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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Coursera, which offers online-education courses, was recently hit with a regulatory freeze in Minnesota, because the rules for education-related businesses in that state require that they jump through a series of hoops, including filing for registration (and paying fees). The state later modified its views on the service after an uproar about these restrictions, but it is unlikely to be the only roadblock the company runs into as it tries to expand. The reality is that in any number of markets, from education to the hotel industry to broadcasting, regulations haven’t kept up with the evolution of the businesses they are supposed to be regulating.

Entrenched industries and regulators are fighting hard

Airbnb is in a similar position to the hotel industry: the application of social features — which allow owners of apartments, houses, trailers and even treehouses to easily find and connect with potential short-term renters — has changed the balance of power to the point where someone with a spare room has the ability to create a peer-powered business with virtually no overhead. That’s clearly a threat to the hotel business, which is using whatever political and regulatory connections it can to put limits on the company, even as its grows larger: Airbnb is rumored to be talking with Facebook investor Peter Thiel about a funding round that would value it at $2 billion.

It’s important to note that the social aspect of these services is crucial to their success. As I tried to describe in a recent post about using Airbnb, the social element isn’t just a nice addition — it is a key part of how it functions, and why the barriers to entry and transaction costs are lowered as a result. If I hadn’t been able to see that an owner was connected to a Facebook friend, I might never have used it (and they might never have accepted me as a renter). Designing this kind of socially-powered service is something I’m going to be talking about with Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference on November 5th.

Uber, the car-scheduling service, has been another prominent participant in this back-and-forth struggle with regulations and an entrenched industry — virtually everywhere the company has set up shop, from San Francisco to New York, it has run into a regulatory morass that is designed to protect the existing taxi and livery industry as much as it is intended to protect consumers. Although New York has been trying to fast-track changes that would make it easier to operate there, the SF-based company was recently forced to withdraw one version of its service.

The service has had problems in San Francisco as well, and is likely to run into similar issues anywhere there is an entrenched taxi industry that is trying to protect its historic market power and profit margins. In New York, for example, taxi “medallions” — which allow an owner to operate a cab business there — sell for $1 million each. That kind of industry isn’t going to appreciate a disruptor like Uber, and in New York in particular the taxi business is a big political player. In many ways, however, Uber is just the thin edge of a larger wedge: also coming are services like Hailo that use an Uber-style service model for the regular cab business.

Disruptive businesses as “regulatory hacks”

As New York-based venture investor Chris Dixon described it in a recent blog post, startups like Airbnb and Uber are “regulatory hacks,” in the sense that they are designed to do an end-run around existing industry regulations — in much the same way the early disruption in telecom was driven by startups which played fast-and-loose with the rules, and eventually forced regulatory change and became the norm. As Dixon puts it:

“Uber is being threatened by the taxi industry, Aereo by the TV broadcasting industry, and Airbnb by the hotel industry… Of course, regulations that truly protect the public interest are necessary. But many regulations are created by incumbents to protect their market position. To try new things, entrepreneurs need to find a back door. And when they succeed, it will all look obvious in retrospect. Today’s regulatory hack is tomorrow’s mainstream industry.”

The list of these kinds of companies is only continuing to grow: Kickstarter and Indiegogo have not only helped entrepreneurs raise millions of dollars outside the traditional financing industry, but they have also helped trigger changes to federal legislation around small-business funding — and have spawned their own offshoots as well, such as Kickstarter-style platforms that focus on specific niches like raising money for amateur athletes. Aereo may not be a typical startup, since it is backed by billionaire Barry Diller, but it is also aimed at disrupting a traditional business (broadcasting) that is tangled in red tape and controlled by an oligopoly.

There are dozens of other startups such as Lyft and SideCar and TaskRabbit that are trying to bring the peer-to-peer model of social business to different aspects of various industries — even custom manufacturing, where platforms like Etsy and others help creators monetize their services without having to go through the usual channels or middlemen. Regulatory restrictions can impede these kinds of solutions for awhile, or even cause one or two to fail, but the tide of which they are a part continues to advance.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock/Pavel Ignatov and Flickr user Jeremy King

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Much of this evidence comes via Kaggle, a platform where companies and organizations award prizes for the best solutions to their predictive-modeling needs. In September, for example, I covered a first-time Kaggle user and admitted data science neophyte named Carter S. who won a competition using a simple but effective method he dubbed “overkill analytics.”

