Revealed: the finalists for the 2012 Crunchies

Tom Krazit — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 18:00:44 +0000

The finalists for the 2012 Crunchies have been released, and now it’s time to decide who should rewarded for their technology innovation and leadership over the course of 2012.

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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Daily deals dead? Zulily says no, raises $85M from Andreessen

Ryan Kim — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 23:29:42 +0000

Daily deals are supposed to be dying, at least as far as watchers of Groupon and Living Social are concerned. But Zulily, a deals site for moms, babies and kids, hasn’t seemed to notice. And nor has Andreessen Horowitz, which is investing $85 million in Zulily’s Series D round of funding.

Zulily said it now has 10 million members who come every day to check out more than 35 sales events. Sales are announced each morning in an email and last around 72 hours. The company also just launched an iPad app, which is important because Zulily now gets 30 percent of its sales on mobile devices.

But aren’t daily deals doomed? Well, not if you believe Andreessen Horowitz partner Jeff Jordan, who said Zulily is positioned for even more growth ahead as a leader in “ecommerce 2.0.” He wrote in a blog post that the company plays in big markets and is very efficient but doesn’t go head-to-head with Amazon. Instead, it works with designers who don’t have national distribution and creates a long-tail catalog of products similar to Fab.

Zulily isn’t a traditional daily deal site, it’s more of a mix with a flash sales site like Gilt. And it doesn’t seem to be slowing down. The company previously raised $53.6 million including $43 million last year at a reported $700 million valuation. Earlier on Thursday, Fortune reported that Zulily was now valued at $1 billion though that was based on a report that the company was raising $100 million.

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Revealed: the finalists for the 2012 Crunchies

Daily deals dead? Zulily says no, raises $85M from Andreessen