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Thank you to everyone who attended the first Crunchies event last night to honor startups in categories ranging from “best business model” to “best time sink” (pictured right is Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic/Wordpress, showing off his award for Best CEO).

If you were not one of the 900+ people to attend the event live last night in San Francisco, you can watch a video of the entire event that Mogulus recorded here. People are still uploading photos, but you can see them on Flickr under the tag “2007crunchies.”

Congratulations to all of the winners, as well as all of the nominees. It is my honor to have covered most of them since they’ve launched, and to see how well they’ve done is awesome.

And thank you to our co-producers, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat. Having this be a multi-blog event was an important step, and shows how blogs can compete hard for stories and still come together to collaborate when it is good for the community.

Media Coverage

Lots of blog coverage continues to roll in. Mainstream media was also all over the event. Alice radio, which hosts the no. 1 local morning show, kicked things off with two on air mentions. ABC and Fox covered the show locally and ABC also covered it nationally during the 11 pm news (see video clips above). NBC also covered the event - we’re uploading clips now.

AFP here.
“Friday’s event was the first glitzy Internet start-up love-fest in San Francisco since the Webby Awards began here in 1996 during the famous dot-com boom.”

Highlights

The highlight of the event for me was the best gadget category. John Biggs from CrunchGear recorded an overview video that was a crowd pleaser (see video below).

Apple won the award for the iPhone. But we simply could not get anyone from Apple to attend and accept the award. Fake Steve Jobs stepped in and recorded a video accepting for them. I’ve seen the video at least a dozen times now, and laugh harder every time I watch it:

The live performance by the Richter Scales of their Here Comes Another Bubble song was another highlight. I wish we could have ended with them, but their schedule forced them to go very early in the show:

Thank You

Thank you to the sponsors of the 2007 Crunchies who are underwriting the event and making it possible to recognize outstanding contributions in our industry. Award Benefactors: Adobe, Charles River Ventures, The Founders Fund, The Mayfield Fund, Microsoft, Our Stage and Sun Microsystems. Thank you also to our Program Sponsors, including Ask, Framr (an ecommerce start-up offering custom picture framing, launching tonight), Lotus Vodka, Intel Capital, Lehman Brothers, Meevee, RealTimeMatrix’s Vortex, Searchles, our official live streaming partner of the night Mogulus, our official ticketing sponsor amiando, WeBreakStuff for design and MediaTemple for hosting.

And thanks as well to everyone who worked hard on the event from the participating blogs. In particular, Heather Harde, our CEO, put in a heroic effort to get everything in place moments before the event began, and the teams from all four blogs really pitched with multiple all-nighters the last couple of days in to make the night go well. Special thanks to video blogger Sarah Meyers for giving us three straight days of her time to work through all of the video work for the event.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Most of the team will be in San Francisco today preparing for the Crunchies at 7:30 pm. We’ll have light news coverage and a couple of updates throughout the day around the ceremony and party afterwards (we’re still trying to fit yet more people in based on the fire codes - we’re adding tickets to inventory here as we can) and we’ll likely give away a free pair of tickets in the early afternoon.

We have a lot of surprises in store…and yes, we are almost certainly going to be able to live stream the event on the participating blogs (VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb and GigaOm) with technology and support provided by Mogulus.

Stay tuned…

For those of you coming: Be at the Herbst Theater by 7 pm. Directions are linked on the right sidebar, here.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Reader voting on the Crunchies awards ends at midnight tonight PST, about an hour and a half from now. We’ve had over 100,000 votes, but some of the races are very, very close.

The winners will be announced next week at the Crunchies event. The first two batches of tickets sold out right away. The third set goes on sale tomorrow at 11 am PST. This might be the last group of tickets for sale, depending on how many of the reserve tickets are taken by press and nominated startups.

More information on the event is here.

Update: Voting is now closed.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Tickets for the Crunchies startup awards ceremony and party, which will be held on January 18 in San Francisco, are available now for purchase. The event will be held at the Herbst Theatre at 7:30 p.m. and will be followed by a party. This event is being produced by Read/WriteWeb, Venture Beat, GigaOm and TechCrunch.

We’ve got a number of surprises that we’ll be announcing over the next couple of weeks. The first - in addition to the startup awards, Richter Scales will be singing their famous (infamous?) Here Comes Another Bubble song live at the event.