Impressive, sure, but Carter builds insurance-industry risk models for a living. While he’s able to learn new techniques such as natural-language processing and social network analysis as he goes, he’s no stranger to a linear regression. But what if someone’s only formal experience with computer science was a single undergraduate programming course?

Ask Luis Tandalla. That was his case before he took a handful of free online classes last year on Coursera. Yet the University of New Orleans senior recently scored his first victory in a Kaggle competition hosted by the Hewlett Foundation where he had to devise a model for accurately grading short-answer questions on exams. Not bad for a college senior who didn’t really know what artificial intelligence and machine learning were before he signed up to learn them.

Once Tandalla got started, he told me, he got passionate about learning more. So he also took Coursera classes on natural-language processing and probabilistic models, began studying on his own outside the online lectures and even got active on Kaggle (this was his first victory in five competitions). He’ll receive his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in May 2013, but now Tandalla says he wants to pursue a master’s degree in machine learning and start his own predictive-software company

The Coursera connection

Maybe Tandalla isn’t so unique after all. The second- and third-place finishers in the Heritage Foundation competition, it turns out, also learned machine learning on Coursera. The latter, Xavier Conort, is a 39-year-old actuary from Singapore who just decided to become a data scientist last year and is now Kaggle’s top-ranked competitor.

Andrew Ng

Stanford professor and Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng — who teaches the machine-learning class that all three top finishers took — doesn’t think their success is just coincidence. If you’re not trying to make the types of contacts students at top universities are after, and your goal isn’t to perform advanced research, he explained, online education platforms such as Coursera (and, I’ll add, Udacity and EdX), can be incredibly valuable.

In particular, Ng said, “Machine learning has matured to the point by where if you take one class you can actually become pretty good at applying it.” Familiarity with algebra and probabilities are certainly helpful, he added, but the only real prerequisite to his course is a basic understanding of programming.

And with machine learning becoming “one of the more highly sought-after skills in Silicon Valley,” Ng said, corporate recruiters say just completing a single course can significantly boost someone’s salary and job prospects at companies where such knowledge is still in short supply.

“I bet many students are going on to [do] great things because of these courses [even if we never hear about it],” Ng said.

Why it works, and why it could change the world

Ng thinks the current incarnation of online education platforms work so well because they’re essentially nurturing the already-talented students who seek them out. Some professionals, he explained, take courses to learn skills such as machine learning or iOS programming that weren’t in vogue or didn’t even exist when they earned their computer science degrees just a decade ago.

Furthermore, with students able to learn at their own pace, there’s a lot of valuable information disseminated in the discussion forums.

Free access to the best teachers around doesn’t hurt either. Ng said he couldn’t teach his course so well if he hadn’t spent so much time living in Silicon Valley learning best practices from some of the smartest computer scientists on the planet. That experience lets him spend less time teaching algorithms for the sake of algorithms and more time talking about how one might actually apply machine learning in the field.

Ng says that’s a more important than just understanding the algorithms in a vacuum. He compares it to learning how to write a computer program instead of just learning the syntax of a programming language but not being able to string commands together into something useful. This approach isn’t entirely unique among the new order of online educators: On Udacity, for example, Google VP and Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun, centers the Computer Science 101 curriculum around learning Python in the context of building a working search engine.

The value of this opportunity wasn’t lost on Tandalla. He said he can feel the passion that professors have even through the pre-recorded video lectures, and it feels good knowing you’re learning from the people who literally wrote the book on the subject you’re studying.

Who knows who’s the next Einstein

But ultimately, minting new data scientists — even Kaggle winners — is low-hanging fruit. Ng said we don’t yet know how much impact online educations platforms like Coursera can have. In all fields, there are talented people all over the world who just need an avenue to hone their skills and a chance to distinguish themselves.

“It makes me wonder,” Ng said, “if the next Albert Einstein is a little girl in Afghanistan who just needs [the opportunity to access quality education].”

