The list of honorees follows below, and it’s a list packed with newcomers as well as Silicon Valley veterans. Thanks to all for voting in the nomination process, and now that we’ve narrowed it down to five candidates for each award, don’t forget to vote for which person or company you think is most deserving. Voting begins today (the voting page can be found here, and the rules are here) and closes on January 24th.

As a reminder, the Crunchies, a joint production with our friends at Techcrunch and Venturebeat, will take place on Thursday, January 31, 2013, from 7:30pm to 11:30pm at Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave, San Francisco. You can purchase tickets here.

So, without any further delay, the nominees for the 2012 Crunchies are as follows:

Best Technology Achievement
Baumgartner Jump
Google Glass
Mars Curiosity
SpaceX docks with International Space Station
Tesla Supercharger Network

Best Collaborative Consumption Service
Airbnb
Get It Now/Postmates
Lyft
TaskRabbit
Uber

Best E-Commerce Application
Fab
Hotel Tonight
Karma/Facebook Gifts
Warby Parker
Zulily

Best Mobile Application
Evernote
Google Maps
Grindr
Instagram
Square

Fastest Rising Startup
Exec
Lyft
Pinterest
Snapchat
Stripe

Best Content Discovery Application
Flipboard
Instapaper
Pinterest
Prismatic
Tumblr

Best Design
Facebook Timeline
Medium
Paper by FiftyThree
Square
Svbtle

Best Bootstrapped Startup
FreshBooks
Instapaper
Nimbus
Techmeme
Upverter

Sexiest Enterprise Startup
Asana
Box
Cloudera
Plexxi
Zendesk

Best International Startup
Hailo
Rovio
Soundcloud
Spotify
Xiaomi

Best Education Startup
Codecademy
Coursera
Edmodo
Khan Academy
Udacity

Best Hardware Startup
Lit Motors
Lockitron
Makerbot
Nest
Raspberry Pi

Best Time Sink
Angry Birds Star Wars
Buzzfeed
Letterpress
Pinterest
WhatsApp

Biggest Social Impact
Donors Choose
Indiegogo
Kickstarter
Kiva
Reddit

Angel of the Year
Michael Arrington
Chris Dixon
Paul Graham
David Lee
Chris Sacca

VC of the Year
Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
Matt Cohler
Jim Goetz
Michael Moritz
Peter Thiel

Founder of the Year
Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia (Airbnb)
Kevin and Julia Hartz (Eventbrite)
Elon Musk (SpaceX, Tesla)
Kevin Systrom (Instagram)
Nir Zuk (Palo Alto Networks)

CEO of the Year
Dick Costolo (Twitter)
Phil Libin (Evernote)
Marissa Mayer (Yahoo!)
Larry Page (Google)
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Best New Startup of 2012
Coursera
Crowdtilt
Lyft
Snapchat
Waze

Best Overall Startup of 2012
Fab
Github
Instagram
Palantir
Square

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“It’s been a pretty serious engineering effort on our end to build an infrastructure to run a lot of server-side languages, like Python,” said co-founder Zach Sims.

Until now, he said, the startup focused on langages that can run in-browser, such as JavaScript and HTML, not Python and other languages that run on remote servers.

In January, the company started offering courses in Python and Ruby through Codecademy Labs, but it was more of an experimental, lightweight offering. Sims said they’ve rebuilt the way they offer Python from the ground up and plan to launch other new server-side languages in the near future.

Starting today, the startup will offfer six new user-generated Python classes and will allow the community to contribute more. Python was by far the most requested language by users, Sims said, and given mounting interest from high school teachers, they wanted to be able to roll out the new courses in time for the new school year.

Last week, author of “Program or Be Programmed” and CNN tech commentator Dougless Rushkoff said on his blog that he would be joining Codecademy as an evangelist for Codecademy and its wider goal of code literacy.

“He’ll do more writing about the theoretical underpinnings of why people should learn to program, he’ll be giving speeches about it… and talking with people in government and elsewhere,” said Sims.

Since launching last year, the startup said millions of students on the platform have taken more than 100 million exercises and that more than 25,000 people have created courses.