Over 45,000 votes have been cast for 100 startups in 20 award categories. Who’ll win? That will be a closely held secret until the night of the event. Voting goes through midnight pst, January 10.

Details:

• Friday, January 18, 2008 at 7:30 pm
• Herbst Theater, San Francisco
• Festive attire welcome. After-party to follow.
• Tickets are available here, hosted courtesy of amiando.

The Herbst Theater has 916 seats, so we have just 450 general admission tickets in the balcony and dress circle to release for the event. Tickets are $40, and $10 from each ticket will be contributed to the American Heart Association in honor of Om Malik and in memory of Marc Orchant. The balance of the tickets are reserved for the 100 finalist companies, press and corporate sponsors. If you are interested in orchestra seats as an event sponsor, please contact Jeannie Logozzo. Sponsorship packages range from entry-level event tickets to sponsorship of specific award categories, and all creative combinations in between.

Thank you to the sponsors of the 2007 Crunchies who are underwriting the event and making it possible to recognize outstanding contributions in our industry. Award Benefactors: Adobe, Charles River Ventures, The Mayfield Fund, Microsoft, Our Stage and Sun Microsystems. Thank you also to our Program Sponsors, including amiando our official ticketing sponsor, WeBreakStuff for design and MediaTemple for hosting.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

On Thursday we announced that we are holding a “primary” that includes each 2008 presidential candidate. We are asking readers to vote based on the candidate’s positions on ten key technology related issues.

I talked with CBS news on Wednesday (clip is here) to announce the project. On Thursday morning, I spoke with Ross McGowan from the San Francisco Fox affiliate station as well. The clip is above.

Read up on the candidates’ positions on the ten key tech issues and vote for the candidate you prefer at primaries.techcrunch.com. We’ll announce our endorsements prior to Super Tuesday on February 5, 2008. You can also review the podcasts and interviews that we’ve done directly with five candidates so far: Barack Obama, John McCain, John Edwards, Mitt Romney and Mike Gravel.

By the way: TV is hard. It’s very new for me. And it is, of course, a lot different from blogging where you can think, write, edit, etc. And both of these interviews were done at the crack of dawn, when I am normally going to bed.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Our series of podcasts and interviews with the 2008 presidential candidates continue - so far we’ve spoken to Barack Obama, John McCain, John Edwards, Mitt Romney and Mike Gravel. We are in active scheduling discussions with all of the remaining candidates.

Now it’s time to endorse a candidate from each party as having the most interesting and effective positions on technology issues.

We no longer live in an industrial economy - the future is information and the Internet. Our president must carefully consider her or his policies on key tech issues, something they’ve never really had to do before. What is their position on net neutrality? How will they bridge the digital divide? How do we handle technology sales to China and other countries using that technology to perpetrate human rights abuses? Should the Internet be taxed? How do we curb identity theft on the Internet? What is the future of intellectual property protection? How do we handle immigration issues for tech workers? How do we catch up with the rest of the world in the mobile Internet space? And what will we do to encourage research and productization in renewable energy?

These are issues that get little attention from mainstream press (with the exception of renewable energy policies), but we think that they deserve to be considered as part of this election. Technology workers in Silicon Valley and elsewhere tend to donate a lot of money and time to campaigns, and they are more frequent voters than the average cititzen. The candidate’s positions on technology and related issues impact how they spend their time, money and votes.

Please help us choose two candidates to endorse in advance of Super Tuesday. See how each candidate falls on the issues, and vote for who you think would make the best Tech President, at primaries.techcrunch.com. And thanks to webreakstuff for building out the site for us.

We announced this yesterday to some major media outlets and got a great response. I was interviewed by ABC News (clip above) to talk about the podcasts and the endorsement yesterday. Today I spoke on Fox News as well (the clip will be up shortly). You can also read ABC’s coverage here.

Note that some of the campaigns (particularly Ron Paul) picked up on this yesterday from ABC’s coverage and started talking to their constituents about it. So some of the early results are skewed heavily towards those candidates. I expect over the next few days for the results to become more normalized.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

So tonight’s the big night for our first MeetUp in Boston, with co-host IDG Ventures Boston. Doors open at The Estate, 1 Bolyston Place at 6 pm. Party ends at 11 pm (see info below about the drinking-focused after party). Please bring your IDs for ticket verification.

