The partnership, which comes a year after a similar deal between Flipboard and the New York Times, will grant full access to FT subscribers while casual visitors will be able to read a smattering of FT blog posts and cultural stories.

Rob Grimshaw, managing director of the FT.com, said by phone that the deal will involve the FT and Flipboard sharing advertising revenue, but would not disclose what the exact revenue split is. In the past, the ad splits have been a source of contention for some publishers, including Condé Nast, which pulled back its advertisements from titles like New Yorker and Wired. (A Flipboard spokesperson said the company has an “excellent relationship” with Conde and is partnering on ads for six other titles).

Grimshaw also said that the FT is exploring selling subscriptions through Flipboard, and would be willing to share some of the proceeds with the platform. This is significant because the FT made waves by leaving iTunes in part due to the 30 percent commission (or “vig,” as the Brits call it) that Apple takes from every publisher.

So why is the FT willing to partner up with Flipboard so soon after leaving Apple? Grimshaw says the difference lies in how the two platforms treat customer relationships.

“The issue is not so much a percentage, it’s the relationship between publisher and audience. Paying a 30 percent finder’s fee is okay. Paying 30 percent in perpetuity and not knowing who the customer is not okay.”

The Flipboard partnership also reflects the fact that the FT and other publishers are keen to get their stories in as many places as possible at a time when readers are consuming more and more content on mobile. As for the future role of Flipboard, which some describe as a “giant iceberg” in the way of publishers, Grimshaw had this to say:

“I think the really interesting aspect to the platform is the way they’re giving readers the ability to create a bespoke user experience. I personally think this is going to be a strong strand in publishing and consumption of news in the digital space.”

Correction: This article was updated at 2:40pm to state that Conde Nast titles had pulled ads from certain titles; Conde did not, as previously stated, break off the relationship.

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In case you missed it, here’s Flipboard’s explanation and demonstration of its new capabilities:

It’s not if, but when

Now don’t get me wrong, Flipboard is no Facebook. Its 50 million-ish user base isn’t particularly active  (though I estimate only around 4 million are active, based on ratios from previous public statements). Not yet, anyway. And thank God, or the media/publishing industry would likely have a significant crisis on its hands, as opposed to one that’s somewhat in the distance still.

The reality the publishing needs to understand, though, is that Flipboard has (smartly) maneuvered itself into a powerful position. With the flick of a switch, it could deal a serious blow not only to the traditional old media but also to a variety of digital platforms – Tumblr, Flickr, WordPress, among others – as it pivots from purely curation-based interaction to one that offers users full-blown creation abilities. Indeed, this is likely its only future, since without the agreement of the major content creators, Flipboard would be little more than a collection of Tweets and blog posts.

It’s about money

Currently the ad model Flipboard is using is fine, but it’s fair to say it’s not setting anyone’s world on fire. That could change in a heartbeat, though, if the magazines Regular Joes create take off and real readerships are built. Could the next powerhouse of media come from a bedroom in Delaware?

It’s safe to assume then that the company is actively exploring revenue paths behind closed doors right now: micropayments, revenue-share or even subscriptions. Imagine consumers subscribing to read other consumer-curated magazines, or locking down content only to be opened like mag apps are now, or as in-app purchases per gaming, or even geo-location apps (Grindr). At the end of the day, though, it’s crucial to note that Flipboard has what no other publisher does: love from Apple, and quite possibly the credit card numbers that go with that love.

It’s about attention

Bless anyone in the media for not believing that this move hasn’t just made their job far harder. A reminder: You’ve just received yet another huge set of competitors vying for the same eyeballs you covet. If history is anything to go by, most people already feel quite satisfied parsing news (á la Google News) so this shift should be sending chills of terror through professional curators like editors and writers. After all, going big is likely only a creative ad campaign away for Flipboard.

Another major feature that news reports of Flipboard’s update typically neglected to mention is the bookmarklet capability. The idea is that readers don’t even have to be on Flipboard to still add content, from anywhere on the web. Awesome for users, existentially terrifying (and awesome) for the media.