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FreeCause, a Boston-based arm of Rakuten, a Japanese e-commerce company, is teaching all 60 employees JavaScript as part of an effort to narrow the tech divide, according to a recent Boston Globe story.  ”I thought that this would facilitate more efficiency, bring our teams closer together and ultimately make our company perform better,” FreeCause CEO Michael Jaconi told the Globe.

Zach Sims, co-founder and president of Codecademy — which offers online coursework to teach coding and which FreeCause uses — clearly wants this trend to continue. In a recent interview, he told me many other companies including digital ad agencies are using Codecademy, but couldn’t share names. Courses in JavaScript and HTML/CSS are the most popular, Sims said, because either of those skills enable a user to “pretty much build a web site in the easiest and most visual way.”  JavaScript use is mandated by browsers and is thus pretty much the language du jour.

Journalists wanting to do investigative reporting find it easier to crunch data when they really know the underlying tools. The same holds true for attorneys who have to pore through reams of documents, he added.

Codecademy is a hot startup in this space, but it’s by no means alone. MIT’s MITx program (now dubbed EdX) aims to make university curricula — including computer programming coursework — available for free.  MIT and other EDx partners, including Harvard University, obviously see a market here.

That’s not to say there isn’t some push back. Some skeptics say professional programmers in these companies are called on to mentor their colleagues and this can be draining. And, if everyone’s a programmer, it’s harder for the pros to differentiate themselves, according to one programmer, Dan Frost, in an article in .net magazine.

We’re in a world where coding is becoming less impressive. Everyone builds sites, some of them code but you don’t have to. It’s no longer just the nerdy who can create sites, apps and features.

Since the web came along and people could teach themselves there have been self-taught developers. But even the graduates are under threat. I get CVs with people with computer science degrees, AI courses, various media and coding under their belt but there’s still something missing. Sometimes a lot missing.

Sims, for his part, thinks the everyone-will-code trend is inevitable as technology advances. In a Fast Company post,  he wrote:

As technology improves, white-collar jobs are going to be increasingly outsourced to machines. But if you’re worried about your job, there is an easy solution: Society’s increasing dependence on automation means it’s more important than ever to understand the systems that we depend on every day.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user isak55

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It’s fair to say that the site, which provides game-like online courses to teach people how to code, has had a blockbuster year so far. It’s spent 2012 seeing enormous growth, adding new marketplace features, and gaining a legion of fans, including New York mayor Michael Bloomberg.

But even though the site has seen a breathless rise to prominence, the money isn’t just being used to keep the servers spinning while demand grows: it’s got ambitions too.

Ahead of an on-stage interview with me at LeWeb London on Tuesday, co-founder Zach Sims told me that the new funds “give us the ability to go international” — something useful given that 50 percent of the company’s user base already comes from outside the U.S.

And in a post on the company’s blog, he explains his belief that the latest investors are well-placed to help it achieve that expansion.

“A few weeks after we launched Code Year, we met Neil Rimer and Saul Klein of Index Ventures.  Saul told us, about the world he wanted for his kids – one where code was a foreign language as important as Chinese and English for people to learn.  Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins visited our office around the same time and painted a picture of a few industries that needed to be shaken up – education chief among them.”

“It became clear that we needed partners who both understood the importance of a global company… and the process of scaling a company far beyond the nine people we have grown to now.”

It’s actually the first investment from Index’s new €350 million early stage fund, but still, it’s only eight months since the business announced its last round of funding, a $2.5 million round from investors including Union Square Ventures, Ron Conway’s SV Angel and Michael Arrington’s Crunchfund.

This time round Union Square is following up, with Index’s Saul Klein leading the round and KPCB’s Mary Meeker joining in too.

So what do they see in it?

Index’s Klein told me that he was excited by Codecademy for many reasons, but not least because “it’s not a content-needy educational publisher” but “a marketplace for students and teachers.”

He also pointed out that with a global depression, it made sense to back a company that gives people the chance to learn new skills and potentially find jobs that they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to access.

That seems a proposition that is not just popular with VCs but also a magnet for billionaire tycoons: not only did Bloomberg express his support for the site, but investors include Russian Yuri Milner (who adds to his previous investment) and Virgin founder Richard Branson.

