Today Facebook begins rolling out file sharing to all Groups, and while it’s got many restrictions, it could be good enough to limit the long-term growth potential of cloud storage / file sharing services like Dropbox, iCloud, and Google Drive. Music and any copyright files aren’t allowed and file size is capped at 25mb, as Mashable first reported. But this is just the first version, and you can be sure Facebook will keep hacking away at it.

Last month, the social network started letting users share files within Groups for Schools, but now we confirmed with Facebook that within a few days all Facebook users should have the option to upload and share files from the Groups post composer.

Facebook users often talk about downloadable files, but now they’ll be able to share those Word docs, images, e-books, PDFs rather than having to upload them elsewhere. The addition of file sharing has been a long time coming, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had previously worked on a peer-to-peer service called WireHog, which was shut down due to concerns about copyright infringement. It also comes after Facebook’s acquisition of New York City-based file sharing Drop.io in 2010, which brought Sam Lessin on board.

File sharing could help Facebook fight its public image as a distraction from getting real work done. If you already have a Facebook Group to organize discussion about a class, work project, or vacation with friends, file sharing will fit right in.

You’re not going to be able to share huge home movies or zip files of photos, and sadly amateur musicians won’t be able to share their own creations with friends. But Facebook file sharing could be good enough for a lot of people, especially if it ups the file size limit, creates perma-URLs for files, and creates a tab in groups specifically showing shared files. Most important it would need extend file sharing to the general news feed to really become competitive. If it makes these improvements though, it could pull market share from other file sharing system by focusing on convenience.

There’s still plenty of use cases for the big cloud storage / file sharing services…such as sharing copyrighted files. Plus people might feel like their files will be more private on a dedicated service, even though Facebook Groups are quite secure. Products specifically for file sharing might always rule for business, but free personal usage that Facebook could chip away at has been a huge lead generator for enterprise sales. That’s why Facebook moving into the space could limit their long-term growth potential — something investors who sunk $257 million into Dropbox don’t want to see.

Let me be clear: this won’t kill Dropbox or reverse its stellar growth. We’re fans of the service and it won the TechCrunch Crunchie for overall startup of the year. But Facebook could make it hard for it become so popular that it could deliver to investors a serious multiple on the huge amount of funding its received.

The “good enough” approach is becoming a Facebook staple. It’s asymetrical, interest graph follow feature Subscribe was late to the game by years, but because it lives in the news feed where 900 million people already spend their time, it could stunt Twitter’s growth. The same thing could happen here. Facebook’s popularity and how deeply it’s ingrained our lives give it a big advantage. Power users may always crave specialized products, but for average joe, the option to send a file from the Facebook account they already have might be enough to stop them signing up somewhere else.

[Additional reporting by Ryan Lawler. Image Credit: How Stuff Works]

Google finally launched its long-rumored Google Drive online storage service today. This was probably one of Google’s worst-kept secrets, so the launch itself wasn’t much of a surprise to anyone – least of all Dropbox, which – until today – was pretty much synonymous with online storage for documents.

If nothing else, Google Drive is a full-frontal assault on Dropbox on virtually every level. Google is not just massively undercutting Dropbox’s pricing scheme, but thanks to integrating Drive with Docs, it is also able to offer far more features. With this kind of competition, the future might not be so bright for Dropbox.

It’s not just Google, though. Just yesterday, Microsoft also launched its new SkyDrive apps, which also replicate Dropbox’s functionality and add more tools to it. Indeed, besides undercutting Dropbox’s pricing, the one area where Google and Microsoft are easily one-upping the popular startup is in the suite of tools they offer around their clones.

In other news, @Dropbox is launching a search engine.

— Drew Houston (@drewhouston) April 24, 2012

The question then is, what’s next for Dropbox? It was always pretty obvious that the big players wouldn’t just ignore this market and leave it to a few scrappy startups. Google’s and Microsoft’s marketing power and scale could easily overwhelm whatever momentum Dropbox had until now.

To remain competitive, Dropbox will have to seriously cut its prices and improve its feature set at the same time. That’s a tough call for a relatively small company. While Google doesn’t really need to make money from selling storage, it’s those kind of services that make Dropbox and co. viable businesses.

As Posterous co-founder and YCombinator partner Garry Tan noted before the Google Drive launch, Dropbox may have an advantage over others by being platform agnostic – especially on mobile. Even there, though, times are changing. Google is obviously going to deeply integrate Drive into Android, but it will also launch an iOS app. Microsoft is going to bring SkyDrive to Windows Phone and iOS, too – though it’s still questionable if it will ever come to Android, too. Apple is the odd one out here, because it is so focused on its own ecosystem and because its iCloud offers a very different vision of what cloud storage should look like.

Dropbox may be platform agnostic, but the funny thing is, most of the big players don’t just cater to their own platforms anymore either.