Content creation is coming

So what to do? True, full-featured content creation capabilities are doubtless coming to Flipboard. How aggressive Flipboard moves in that area will be interesting, as the company obviously has to be careful about biting the hand that feeds it. (In fact several publishers have already pulled back from the partnerships, choosing instead to focus on their own apps). The only way for publishers and the media to fight back then will be to remove articles from the system, or cut a deal. However, I have said it before and I’ll say it again: No paywall will ever be truly successful unless all the competition is paywalled, too.

Either way, we have a glimpse of a possible future and it’s both beautiful and terrifying. For those unconvinced of the power and implications of what I’m talking about, take a minute to check out the custom @themediaisdying magazine that I cobbled together in precisely 33 seconds and you’ll see what I mean. Now imagine what happens when tens of millions of people start doing the same.

Paul Armstrong is owner of Digital Orange Consulting; follow him at www.paularmstrong.net or on Twitter @TheMediaIsDying.

Have an idea for a post you’d like to contribute to GigaOm? Click here for our guidelines and contact info.

Photo courtesy Ri han/Shutterstock.com.

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Some aren’t so sure. Vibhu Norby thinks Yahoo shareholders need an explanation because the math doesn’t make sense — $30 million for two engineers, a founder and dubious control of intellectual property. But hey, this is the same company that hired a guy as its CEO who had made up his resume. Emin Guen Sirer doesn’t pull any punches in his dismissal of the deal. Can D’Aloisio inject some minty-fresh thinking into the company?

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Flipping the magazine world:  Flipboard packed a few potentially disruptive features inside its latest update. The company announced the Flip It! button this week, which will allow users to collect articles, images, videos, and songs from Flipboard content, RSS feeds, and social streams and curate them in their own digital “magazines” right inside Flipboard, with the best ones being featured by the company.

The atomization of content continues, and we are seeing further disintegration of the magazine brands and the content they create. When I see this move, I see a Netflix-like effort to build a packaged service on top of existing content creators.  Not only that, but Flipboard has also said that it will adopt a layer of e-commerce in the near future, making Flipboard a one-stop shop for consumption, bookmarking and social sharing. (Please sign up for the Om Says magazine, while you are at it.)

T-Mobile says contracts are stupid:  And since we’re on the subject of disruption, T-Mobile is hoping to step out of the shadows and “rattle the cage” of the wireless industry. CEO John Legere introduced the company’s new “un-carrier” moniker, which means T-Mobile will do away with phone subsidies, and will offer plans and phones untethered — including the iPhone 5 — starting April 12. While that may incite a guttural “hallelujah!” from the depths of your 24-month-contract-abhorring soul, you should make sure the switch is worth it, both in cost and coverage.

By the way, if you are switching from AT&T, then your iPhone 5 is going to work with T-Mobile’s LTE (but not 3G) network.

You can choose to buy your device outright and enjoy contract-free usage till the cows come home, or plop down a smaller chunk of change and pay off your phone over the course of 20 months, rendering the balance if you choose to leave T-Mobile before then. Not exactly a contract in way we’re accustomed to, but still a pretty short leash. T-Mobile also lags behind the competition in fast wireless speeds, but the company is finally dropping its LTE service on seven cities across the nation, with more being rolled out in the coming year. Still, there are many questions left to be answered: Are T-Mobile’s offerings enticing enough to get you to switch? Was John’s new cool-guy wardrobe a hit? What will T-Mobile girl Carley Foulkes do now that she’s been handed her pink slip?

Two Kinds of Cyber Warfare: We all wish that time would slow down a bit, but the Internet? Not so much. The biggest cyberattack in history took place this week, causing slowness for users around the globe. It’s suspected that a group called Cyberbunker targeted their 300 billion-bits-per-second DDoS attack at The Spamhaus, a spam-fighting group with which it’s had a long running feud.

