:19 – I am a bit disappointed that they only interviewed people “connected” – would have been nice to do it like they did the TC party where anyone could come talk to us – we hear enough shilling day in and day out 

10:10 – Personally I would love for Sarah to stop doing  her pop snap thing – it just doesn’t help the image, sorry.

10:09 – Zivity says she isn’t leaving private beta until 2009 but somehow was big enough to get a nom? asks the chat room  – she also said she’s looking to build a community that respects women and embraces “artistic qualities” – whatever that means.

9:53 – how did Tesla win considering they don’t even have a car made yet? – says the chatroom 

9:50 – apparently Netvibes has a new version coming out tuesday at 5am – it’s with “the press” – which clearly does not include CN :( 

9:49 – people in the chat room wondering how companies win awards in private beta

9:42 – iMedix – worth the flight from Israel to be here to win – they have been working 24/7 in the hotel – adhd most popular term on their site

9:40 – Seth from Meebo – he says fantastic 4 times – they are working on some kind of sync platform for developers to make it really great – and putting their stuff on island and def jam records

9:33 – MC Hammer comes over – shills the f out of dancejam – he believes they are creating something great around dance – shills his team – looks like he is wearing a 2 foot rabbit or bear around his neck – chat room going crazy for it – no one can figure out what that is – he belives dancejam is a “comfortable place” – he also says anything goes – hes a friend of mogulus – i guess thats why he gets a 10 minute interview!

9:30 – Sarah Lacy says she’s glad that Facebook won 2 of the biggest awards, she was surprised and shocked that WordPress won, surprised Slide didn’t win anything

9:28 – the show is over now – Mike ended it quickly and swiftly – that was shocking says the chat room

BEST OVERALL

Winner – Facebook

BEST NEW STARTUP

Winner – iMedix

BEST CEO AWARD

Winner – Toni Schneider – Auttomatic

BEST FOUNDER AWARD

Winner – Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook

BEST TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION

Winner – Earthmine

9:09 – Mike thanks the sponsors

9:05 – another video – this time something about words of wisdom – it seemed like shilling not words of wisdom

MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED

Winner – WordPress

8:59 – first time i’ve ever seen this – man reading notes off the treo and can’t remember any of it

BEST BUSINESS MODEL

Winner – Zazzle

8:57 – Disappointed that Richard posted all of the winners before they were announced :(

BEST INTERNATIONAL STARTUP

Winner – Netvibes

BEST MOST LIKELY TO SAVE THE WORLD 

Winner – Donors Choose

8:39 – Dan Farber asks the hosts questions:

• Erick – he was surprised that they asked their audiences to come up with the initial nominees and then vote on the winners – they wanted to be like Digg – they found it wasn’t so easy – there was a lot of gaming – in the ends we put our heads together – so the people did NOT pick the winners apparently  (Rafe says via Twitter he thinks people did pick the winners but they picked the finalists)
• Om  – working too much is a killer app – he likes twitter
• Matt – he was surprised by all the action in advertising – wonders if advertising will work in the downturn
• Richard – he likes the number of international products that are part of the event
• Mike – we are seeing less and less exciting stuff – no intriguing business models coming out now – he looks forward to coming back to exciting

8:38 – based on my post and your feedback on what is a startup, is techmeme a startup still? service is great, but is it still considered a startup?

BEST BOOTSTRAPPED STARTUP

Winner –  TechMeme

8:35 – Mike says blogs shouldn’t raise funding

BEST TIME WASTE SITE

Winner – Kongregate

8:29 – another video of bootstrapping

BEST USER GENERATED CONTENT

Winner – video died - Digg won 

8:25 – Happy Birthday to scoble says Mike

BEST USE OF VIRAL MARKETING 

Winner – StumbleUpon

BEST CONSUMER INTERNET STARTUP 

Winner – Meebo

8:18 – another video this time about users and community – looks like most of the companies are from SF

8:15 – all winners get 30 seconds but fake steve jobs gets multiple minutes! funny for 30 seconds – the man curses 40x for cheap pops – lame

BEST GADGET

Winner – iphone

BEST ENTERPRISE STARTUP 

Winner – Zoho

8:05 – so far i’ve picked every winner – that’s not good

BEST CLEAN TECH STARTUP

Winner –  TESLA

8:05 – Richter Scales is done – camera person zooms like there is no tomorrow 

7:58 – Mike talks about the Richter Scales video – they are playing live

BEST VIDEO SITE AWARD

Winner –  Hulu

7:54 – sponsor commercial for adobe 

7:54 – is it best or most popular who wins?

