Without further ado, the winners of this year’s Crunchies awards are:
- Best technology innovation/achievement: Earthmine
- Best bootstrapped startup: Techmeme
- Best new gadget/device: iPhone
- Best business model: Zazzle
- Best design: SmugMug
- Best enterprise startup: Zoho
- Best consumer startup: Meebo
- Best mobile startup: Twitter
- Best international startup: Netvibes
- Best user-generated content: Digg
- Best video site: Hulu
- Best use of viral marketing: StumbleUpon
- Best clean tech startup: Tesla Motors
- Best time sink site: Kongregate
- Most likely to make the world a better place: DonorsChoose
- Most likely to succeed: WordPress
- Best startup founder: Mark Zuckerberg
- Best startup CEO: Toni Schneider
- Best new startup of 2007: iMedix
- Best overall: Facebook
Thank you to the sponsors of the 2007 Crunchies who are underwriting the event and making it possible to recognize outstanding contributions in our industry. Award Benefactors: Adobe, Charles River Ventures, The Founders Fund, The Mayfield Fund, Microsoft, Our Stage and Sun Microsystems. Thank you also to our Program Sponsors, including Ask, Framr (an ecommerce start-up offering custom picture framing, launching tonight), Lotus Vodka, Intel Capital, Lehman Brothers, MeeVee, RealTimeMatrix’s Vortex, Searchles, our official live-streaming partner of the night Mogulus, our official ticketing sponsor amiando, WeBreakStuff for design and MediaTemple for hosting.
Perhaps this is a lesson to investors. Despite something being “hot” right now most of these companies will be forgotten by next year so unless the company is brining in boatloads of money.
I would Replace digg w/ reddi, it carries a more transparent ranking system. All in all, its a great list. My favorites are Facebook and WordPress.
Parul Bindra
http://bhopu.com – Web 2.0 Blog
Deserving winners. Digg could probably do better as far as user generated content. Anyone thought of that?
http://Abesha.wordpress.com
Well done to Smug Mug Photo Sharing. They are awesome.
Heh! Digg and best user-generated content? Just goes to show voting is not always be the best process for selecting award winners. The hordes on Digg could swing any vote to make Digg the winner in any category!
IMO, blogging sites like Blogger.com should be voted the winner for best user-generated content. They encourage users to publish much better information than Digg comments.
Facebook- definitaly deserving this award :)
Great news. Will forward it to all my friends. They should know.
Congrats to Matt, Toni, Barry and the crew at WordPress! Well done gents!
I can give or take the other winners, but congrats to Meebo. A great chat program made by folks who honestly care about their users and want them to have a great experience. Both the iPhone/iPod Touch adaptations and the web-based version are a joy to use and include all the chat programs I care about being on.
(Note to Trillian: You could learn a thing or two from them. Drop ICQ and support GoogleTalk!)
Facebook definitely deserves the overall award, their figures speak for themselves….their servers are slow though, and updates are becoming difficult at times….short attention spans start wandering quickly….employers are also increasingly banning facebook from work pc’s, and during working hours.
Then Stumbleupon is a personal favourite, definitely the way to discover obscure sites about your areas of interest, finding stuff you’d never find on organic text driven search engine results.
Am not a great fan of digg. Predict that it will be upstaged.
I’m ashamed to admit that I’d only heard of about half of the winners before. I shall investigate them all after hearing such good things about them. :)
I don´t think that Digg is the best in his category, but others deserve the premium!