If that’s not enough, a trio of divers was busted for allegedly trying to cut through undersea Internet cables just off Alexandria, Egypt. If those cuts had been carried out, it would have made things even worse by crippling the web access for entire continents. Though both attacks were thwarted, it makes you wonder if hand tools with sharp edges are still a bigger threat than zombie PC’s.

And here are some stories you might have missed this week:

• Someday, advertisers might be able to skip all that pesky market research and simply use their brainwaves to deliver targeted ads in real time. Sounds fun, right?
• More advertising is coming, and there is nothing you can do about it. “The question for brands will change from “How many fans or followers do you have?” to “Whom do you want to reach?” writes AdAge.
• The San Francisco Bay Bridge will be lit up with over 20,000 LEDs for the next two years. Here’s a look behind the project.
• Will Google Glass follow the path of most innovations and totally tank the first time around?
• The rise of the noUI. Simply a brilliant and must read article.
• We are happy to report that coffee is, in fact, nectar of the Gods.

Read this and other in-depth articles on GigaOM’s Flipboard channel

As we tried to point out in our post, Flipboard’s new version is more than just an evolution, it’s a significant departure from what the service was all about. Until now, it has been about making it easy to discover and consume content from multiple sources, but the new features are all about turning readers into publishers — by giving them curation tools like those used by Flipboard’s own editors.

When advertisers become publishers

Flipboard’s move may seem like an obvious step, and one which combines some of the appeal of services like Pinterest or Tumblr. But depending on how Flipboard decides to proceed with these features, they could be very disruptive indeed. Here’s a couple of ways they could do that:

1) Advertising: Flipboard’s curation and publishing tools are not just for individual users, but corporations, existing publishers and brands — and one overlooked element of the launch is that Flipboard is building e-commerce functionality into the app. Chief technology officer Eric Feng said some advertisers are already creating their own magazines using both their own ads and content from other sources. Those magazines could then be selected and highlighted by Flipboard’s algorithms just like any other effort by a Flipboard user.

We’ve written a lot about the phenomenon of “native” advertising (and will be talking more about it at our paidContent Live conference on April 17 in New York) as well as related concepts like sponsored content and what some call “brand journalism.” The idea is that brands and advertisers now have all of the same tools that traditional publishers used to have a monopoly on — that is, the ability to create and distribute interesting content and reach audiences directly. If a brand can curate content itself, and have its own ads with e-commerce features built in, why does it need a traditional magazine?

Revenue sharing with curators

2) Revenue: Flipboard already has some partnerships with media companies in which it gets to use more of their content directly in the app (instead of showing just short excerpts and then a “web view” in a browser) in return for a share of advertising revenue. When I asked Eric Feng whether Flipboard might consider doing a revenue share with individual users if they create compelling magazines from curated content, he said “that is something we are thinking about doing at some point in the future.” That’s not a promise, but it’s still an interesting idea, and potentially very disruptive in a number of ways.

If Flipboard provides the content and the tools, and the users who curate that content are generating a lot of value in terms of pageviews or “likes,” or whatever metric you want to use, shouldn’t those users get some benefit? Where this gets problematic is how Flipboard decides who gets what share of the revenue. If the ads come from a traditional media outlet, do they get the largest share or does Flipboard? And if media companies don’t want to play ball, does Flipboard just monetize their content anyway, the way Huffington Post and other aggregators do?

The idea that advertisers now have many of the same tools as publishers and traditional media companies do, and that readers and consumers of content also have much more power over that content than they used to, are two pretty inescapable facts about the new media landscape — and Flipboard has just staked a claim to some significant territory on both of those fronts.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock / JJ Studio and Shutterstock / Eldorado3D

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Chief technology officer Eric Feng said in an interview prior to the launch of the new version that this is much more than just an evolution of Flipboard — it’s a major push into a whole new area, namely curation and publishing of content by individual users. “It’s one of the most ambitious efforts we have ever undertaken,” said the former CTO of Hulu. “It’s been more than 18 months since the inception of the idea, so this is a pretty big deal for us. We were originally focused on discovery and filtering of content, but now we are moving into curation in a big way.”