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But journalism students show what she sees as a lack of desire to learn about JavaScript, HTML, CSS and other tools to help tell a story on a web page, rather than the front page, Mulligan wrote in the Nieman Journalism Lab blog. It’s probably never been easier for students of any age to actually learn to code — there’s free or near free online coursework from Codecademy, the MIT/Harvard EdX program or Coursera. But Mulligan’s recommendation is that J-schools need to integrate these coding courses — or at least teach students about how web pages deal with or render their stories — into the base journalism curriculum.

Mulligan wrote:

We need to innovate our curricula, really looking at what we are teaching our students. Learning, or mastering, specific software is not properly preparing our future journalists for successful, life-long careers. No one can learn digital storytelling in a semester. Mastering Dreamweaver and Flash isn’t very future-friendly, and having a single mid-level “Online Journalism” course offered as an elective does more harm than good. We should be teaching code in all of our journalism courses — each semester, each year, until graduation.

There is growing belief in many quarters that software programming is no longer just for programmers – New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has promised to learn how to code; 6-year olds in Estonia may soon do the same. And with more news flowing through the web rather than print, what Mulligan proposes here is not surprising at all.

It’s our job as educators to remove fear of learning, a fear notoriously prevalent in journalists. HTML is not magic. Writing code is not wizardry; it’s just hard work. Learning to program will not save journalism and probably won’t change the way we write our stories. It is, however, a heck of a lot more fun being a journalist on the web once “how computers read and understand our content” is understood.

What is somewhat surprising, in my view, is the reluctance she sees among young would-be journalists to learn these skills. From what I’ve seen over the past few years, many young reporters are impressively proficient in these skills. It’s the geezers (ahem) who have a hard time with coding. But here’s the thing: Even geezers can learn. And if they want to stay employed, they will do so.

Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user argus

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Coursera, founded last fall by Stanford professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, expands today to include non-Stanford classes and also announces $16 million in Series A funding, in a round led by Kleiner Perkins.

Coursera is adding about 30 online courses from the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Stanford and the University of Michigan. (More courses and universities will be added in coming months.) The courses, which cover topics from computer science and medicine to business, history and literature, aren’t just class videos — the company is not “just shoving the video on the web and hoping for the best,” Koller said. Rather, Coursera aims to recreate an on-campus experience for virtual students. Its coursers include video lectures with interactive quizzes, homework, interactive assignments and collaborative online forums.

“A professor teaching 100,000 students is almost like a new medium, like moving from papyrus to prose,” Ng told me. “For example, how often do students want to see the instructor’s face? Do they want pre-typed text or should the instructor hand-write the text? We’re still figuring it out. Multiple top universities working on a single site provides the opportunity to leverage resources, and partner institutions can learn from each other about how one ought to teach in this new space.”

“We are seeing tremendous retention on the site; when homework is due, traffic spikes,” Koller said. “If you’re changing the lives of millions of people, there will be a way to make it financially sustainable.”

Bringing more “free” to the $12 billion textbook industry

A new tool from white-label digital college bookstore site Akademos tackles another problem in higher education: Expensive textbooks. The textbook business today is run by “very powerful book publishers who can afford to have massive sales forces that go out and work individually with professors to convince them to buy textbooks,” CEO John Squires, who was previously at Time Inc. overseeing the development of magazine JV Next Issue Media, told me. “It’s not unlike the pharmaceuticals industry.” And because textbooks are so expensive, he says, “kids basically choose not to buy. They borrow or steal or they go without.”

Akademos aims to get cheaper textbooks into students’ hands by making the textbook discovery process easier for professors. The company’s Textbook Adoption Tool, launching today, lets professors access and compare textbooks across 3,600 subjects and 2 million books.

Faculty using the platform can search for the course they teach, view textbooks by school adoption and bookmark textbooks for possible later adoption. They can also sort by affordability and peer reviews. And searches pull up not just textbooks from the largest publishers but also free Open Educational Resource texts and other types of books.

For now, the textbook adoption tool is simply a free resource (and a way to draw attention back to Akademos’ white-label business), though it may eventually include e-commerce links. “The textbook industry is a $12 billion industry and faculty don’t really have any way to fairly evaluate and track high-quality content,” Squires said. “We think having some influence over that is going to be a pretty fascinating opportunity for our business.”

Photo courtesy of Flickr user beautyfromashes

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