Ustream is broadcasting this year’s Crunchie Awards in its entirety, free of charge. The awards are celebrating the past year in tech, highlighting some of 2008’s best startups, founders, innovations, and gadgets. Tune in below.

This isn’t a real hands-on: Interestingly, Palm wouldn’t let us “hold” the phone and kept a set of applications away from our prying eyes. But here is a thorough walk-through of the Pre operating system, Palm’s WebOS. This new phone was definitely my show highlight and I think the video shows exactly what we’re talking about when we call this Palm’s last chance.

It’s been another harsh day in the CES trenches, and as usual the CrunchGear team has put out a veritable cornucopia of content. Today was particularly notable for interviews: we got Mark Cuban and Bud Mayo, Dr. Dre, and Les Stroud of Survivorman in front of the camera to talk about the future of HD, DRM, and ruggedized camera gear.

There were also, of course, a great number of hands-ons and exclusives, which you’ll find inside. Some of this hardware could really alter the consumer tech landscape.

There’s not a lot of information to be found about YourNight.com, a currently invite-only portal that’s slated for launch this quarter, but the information we’ve received about its parent company Extreme Enterprises raising a relatively small amount of cash for a valuation of tens of millions of dollars made us curious, so we looked a little closer.

Here’s what we know about the service: YourNight.com will be publishing “dozens of internal search engines in an array of online services located within one portal”, and ultimately hopes to give “every person and business in the world a free web presence, multiple free search engine placements, free advertisement, and free entertainment from TV, radio, email, chat, games, networking, dating & more …”

The company is certainly ambitious enough, openly boasting about becoming a serious threat to “companies such as Google, Yahoo, MySpace, eBay, Amazon, Yellow Pages, Microsoft and several more” and billing itself as “The World’s Largest Interactive Entertainment, Information & Shopping Search Portal”.

Tonight’s Crunchies award ceremony in San Francisco is now totally sold out. We’re sorry if you didn’t get a chance to grab a ticket, but you’ll still be able to watch the show streamed live via Ustream (click here to start watching once the show begins at 7:30).

The awards show, which is co-hosted by GigaOm, VentureBeat, Silicon Alley Insider, and TechCrunch, highlights some of Silicon Valley’s best startups, technological innovations, and breakthrough leaders of 2008. The nomination process saw nearly 170,000 total votes to pick out the finalists in each category, and then another 350,000 to pick the final winners.

Peter and Greg got a chance to sit down with Dr. Dre on the first night of CES. We asked him when his next album would drop, what he though of DRM, and if he could help us install Windows 7.

Storyblender, the casual animation site that launched at TechCrunch40 that lets you put together customized goofy video clips, has just opened up a fun new side project called Make Me Talk. The new web app lets you stick some fake lips on the photo of your choosing and make them move realistically in sync with a voice recording.

From the developer who brought us twtpoll, Felipe Coimbra, now there is twtvite, an easy way to use Twitter or Facebook to create a micro-invite for your friends and followers. You create an invite on the twtvite site, and then micro-message with a tiny URL on Twitter or Facebook. The link takes people back to the site where they can RSVP. (See screenshot below).

I just created one for the Crunchies here.

Portland-based AboutUs has secured a $2.5 million round of financing from Voyager Capital with the VC firm’s managing director Erik Benson joining its board, reports TechFlash. The company operates a wiki for information primarily about small businesses, organizations, and ‘anything that has a website’. Yes, that includes TechCrunch.

This is different from our own wiki Crunchbase, which featured detailed profiles of companies, products and people even if they don’t have their own websites.

The wiki service attracts a very decent 7 million unique visitors per month to its network of over 12 million pages, and has plans of turning it from a mere resource of information to a full-fledged collaborative work space. In that regard, it’s different from Wikipedia, although both wikis use MediaWiki to power the network.

Although Google keeps gaining search engine market share, people’s loyalties are far from locked in. J.P. Morgan Internet analyst Imran Khan recently conducted a survey to see if Web consumers would be willing to switch search engines. He found that 62 percent would. The biggest reason that would cause them to change? Better search results (45 percent of all respondents said this would make them switch, and 48 percent of respondents who use Google as their main engine).

I’ve recreated the poll below so that you can take it.

Generally when a site changes its favicon (the tiny image that typically appears next to the URL in your browser) nobody really notices or cares. Unless you’re Google.

Back in June the company unveiled a brand new stylized ‘g’ icon with a blue background. It was sleek, but a big departure from the classic G logo that everyone was familiar with. The blue icon made appearances elsewhere, too, and can now be seen on the Google iPhone Mobile App.

Now it looks like the company has switched again, this time to a logo that incorporates the same stylized lowercase g, but one that also includes the company’s classic yellow/blue/green/red color scheme.

Corkin is a new web service that combines classifieds listings with a set of social tools that the company says differentiates it from juggernauts such as Craigslist and eBay’s Kijiji. Like corkboards you’d find outside of local supermarkets, libraries and on college campuses, Corkin wants to be the website everyone uses to post free classified ads about anything.