Flipboard has always had curated topics such as technology and sports, where the service uses a combination of human editors and algorithms — based on frequency of sharing and other metrics — to highlight specific content. In effect, the new tools allow any Flipboard user to take on the same role as an editor and create their own magazine around a topic, and share it with other users.

Reader magazines get promoted in Flipboard

In a nutshell, users with the new features (which are available only for iPhone and iPad currently, but will appear in an Android version soon, according to the company) can simply click a “plus” sign next to a blog post or article they are reading — as well as any video or audio content that appears in their stream — and add that piece of content or “flip it into” to a magazine, which will then be available to them or any other user who searches for that topic.

And Flipboard isn’t just giving users that ability within the app: the service is also launching a bookmarklet that will allow users to pull in content from anywhere on the web — whether it’s a blog post, a news website or Twitter and Facebook — and add it to their custom-created magazine. In a sense, Flipboard is trying to capitalize on the same curatorial impulse that makes people create collections about specific topics on Pinterest or re-blog photos on Tumblr, and in many ways this move is a shot across the bow of those other services.

It’s also clearly a threat to the existing publishing industry, since a Flipboard user can now create their own custom publication using the content that comes from dozens of different magazines, blogs, websites and other sources. So Flipboard is trying to bring publishers in as well and get them to create their own custom magazines — such as a magazine about the Beatles created with archival content from Rolling Stone. It has even built e-commerce functionality into the app so users can click and buy directly from within an article or ad.

But the most subversive aspect of the new features from a media-industry point of view is that they can be used by anyone — including advertisers. If an advertiser can create their own magazine by pulling in their own editorial content as well as content from other sources, and build e-commerce functionality into it, then it gives new meaning to the idea of brands as publishers and media entities.

Bringing users into the editorial process

The new version of the app will have a section called “By Our Readers” in the table of contents, which will include a mix of magazines that have been created by users on a variety of topics — a small group of beta testers (including GigaOM) have had access to this function for several months. As with the other Flipboard sections, some of the magazines that are highlighted will be chosen based on the number of times they have been shared, and others will be chosen by editors.

Like most news-aggregation and recommendation apps such as Pulse and Zite (which is owned by CNN), Flipboard users have always had the ability to share specific stories or items, but the new magazine-creation features effectively allow a user to spend some time creating a collection of content they can then share all at once. Feng used the example of an editor who is getting married soon and created an entire magazine with content about weddings.

In a way, the new version of the app also picks up where Google Reader and other RSS services left off. Instead of just passively consuming text and photos in a chronological timeline or series of folders, Flipboard turns everything into part of a magazine-style experience. According to Feng, many users have already imported their Google Reader feeds into the app, and those feeds will be available once Google sunsets the service in July.

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Instead, Google’s making the choice for me: As of July 1, Google Reader will be no more. “While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined,” the company wrote on its blog. I’d bet that journalists are among the most loyal followers of all, and this morning we are a very unhappy bunch. “Google Reader” is the number-one trending topic on Twitter right now.

Haven't heard that many people swear in our office in a long time.—
Janko Roettgers (@jank0) March 14, 2013

The loss of Google Reader could change the way a lot of web journalists, like me, do our jobs. Here are some of the reasons we love the service — and why there’s an opportunity for other companies to step up and serve us (assuming we’re not somehow able to convince Google to keep Reader alive…we’ll even pay for it!).

I use Google Reader more than any single web site or app save Gmail. I’ll really, really miss it—
Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) March 14, 2013

Twitter isn’t a substitute for RSS…

The best thing about Google Reader, from my point of view, is that it allows me to scan a lot of information quickly, with the assurance that I’m not missing anything. That’s why, for me, it fills a completely different role than the (equally useful) Twitter does. Twitter provides a snapshot of a moment in time, and you’re likely to miss tweets as they whiz by; Google Reader stores everything. The search on Google Reader is also vastly better than the search on Twitter, and it goes back indefinitely.