BEST DESIGN

Winner – SmugMug

BEST MOBILE STARTUP AWARD

Winner -  Twitter

7:46 – first video – trends and innovation – some guy who we don’t know who says it’s the computer is the distruptive thing? some guy says how great cool whip is… i sure hope the other videos are better – this one is about as boring as watching hot air popcorn pop

7:44 - Mike explains that you have 30 seconds to get your thank yous in then we must move on 

7:42 – shows a video about how they made the award – 14″ tall, 2.5 lbs 

7:40 – Show is starting – Arrington is doing the welcome  - Om says hi, Richard says hi, RWW rocks, Matt Marshall from VentureBeat says hi as well, VC covers the intersection of money and tech

7:38 – Sarah Lacy interviewed – she shills everything she is working on – she said she is there cuz Arrington asked her to come – also is interested in the entrep of the year. Sarah says that her book will focus on people who don’t care about money when they do their startups 

7:34 – Geni is interviewed – founder says he has 30,000 people on his tree – am I up on there?

7:32 – Ingrid from Mogulus lets us know that many of the people are in the audience are the founders of innovation – like Kevin Rose – power to the people she says – very exciting to hear what they have to say

7:30 – the hosts have shilled for Herbst theater so many times already - must be in the contract :) 

7:29 - people in the chat room are now picking words for drinking game – i’ll take web 2.0 

7:25 – they interview Marissa from Google – she talks about how interesting it will be to watch how social affects search - Alex asks about maps companies and are they looking to acquire – but wait – isn’t UpNext the only map company?  Marissa says people are looking for the tiger who attacked the woman – and Marissa won’t share any product announcements for 2008 tonight

7:20 – Chris interviews Zoho – a CN sponsor – Raju explains what Zoho does – but you already know cuz we done covered them before and I knows you all have clicked on their ad! Interesting fact – zoho the name is a play off soho – they have 17 apps right now

7:16 – Rafe from Webware is there – shoutout to Rafe from NYC! If you aren’t reading Webware, shame on you! Rafe believes liveblogging is where it’s at – the tragedy he says is that there is no time to reflect

7:15 – clearly the camera person with Rachel is drunk – I feel like I am on a boat in the water – she’s interviewing the guy from Facebook Causes app – says nothing except he wants to win

7:14 – they sure do jump from camera to camera and cut everyone off lolcat

7:11 – Kevin Rose hops onto the camera and discusses the editors – he doesn’t actually discuss the editors – deflects to buries and diggs – he says its ALL BASED ON MATH and what the users are doing – so he said that there are NO editors

7:10 – Rachel is a real talent – she should have a daily show I think. Too bad they gave her the wobbly camera and the mic with no wrapper

7:06 – Chris Albrecht says he is glad that it’s being held in SF because that’s where everything is happening

7:03 – Chris Albrecht is talking about how excited he is about the video category – apparently people are going inside – so far this seems like a real class act

7:01 – they show the tesla roadster – well not really as it’s pitch black outside and you can’t see anything – can we get a light please?

6:55 – interview with Ribbit – they put some VOIP over SalesForce apparently – but they have no frogs on their web site

6:50PM – they interview Sarah Meyers – she apparently has an unlimited travel budget

6:47PM – Some of the GigaOm and Mogulus people are chit-chatting – pretty boring if you ask me. Mogulus is always so “sticky” which makes it hard to watch.

The Open Web Awards are currently accepting votes in all 13 categories. The Open Web Awards are presented by Mashable and about 800 blog partners (except CN, we are always a bridesmaid, never a bride!). Get out there and vote for your favorites!

