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Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Crunchies Winners Announced

While the Crunchies award ceremony is in full swing at the historic Herbst Theater in downtown San Francisco, we've got the winners for you right here. Over 100,000 votes were cast, and many of the races were very tight, but in the end there can be only one winner (per category). So without further ado, the winners of the first annual Crunchies Awards are...

Best technology innovation / achievement

Best bootstrapped start-up



Best new gadget / device



Best business model


Best design


Best enterprise start-up


Best consumer start-up

Best mobile start-up

Best international start-up

Best user-generated content

Best video site

Best clean tech start-up

Best use of viral marketing

Best time sink site

Most likely to make the world a better place

Most likely to succeed

Best start-up founder

Mark Zuckerberg - Facebook


Image via the Guardian

Best start-up CEO

Toni Schneider - Auttomatic


Image via True Ventures

Best new start-up of 2007

Best overall


Be sure to watch the event streaming live via Mogulus. The Crunchies is a joint venture between TechCrunch, GigaOm, VentureBeat, and ReadWriteWeb.

Flock 1.1 Arrives in Two Weeks


Flock, the Social Web Browser, has announced that the Flock 1.1 beta will launch in just two weeks. The browser, built on Firefox code, is designed for social interaction on the web, with features built into the browser just for this purpose. Flock chose last week's Macworld conference to show off the new version. With the upcoming release, several new features will be added, including Yahoo and Gmail support, Picassa integration, and a friend activity feed.

The integration of the popular webmail services from Yahoo and Gmail will allow users to share web pages, images, articles, and links with their friends using a click-to-compose function built right into the browser. By just clicking the email icon in the URL bar, Flock users can instantly share these items with their friends. When new mail arrives, the Flock Mail icon will light up to let users know to check their inbox. This is especially handy since webmail doesn't alert users of incoming mail the way that Outlook or other desktop clients do, forcing them to either keep checking it in a browser tab, using an add-on, or some sort of 3rd party notification software.

Image Credit: CNet Networks

As to why email was the next bigfeature to be included, Flock's CEO, Shawn Hardin, states that "Email is the single most frequently used communication application on the web, and is often overlooked as social activity."The new Picasa feature will let users of the popular photo-sharing service quickly upload pictures to Picasa from Flock. To share these photos, users can email them via web mail or just drag and drop them onto the Flock People sidebar, the same way that YouTube videos, flickr photos, Photobucket photos, and others are shared in version 1.0.

The Friend Activity feed is like Facebook's News Feed, expect that it tracks your friends recent activities across all of Flock’s supported services. The feed will inform users when their friends update their Flock profile or online status, upload new photos, and it even displays their Twitter updates.

The new version will be available for as a free download for Mac, PC and Linux in two weeks at www.Flock.com.

Live Blogging 2.0

If you're a blogger who is into covering live events, like keynotes, press conferences, meetings, or sports events, you may be interested in the new, free service from CoveritLive. In development since 2006 and emerging from beta in November of 2007, the CoveritLive platform gives you an easy way to blog events as they happen and it also provides tools to interact with your readers during the event you're covering.

As you use CoveritLive's software, your commentary streams live to your web page or blog. Readers viewing the commentary can ask questions and participate in polls you create, giving them a reason to stay online on your website for the duration of the event, instead of checking in every now and then. Readers viewing the live blog stream don't have to create user accounts to participate or download any software.

While blogging, you can also add pictures and videos in real-time, keeping the stream updated with interesting content. The text, images, and videos can be drag-and-dropped into the application's interface and linked with ease.

The CoveritLive Console

CoveritLive also provides a way for multiple editors to work together in real-time. One writer could be focused on uploading content and writing while the other answers questions and responds to comments.

How it Works

When you use the CoveritLive service, a resizable AJAX Viewer Window of your live blog is embedded into your website or blog, similar to the way you would embed a widget. However, the CoveritLive team is quick to point out that the service is really "anything but a widget or lightweight tool." Don't be fooled by its ease of use, they say: CoveritLive is a scalable application designed for anyone to use whether they have just a handful of reader or hundreds of thousands.

CoveritLive on a blog

The one-click publishing feature lets you use Google image or video search and then, with one click, post the image or video to the live blog window. There is also an online Media Library and Showprep tool where you can load up your media in preparation for the event. This lets you build up a collection of items beforehand so they are ready when you need them during the live event. 

The one-click Quick Polls can be created on the fly or in advance and stored in the Media Library. You can create as many polls as you would like and can turn the different polls on and off in the "Now Playing" section of the app.

Readers can comment on the live blog, but it's not like a chat window or forum. The comments, or "Audience Messages," as they're called, stream into a window in the Console that only the author can see. By clicking the comment, the author can post the question or comment directly into the live blog for everyone to see and then respond to it. The Audience Messages feature can be turned on or off as desired during the event.

Another nice feature the Console provides is a Viewer Window built right into it. With this, you can see exactly what your readers see, making formatting problems no
longer an issue.

At the event's end, the Viewer Windows becomes what they call an "Instant Replay." This new window has the entire live blog for site visitors to read if they missed viewing it live. The latecomers can still view the poll results, which are automatically linked to by the app when the event is over. The live blog you created is stored on CoveritLive's servers where you can access it at any time or delete it if you decide you no longer need it.

Why Do We Need Liveblogging Tools?

Today's standard publishing and blogging platforms are not really created for live blogging. You have to write, save, and publish and then refresh your blog's page to make sure that it looks right. If you don't know how to set your blog's page to automatically refresh, your site visitors have to automatically refresh the page on their own to see the new content. Even if your page is automatically refreshing, it is still not the equivalent of real-time blogging as your posts are not being displayed as you write them. With CoveritLive, you can instantly blog the event without having to worry with those sort of technical details.

Unfortunately, when put to the test during this year's Macworld conference, a minor technical glitch, the equivalent of "one loose screw" (so they said), managed to crash the service. However, CoveritLive responded that this was not due to being overloaded by traffic, rather an issue in their Quality Assurance process, and hopes that everyone will give them another shot in the future. Yikes!


As web-based reporting relies more and more on live coverage of major events, it will be critical for CoveritLive to make sure that outages like this past one never occur or no one will bother to use the service again. Many may have already decided that one crash is one too many and have already sworn it off.

Still, if they get the kinks worked out to deliver a more stable platform, a liveblogging service with the feature set and ease-of-use of CoveritLive is worth keeping an eye on.