Crunchies, Anyone?

On January 18^th, 2008 an all-star award show took place at the elegant Herbst Theater in San Francisco. Winners who walked the runway to receive their award statues weren’t movie stars or songbirds, but a new breed of Beautiful People: Favorite Web 2.0 innovators selected by the internet community using website voting.

The event, called the Crunchies 2007, was a collaborative effort among the tech blogs GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat and TechCrunch. It was hailed as their “first annual competition and award ceremony to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year.” We’ll provide some more details about these Web 2.0 favorites in future Tips.

And the winners are….

Best Overall site or product 2007: Facebook
Best technology innovation/achievement: Earthmine
Best bootstrapped startup: Techmeme
Best new gadget/ device: Apple 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 site: Digg
Best video startup: Hulu
Best clean tech start-up: Tesla Motors
Best use of viral marketing: StumbleUpon
Best time sink site: Kongregate
Most likely to make the world a better place: DonorsChose
Most likely to succeed: Automattic (WordPress)
Best startup founder: Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
Best startup CEO: Toni Schneider (Automattic)
Best new startup of 2007: iMedix