Every aspect of Corkin has a social element to it; users can comment on listings, comment on photos, reply to comments, send direct messages, etc. and the company founders believe this makes them a better service than Craigslist, eBay / Kijiji and the countless other classifieds sites you can find on the net. The site sports the same spartan look Craigslist does (but including annoying in-your-face ads), and the founders of Corkin realize that they’re going to have to fight an uphill battle trying to beat them.

We had a chance to chat with billionaire entrepreneur, Mark Cuban, and CEO of Cinedigm, Bud Mayo, about their work together to bring live 3D entertainment into movie theaters across the country. The technology promises to be a completely different theater-going experience. Cuban even went as far as to call it “the LSD of 2009.”

Tapulous CEO Bart Decrem sent out an email to investors yesterday updating them on the status of the iPhone/Android focused company. It was forwarded to us, and we reprint it below.

The company makes the popular Tap Tap Revenge application as well as Tweetsville and others. Like competitor Social Gaming Network, everything they touch seems to turn to gold.

In the email Decrem says they have had 5 million unique installs of Tap Tap Revenge and claim it is the third most popular application for the iPhone, after Facebook and Pandora. He also says that they have 100,000 customers who’ve paid them for apps and they went from no revenue in September to break-even in December, an important milestone.

On December 31 the company closed an additional $1 million in funding, Decrem says, adding to the $1.8+ million they had previously raised. He also says Tap Tap Revenge II will release in early February.

New site Tweetvisor, created by Nelu Lazar, offers users an alternate interface to view and interact with Twitter that some users will really like. (unlike Tweetree, for example, which I think lacks unique and compelling features).

The site places messages from other users directed to you (replies and direct messages) in the sidebar, and offers search in the middle of the screen. Users can save searches and see when new results pop up for that query.

But the compelling feature is the ability to easily administer and switch between multiple Twitter accounts. Some users control their business and personal accounts, or just handle lots of different brands. Tweetvisor is the best browser based solution we’ve seen. It just launched, so don’t be surprised if there are hiccups.

We’ve been getting quite a few tips about this, and German media outlets are picking up the story like crazy, so here goes: if you were ever in the market for a German blog, now would be a good time to put your money where your mouse is. Robert Basic, famous in German-speaking countries for his blog Basic Thinking, has put the site up for sale on eBay reportedly because he wants to start from scratch again.

Basic Thinking is a technology blog which has actually been dubbed the ‘German TechCrunch’ by some; we’d be honored but we’re not sure since we haven’t been following it and our German is a little rusty. Basic is really straightforward about the incoming revenue of the blog on the auction listing: it made him about €37,000 gross from display and text link advertisements in 2008. He hasn’t been actively selling advertising on the site so he’s confident that it could bring in way more revenue, especially considering his status as the German ICT blog and that his Google PageRank could be brought back from 4 to the former 6 by simply removing the text link ads.

Last month meebo, the web-based chat startup that supports nearly every IM protocol, announced that it had added support for both MySpace and Facebook Chat. Meebo’s post on the new features was a little strange - while they explicitly thanked “the folks at MySpace who encouraged and helped us to test and gave us their support”, there was no such mention of any support from Facebook’s side (instead, thanks went out to Eion Robb, who created a Facebook Chat Plugin for Pidgin). And while it’s easy to assume that Facebook was simply unwilling to help meebo, it turns out that meebo never asked.

Tonight Meebo is announcing that they’re removing support for Facebook Chat. From the company’s post on the change:

MySpace, like YouTube, is holding a contest to send one MySpace user to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland later this month.

MySpace has teamed with the Wall Street Journal on the contest, which is fascinating because (I imagine) there is exactly zero overlap between the stuffy WSJ readership and the hip, chaotically cool MySpace crowd. But they are sister companies under the mammoth News Corp., so maybe they thought it was a good idea to partner up.

Anyhow, the contest will make one MySpace user a “special correspondent” to the prestigious event. The winner will be chosen by a panel of experts and given a press pass to Davos.

LogRhythm just joined the Payment Card Industry Security Council (PCI) with the goal of making log info more secure.

While the PCI group is focused on payment security–it was founded by American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB International, MasterCard Worldwide, and Visa Inc.–the addition of LogRhythm will extend the focus toward making logs across all organizations more secure.

Trusty’s is a new local search engine/review database for blue collar service workers, aiming to help small businesses establish reputations while giving consumers an easy way to find the services they’re looking for. While there are a number of sites out there that allow users to rate their experiences with local services (including countless niche communities), most of them are purely user-generated, and don’t give businesses any control over their profiles.

Rather than leave all content creation to consumers, Trusty’s is taking a different approach. Each company is invited to create their own profile, where they can list their contact information, credentials, and other information that is effectively forms an online resume. Users can visit these profiles and leave ratings and comments that business aren’t able to edit without contacting Trusty’s (as they would in the case of profanity or obviously misleading reviews).