@glecharles Twitter is real-time for me and RSS is asynchronous–there's no way one could replace the other.—
Nancy Foasberg (@nfoasberg) March 14, 2013

…and neither is Flipboard

Services like Flipboard are great if you want to see the most popular stories on a given topic. But as someone who really geeks out digital book publishing, I don’t just want to see the stories that an aggregator recommends for me because they’ve reached a critical mass. I want to keep up with the little blogs, the niche blogs that rarely surface but that do occasionally pick up on some story or emerging trend that I would simply have never learned about otherwise. Google Reader helps me keep track of what’s going on at the roots of my beat. I choose the sources I’ll follow there, and I know that I won’t miss out on one of their stories. I trust Flipboard (kind of) to link me to some big political or tech story, but I don’t trust it to “discover” the nitty-gritty stuff for me, and for good reason: It doesn’t.

Google Reader impact also undercounted if you strictly look at # users bec many power-curators/sharers use it as a discovery system—
Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) March 14, 2013

In addition, Flipboard is a lean-back kind of service. I use it when I want to curl up and read. In the mornings when I’m looking for stories, I don’t want to tap through a pretty magazine-like interface on my iPad. I just want to scan headlines and text fast, and I want to do it on my laptop.

So what’s next?

Now that the panic’s subsiding a little bit, it looks as if viable alternatives to Google Reader are going to emerge. In fact, Instapaper’s Marco Arment actually thinks the closure of Reader could be a good thing for people who rely on RSS: “We’ll be forced to fill the hole that Reader will leave behind…We’re finally likely to see substantial innovation and competition in RSS desktop apps and sync platforms for the first time in almost a decade.”

Alternatives are sure to pop up in coming days. Search Engine Marketing Land has a big list here. Digg is apparently working on a Reader-like service. Feedly and Reeder, two apps that integrate with Google Reader, have already promised that they won’t die off just because the service does. “A lot of Google Reader users use their reader as a research/curation tool and need to be able to crunch through a lot of articles very fast,” Feedly wrote on its blog Thursday morning — and explained how customers can use Feedly to do just that. Reeder also tweeted that it’s staying in business, though it hasn’t explained how yet.

Bigger revelation: Google built a service that you configure with all your interests and biases. They couldn’t make it profitable.—
  (@macdrifter) March 14, 2013

“I think that there is still a lot of value a service like Reader could provide — particularly in a world with increasing information overload coming us from many different sources,” Brian Shih, a former Google Reader product manager, writes on Quora. “But Reader at Google was pigeonholed as an RSS-reader explicitly, and didn’t have a chance to grow beyond that to explore that space.” Similarly, Chris Wetherell, an early creator of Google Reader, told Om that the service missed early monetization opportunities that other companies still might be able to tap into.

The good news for journalists and others who rely on Google Reader is that, while Google clearly doesn’t see a business opportunity in the legions of Reader fans, other companies do. And over the next couple of months, they’re going to be competing for our business.

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Pulse is one of a number of news-recommendation apps that try to apply algorithms and other filters to suggest content to users — a group that includes Zite (which was acquired by CNN in 2011) as well as News360, Flipboard and Prismatic. Pulse was one of the first to make a big splash, in part because Apple founder Steve Jobs mentioned it on stage during the launch of the original iPad, and also because the New York Times accused the company of copyright infringement for aggregating its content.

Since its launch, Pulse has grown to the point where it has about 20 million users, but it’s still seen by many as a runner-up to Flipboard in the news-recommendation market, so an acquisition in the $100-million range would likely make sense for the company and its backers.