The bolded selection in each category below is who received my vote. Many of these decisions were not easy as I have many favorites but I can only select one. Runner-up vote is in parens.

Niche Social Network

CafeMom, CampusBug, CollegeTonight, FilmCrave, GloCals, (OpenSourceFood), OurLikes, Realtorclix, SwitchPlanet, Wish Done

Favorite Mobile Site

Facebook for Blackberry, GetaBuz, Google Maps for Mobile, Mocospace, Tipped.mobi, Trugo, Twitter, Utterz, (WireNode), WishDone

Favorite Social Shopping Site

CrowdStorm, iliketotallyloveit, Jellyfish, Lootist, Recommendr, Skimbit, Smashingdarling, ThisNext, (Woot), Zlio

Favorite Music Site

BandsinTown, GetaBuz, GrooveShark, Gruvr, (iLike), Last.fm, Mixaloo, Pandora, TheHypeMachine, ThePeriodicLabel

Favorite Site To Find Places and Events

BandsinTown, EventBrite, Eventful, Evite, Facebook, Going.com, Meetup, MySpace, (Upcoming), ZVents

Favorite Start Page

DailyWaste, Eskobo, Favoor, iGoogle, Live, (myAOL), myYahoo, Netvibes, PageFlakes, TheWebList

Favorite Video Sharing Site

Break, GoogleVideo, Kaltura, MetaCafe, Mocospace, Trugo, Uber, (Veoh), Vimeo, YouTube

Favorite Photo Sharing Site

DotPhoto, EachDay, Facebook, Flickr, PhotoBucket, Picasa, Slide, (SmugMug), Vois, WebShots

Favorite Sports and Fitness Site

ArmChairGM, Ballhype, ESPN, Local Replay, MediaZone, (Skinnyr), Sportme, SportSnipe, Traineo, YardBarker

Favorite Social Search

Copenda, Eurekester, Facebook, Gleamd, Mahalo, Spokeo, Tipped, Trugo, VibeAgent, Wink (not enough information on these sites to me to vote)

Favorite Application or Widget

BlogRush, Flempo, Flock, Getabuz, iDesktop, Jangl, MindTouch, (Quintura), SezWho, WidgetBucks

Favorite Social News or Social Bookmarking Site

BlinkList, Del.icio.us, Digg, Mixx, Newsvine, Propeller, Reddit, (StumbleUpon), Wikio, Wish Done

Favorite Mainstream or Large Scale Network

Bebo, (Facebook), LinkedIn, MocoSpace, MySpace, Netlog, OurLikes, Uber, Vois, Wish Done

Update: Appears we were right, unfortunately no TechMeme lead love. Also, VentureBeat has been added since the inital site went live.

Just noticed this on the Techcrunch toolbar, "Crunchies". It appears to be a partnership between Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb and GigaOm. Webware/CNET had their similar Webware 100 earlier this year.

From the site, "The 2007 Crunchies is our first annual competition and award ceremony for the most compelling startups of the year."

Looks interesting and awards for the hard work and effort startups put in should be rewarded. If you think about it, all those startups is what keeps a good bit of the press moving! The Crunchies are sponsored by Sun.

I am curious as to the name choice – wouldn’t something general enough for all 3 sites make more sense? Will we see Mint win this too? LAWL :)

Update from a CN reader: Mashable launched "Mashable Awards" this past weekend though it seems to focus more on social networking and new social sites.

Alright, here are the winners in the 1st annual CenterNetworks SXSW Interactive Playpen Awards. First let me say that the playpen is a great idea. We are all big kids at heart and drawing, playdoh, legos rock. It's a great meeting spot as well.

So here are my picks for the three best lego formations. If you know who made these winners, leave a comment so we can link them up!

First Place – Digg – this one is just amazing – how they were able to get the community on the left – with the higher peaks being the ones that are making the frontpage. And using the legos on the side to design is great.

Second Place – Blogads – wowzers – this is brilliant – love the font type for the company name

Third Place – this one goes to icebrrg.com for their innovative use of a creative commons license.