The Crunchies: And the winners are...

Last night the San Francisco Web 2.0 crowd filled the high society Herbst Theatre for the Crunchies, a people's choice award program hosted by my friends from TechCrunch, GigaOm, Venture Beat and ReadWriteWeb. You can watch a replay of the event here, courtesy of Mogulus.

The winners were thankfully limited to 30-second acceptance speeches, and The Richter Scales performed their now famous (in the echo chamber) "Here comes another bubble" live. The funniest moment of the evening (video here) came from Dan Lyons, also known as Fake Steve Jobs, who accepted the award for best gadget (the iPhone) in lieu of Apple sending anyone to pick up the statue. Incredibly cool, as Steve Jobs might say.

I added to the festivities, interviewing the hosts, Mike Arrington and Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch, Om Malik of GigaOm, Matt Marshall of Venture Beat and Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb, about what bubbled up as trends or "ahas" after looking at thousands of products in the process of narrowing down the choices before the popular vote commenced.

I went camera-less to the event, so photos to come from others clicking away. Here are some shots of the winners.

And the winners are:

Best Overall: Facebook Best technology innovation/achievement: Earthmine Best Clean Tech Startup: Tesla Motors Best video startup: Hulu Best user-generated content site: Digg Best mobile start-up: Twitter Best International startup: Netvibes Best consumer startup: Meebo Best enterprise startup: Zoho Best design: SmugMug Best new gadget/ device: Apple iPhone Best business model: Zazzle Best bootstrapped startup: Techmeme Best Startup Founder: Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) Best Startup CEO: Toni Schneider (Automattic) Best new startup: iMedix Most likely to succeed: Automattic (WordPress) Best use of viral marketing: StumbleUpon Best time sink site: Kongregate Most likely to make the world a better place: DonorsChoose