Here are a few highlights of what to expect:
We are working with Brightcove to host a variety of video interviews with meetup attendees. I will be doing a series of interviews with technology founders/CEOs. Thanks to Chris Brogan for producing the video segments. We’ll be adding the video posts using the Brightcove player on the dedicated Boston MeetUp page.

SnapYap will be live videoblogging the meetup. They will also be opening up invitations to their new Video Calling feature for the first 1,000 users that sign up through this link. Try it out!

Attendees will also be enjoying an array of interactive games and contests with cash and prize giveaways: ZoomInfo is raffling off a Nintendo Wii, Moola is giving away $5,000 cash to the winner of an online game and Poker Creations is hosting an interactive poker tournament with cool prizes all night long.

After Hours with TechCrunch: We’ve also decided to continue our social networking at a nearby pub when we’re done at The Estate at 11 pm. Please join us at MJ O’Connor’s, 27 Columbus Avenue at Park Plaza. We’ll keep a tab open until the TechCrunch credit card gives out. Drink your Red Bull today so you can stay up with us!

Thank You Sponsors
We’re incredibly grateful to our nineteen event sponsors who are making tonight’s Boston MeetUp possible.

Please take a few minutes to learn about the services of our hosts on our dedicated Boston MeetUp page and here.

Event Co-Host:
IDG Ventures Boston: early-stage venture capital firm with $280 million under management. The firm is focused on investing in consumer, information and life sciences technology companies. IDGVB portfolio companies that will be represented at TechCrunch MeetUp Boston include Acinion, BzzAgent, go2 Media, GuildCafe, Infobright, Mall Networks, MOBIVOX, SimpleTuition, Transpera and VidSys.

Partner and Product Launch Sponsors:

Brightcove: the market-leading Internet TV platform, used by media businesses around the world to distribute and monetize direct-to-consumer, broadband video programming.

Moola: has created a “Massively Multi-player Rewards Game” (MMRG) that is half loyalty program and half super-jackpot game show with 175,000+ member community.

Mzinga: provides workplace and customer community solutions that transform business processes to produce a more energized workforce, greater customer loyalty, and positive bottom line impact.

OurStage: is the only purely democratic online competition where the fans decide who’s the best in emerging music, film and video.

TripAdvisor: is used 25 million people each month to start their travel plans and who are pioneering the next generation of online travel guides.

ZoomInfo: a business information search engine used to quickly find information about 3.5 million companies and 40 million business people.

Communications Sponsor
PerkettPR, Inc.: provides results-based communications solutions for emerging Web 2.0 companies and established technology leaders.

Product Sponsors
Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment: is intelligently connecting gamers on a massive scale with its innovative Social Networks at Play™ (SNAP) games.

CoreBlox: is all about enabling people to easily locate and exchange information.

NowHound: is the Internet’s first live-media search, and is launching out of stealth mode tonight during the TechCrunch Boston Meetup.

Power Play Development Corporation is the parent company of Poker Creations, a gaming software development company and National League of Poker, the Internet’s leading poker-centric social media portal.

MyPunchbowl: is a new website for event and party planning with unique features such as: “Pick a Date”, “Save the Date”, “Party Checklist” and more.

SnapYap: is an exciting new suite of live video communications tools, the first of which is launching during the TechCrunch Boston Meetup.

Event Sponsors
Prism VentureWorks: is a Westwood, MA and Santa Monica, CA based venture capital firm built by experienced entrepreneurs in technology and life sciences with approximately $1.25 billion in capital under management across five funds.

You Be the VC: equal parts incubator and American Idol, is a competition to find the best new entrepreneurs in the U.S.

We’d like to also thank Memo Media for making us and our sponsors shine in the digital signage displayed at the meetup; Gary Vaynerchuk at Wine Library TV for supplying our delicious wine for the evening; and EventBrite for seamless ticket managment for MeetUp attendees.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Can't see the video? Click here

Just five days until TechCrunch40 next week in San Francisco. As of right now we have 27 tickets remaining, which means it should sell out sometime tomorrow afternoon and registrations will be cut off. There will be approximately 900 people at the conference, which is about double what we had originally planned (and hoped for).

Forty companies are preparing to launch products (actually, 39, but more on that below) in front of the full audience and panel of experts, and will compete for the $50,000 prize. An additional hundred startups will be showing their products in the demo stations. On top of that, Yahoo and AOL will be launching products at the event, and we have keynote sessions with Marc Andreessen, David Filo, Chad Hurley, Michael Moritz and Mark Zuckerberg. Jason Calacanis has been coaching startups at Sequoia Capital over the last few days to perfect the demos.