Here’s my chat with Zach Simms at LeWeb:

Photograph of Codecademy founders Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Hack NY

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On Monday, the company debuted Course Creator, a platform that allows anyone to make educational courses to teach programming techniques. Up until now, Codecademy, which launched in the summer 2011 class of Y Combinator, has developed all of its programming courses in-house.

Codecademy Course Creator screenshot (click to enlarge)

Codecademy co-founder and CEO Zach Sims tells me that the company has received thousands of requests from users keen to build their own coursework on the site, and views the launch of Course Creator as a major step in the company’s growth. “This is probably the biggest announcement we’ve made yet,” Sims said in an email Monday. “We’re going from being a content company (creating courses) to becoming a platform for others to create courses.”

With the huge amount of user demand that Codecademy has seen since its launch only five months ago — the site has one million users and counting — the shift to become a platform play is a very smart one. Codecademy has just six full-time staff members, so its in-house ability to build courses was naturally limited. Now the company can become a full on ecosystem to facilitate education between its own users.

The financial implications here are interesting, too. Codecademy hasn’t started making any money yet, but down the line, the company has said it could charge for premium courses and services. Now, there’s potential for user-created courses to be part of a future Codecademy premium section. It would be nice to see Codecademy’s Course Creator evolve to become a revenue sharing platform — a place where people can teach others an increasingly important skill, and make some money while doing it.

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I sat down with Codecademy co-founder and CEO Zach Sims to hear about how the company got to this point so quickly, and what’s on deck for the months ahead. Here are a few key takeaways:

Necessity breeds invention

The idea behind Codecademy emerged out of the founding duo’s frustrations with the status quo of learning how to program. Co-founder Ryan Bubinski was already an experienced programmer who spent his weekends and free time during college teaching other students how to build web applications; but Sims was not nearly as familiar with coding. When the two entered Y Combinator’s summer 2011 class together in the hopes of launching a web startup, Sims tried to learn how to code on his own so that he could be of more help on the technical side of whatever business they founded.

“I was watching videos and tutorials and reading books,” Sims said. “But I found I learn best by building things and breaking things, not by just reading something. I wanted something interactive where I could learn in bite-sized pieces, and actually practice what I learned along the way.” So Sims and Bubinski decided to use their time at Y Combinator to build exactly that — and Codecademy was born. The company is now backed with $2.5 million in venture capital from a handful of elite investors including Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly Ventures, SV Angel and Yuri Milner.

Timing is everything

Codecademy’s message — that knowing how to write computer code is becoming just as important as knowing how to read or write — could not have come at a better time. While many sectors of the economy are suffering from layoffs and underemployment, the tech industry is having a full-on hiring crunch. Nearly every tech industry executive I talk to is currently looking to hire as many good engineers as he or she can find. The only problem is that not enough people right now have the programming skills necessary for those jobs.

Screenshot of an introductory Codecademy lesson (click to enlarge)

“Programming is the new literacy,” Sims said. “We’re all walking around with these phones in our pockets, using all these apps, but no one understands how any of it works. There are just not enough engineers, and this is the job of the future.” That Codecademy launched just when this started to become apparent on a larger scale has been key to its early success.

Listening to users — online and off

When Codecademy’s users started getting together offline by scheduling real-life meetups, the company decided to follow them. Last week saw the launch of official Codecademy meetups, and there are now official meetup groups in 171 regional areas worldwide to let people get together in person to discuss their progress learning how to code. Also last week Codecademy launched a Q&A feature within its web product to let people talk to each other via online forums while doing the Codecademy lessons.

Getting bigger, but staying scrappy

For now, Codecademy does not make any revenue, but in the future it could start charging for more advanced lessons and premium services, Sims said. Any revenue generation plans are a bit farther out on the horizon, as right now the company’s focus is on growing its user base and adding new lessons to the core free service. One thing is certain, though: Codecademy has no plans to become an accredited learning institution that charges for a degree.

Sims, who studied Political Science at Columbia University but dropped out several credits shy of graduation, said that Codecademy is founded on the belief that skills are the most important factor in getting good work — not educational credentials. “If you look at a lot of Silicon valley companies, they don’t hire based on a degree. A lot of the best programmers in the industry never even went to college at all,” he said. “Your skills should speak for themselves.” That sounds like a worthwhile lesson in itself.

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