LinkedIn is becoming a media network

For LinkedIn, meanwhile, the purchase of a service that aggregates and recommends content from a wide variety of news sources would be an interesting extension of its recent moves to bulk up the media side of its business. When the company first launched its LinkedIn Today service — which aggregated news based on which links were shared within a user’s network of contacts — it seemed to some (including me) like a side project designed to primarily to drive traffic to the site, which was mostly being used as a place to store a resume or connect with potential employers.

Since then, however, the company has made a number of other efforts on the content side that are more ambitious — directed by former Fortune magazine staffer Dan Roth — such as the launch of the Influencers program, in which the site gets prominent personalities such as Richard Branson and Reid Hoffman to blog about topics of interest to its users. In many ways, this is analogous to what alternative blogging platforms like Medium and Svbtle have been doing (and WordPress seems to be interested in doing as well). (see disclosure)

So what could LinkedIn do with something like Pulse? Peter Kafka of All Things Digital has one idea, based on a video that Dan Roth made for a Fortune app that had LinkedIn integration — so that users could see who they were connected to at a specific company that was mentioned in the news. But while this might be useful to some, it seems a lot less interesting than using it as a kind of extension of LinkedIn Today: in other words, a way of recommending content that would target users based on their interests.

It’s all about the “interest graph”

As we’ve tried to explain a number of times, this kind of “interest graph” targeting is the holy grail for both content companies and social networks. It’s the reason why Facebook is constantly tweaking its news feed, and why Twitter is pouring resources into improving recommendation filters like its Discover tab and other features — and why Google is trying so hard to get people to share and “plus one” more content through its Google+ network.

If there’s one overwhelming reality of the digital age, it’s that we are all to some extent drowning in content from an ever-growing range of sources, and we all spend an increasing amount of time trying to filter out the noise and find the signal. LinkedIn has a large and growing graph of the social-network connections between people based on their work — a graph some believe could make the company an acquisition for someone like Bloomberg — and that could potentially be very valuable for users.

So a LinkedIn-Pulse combination might start as a version of the app that functions almost exactly like the current version, but also tracks content shared by a user’s business-related graph from LinkedIn, and then grows into a larger service incorporated into the site itself. And data from such a service would likely also be very interesting to Pulse partners like the Wall Street Journal, who use the app as a secondary method of distribution and subscription revenue.

And if such a deal does end up happening, of course, a LinkedIn purchase of Pulse would be just another example of a non-media company (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, etc.) establishing a powerful foothold in an area of the business that has traditionally belonged to newspapers and magazines.

Disclosure: Automattic, the developer of WordPress, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / noporn and Arvind Grover

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So who exactly is going to organize the web’s information into a digestible format? That’s still TBD. Flipboard and Zite and Prismatic are just a few solutions (if you look beyond my beloved Google Reader to social, iPad-oriented apps), but they haven’t necessarily won the market yet. Flipboard announced in August that it’s been gaining traction, but that still only translates to 20 million total users, compared to Twitter’s 200 million active users. So the social reader market remains an interesting one to watch.

And one of those apps to watch is Thirst, which is relaunching its product Tuesday as a social reader for news. The company’s first product was more of a social reader for tweets, organizing the ones you missed in a new format. While that product was interesting, it definitely did not jibe with Twitter’s new API restrictions, and Thirst announced it would expand into other types of content after presenting at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference.

Rather than shuffle tweets, the new Thirst app instead tries to do what most social readers do: it presents with you the most popular news stories of the day, lets you select topics and categories that interest you, and read articles within the app. The big question is still traction and users, obviously — you need friends using the app to make sharing and commenting interesting, and your users have to be willing to declare their interests and set up the app. These are significant hurdles, no doubt.

But one of my favorite features in the app is the ability to like or comment on articles, which is reminiscent of the old function on Google Reader where you could like and comment on articles among your friends. Google unfortunately axed the feature despite user protest in favor of rolling out its social product in Google+. It’s smart that Thirst would model that feature in hopes of capturing some of the enthusiasm that the old Google Reader did.

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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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