As I said above, we actually only have 39 startup launches planned. The last spot on stage on the last day will go the audience choice from the demo pit companies. Each attendee will be given two tokens (one for each day) to give to the demo pit companies they like best. Whoever gets the most tokens gets a spot on stage and is fully eligible to win the $50,000 prize.

I am really looking forward to the event, and I am absolutely humbled by the outpouring of enthusiasm we are receiving from companies and attendees . I’ve never been associated with a production of this size - there are literally thousands of moving pieces and any number of things can go wrong. There will undoubtedly be a hiccup or two during the conference, but with any luck all of the planning and hard work will pay off, forty startups will get the launch event they deserve and another hundred will get to show their stuff to nearly 1,000 people.

See you Monday! If you are attending, look for additional logistical details and announcements on the TechCrunch40 blog.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

I just returned from our party in central London to celebrate Seedcamp Week and the relaunch of TechCrunch UK & Ireland.

Robert Loch, who’s famous for his London parties, generously agreed to have the event at his penthouse London flat in Soho. His parties are so notorious (and I use that word intentionally) that we had to keep the location secret and only email it out to attendees who’d registered. Even so, 50 or so people showed up “off list” and were able to get in.

Total attendance was about 250 people, including most of the venture capitalists in London who invest in the Internet, most of the Seedcamp attendees and a ton of other entrepreneurs. Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis also dropped by for an hour or so.

One thing I need to remember for our next party - Londoners drink a lot more and stay out far later than their Silicon Valley geek counterparts. We actually ran out of alcohol completely at around 10:30 but Heather soon had another shipment brought in. I left at 1:30 am to get back to my day job. As far as I know the party is still going strong.

TechCrunch UK & Ireland Relaunches

The primary reason for the party was to celebrate the relaunch of TechCrunch UK & Ireland, after a nearly year-long hiatus. I am very pleased to announce the return of Mike Butcher as the editor of the site. Mike knows everyone in London - seriously - and he has deep experience writing about startups at The Financial Times, The Industry Standard and The Guardian, among other publications. We are very lucky to have him rejoin the TechCrunch team. Look for his coverage of Seedcamp on Friday morning London time.

See more coverage of the relaunch at The Guardian.

Thank You To Sponsors

Heather put the party together in a week after we nearly canceled due to a lack of an appropriate venue. Still, a number of sponsors stepped up to cover costs of the event and supplied excellent food and drink. Thank you to all. And special thanks to the Seedcamp team for working with us to organize and promote the party.

Event Sponsors:

Olswang is a leading law firm renowned for its work in media, communications, technology, real estate and more recently, biosciences. Founded in 1981, the firm has grown to a staff of more than 500 and has offices in London, the Thames Valley and Brussels. Olswang is organised with both a sector and service line focus, enabling it to deliver specialist legal advice backed by a strong business perspective.

WorldTV is an exciting, second generation video site offering a slick and user-friendly interface for online aggregation, personal archiving, search and viewing of multi-definition video content in Flash, including access to more than 25 million video clips from a range of popular, well known sites. The service lets users create their own full-screen online TV channel, complete with MTV style logo and all at a cool and easy-to-remember URL. Based in London and Limerick, Ireland, WorldTV will launch out of private beta in November, and is an idea from Smashing Concepts! - the UK ideas and incubation company.

Food & Drink Sponsors:

Thanks to Mucho Mas Burrittos (seven days old, founded by former Skype guys, better than Chipotle) and Hummus Brothers for feeding us, and Stormhoek for supplying the excellent wine for the event. The food and wine was awesome and you kept everyone appropriately fed and watered.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

More good news around the upcoming TechCrunch20 Conference in San Francisco this September: Ron Conway, Loic Le Meur and Sarah Lacy have agreed to join the Expert Panel, bringing the total number of experts who’ve agreed to participate to 16. The full list of experts is here.

The deadline to submit applications to launch a startup at the event ended last week - and we had over 600 submissions that we are reviewing now. If you are one of the companies that doesn’t make the cut into the twenty finalists, don’t worry. We’ve got a cool program that we’ll be announcing that will give you the opportunity to have a presence at the event.

The early bird registration discount ends on July 16.

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