As usual, Google’s (and Microsoft’s and Apple’s) competitors will say that this move validates their model and that they welcome a new competitor, but at the end of the day, Google’s entry is only making life tougher (too tough?) for Box, Dropbox and all the other cloud storage startups.

SkyDrive, Microsoft’s online storage service, is one of the core elements of the company’s cloud strategy. Today, Microsoft is taking the wraps off a number of new SkyDrive apps, including a Dropbox-like desktop integration for Windows and Mac (OS X Lion only). With this, SkyDrive will function like any other folder on your machine and any file you save to it will be automatically uploaded to the cloud and synced to your other computers. For current Dropbox users, this is obviously nothing new and it’s taken Microsoft quite a while to finally offer this feature. With this update, though, Microsoft is also reducing the amount of free storage it is offering new users from 25GB to just 7GB.

In addition to this Dropbox-like functionality, Microsoft is now also making it possible for Windows users to access, browse and stream files from a remote PC that is running the SkyDrive preview app. This feature, of course, only works while the remote PC is powered on.

Microsoft is also launching updates versions of its mobile apps for iOS and Windows Phone today. SkyDrive is now also available for the iPad.

Google, of course, has been rumored to launch its Google Drive service very soon, but for the time being, it’s not clear how closely Google’s service will resemble Dropbox and SkyDrive and how much free storage it will offer.

Better Apps, Less Storage Space

Sadly, though, Microsoft is also using this update to reduce the amount of free storage it offers to new users from 25GB to 7GB. Why this odd number? Microsoft says that just 0.06% of current SkyDrive users use more than 7GB. If you already have a SkyDrive account, you can get grandfathered into the old plan. Existing users who already use more than 4GB os storage space on SkyDrive will be automatically upgraded to 25GB for free, but if you currently use less, you will have to do so manually.

New users will be able to buy more storage, of course. Paid plans start at a relatively affordable $10/year for 20GB and go up to $50/year for 100GB. Microsoft calls this a “more flexible approach” and says that it wants to offer a gimmick-free service that strikes the right balance of being free for the vast majority of customers, and low-priced for those who want more.”

People love Dropbox and similar services, but companies — especially large enterprises in regulated industries — have an understandable aversion to file sync services: they allow company data on servers “out there” in the cloud, no longer under company control. ownCloud, essentially an open source, self-hosted Dropbox, has a unique advantage here as it’s strictly a software solution, not a storage provider. I mentioned ownCloud in passing when I wrote about OpenSUSE 12.1, but I’ve been keeping an eye on the project since. To make ownCloud even more attractive to businesses, a commercially supported version is being launched today at owncloud.com.

The ownCloud server does a bit more than just file storage and synchronization. It offers CalDAV and CardDAV services to synchronize calendars and address books with your mobile device. Work is also underway to make it aware of the file types being stored within it, and to provide meaningful actions based on those types: photo galleries, music playlists, and more. There’s a growing ownCloud app store to extend what the server can do. This is the power of open source: rather than relying on something like ifttt, you can have intelligent actions built right into the server you’re running.

There are currently about 400,000 users of ownCloud, with more than 40 dedicated contributors. Version 3 was released in January, and their three month development cycle means a new release should be just around the corner. One of the major features to be included in the next release will be version control for uploaded files.

I spoke to ownCloud CEO Markus Rex about the new commercial offering, and how it differs from the freely available open source version. From the server perspective, there is no difference: the commercially supported ownCloud server components are exactly the same as those in the open source version. What is different is the inclusion of desktop and mobile clients. What’s more, these clients are fully brandable by your organization. And of course, the commercial version provides email and telephone tech support, which almost always makes purchasing decisions a little easier for management. According to Rex, future plans include a robust PKI solution to allow an IT staff to deal with access control issues from a centralized enterprise perspective.

ownCloud has a partner program, in which they espouse “a partner first policy, which means that we will always involve a partner in customer opportunities as long as the customer does not insist on being served directly from ownCloud.” Almost 20 partners are currently listed in 10 countries.

In addition to the benefits of on-premise data storage, server-side apps, and a truly open source solution, ownCloud allows for some unexpected ancillary benefits. For example, Rex said that with a little tinkering (or the help of an ownCloud partner), clever admins could configure ownCloud to organize data on the storage platform that makes the most sense for it: MP3s could be shuffled off to a RAID0 JBOD pool, while documents and presentations could be placed on RAID5 enterprise SAN.

Rex blogged recently about supplanting Dropbox:

For us, it makes no sense to tilt against the DropBox windmill, they have created an amazing feature that has revolutionized the way people access, synch and share their data. All we want to do is save IT managers from indigestion and hair loss from all their corporate data running wild on iPhones, iPads, laptops and Androids — and to do that in a cost effective way.

Compliance with legal regulation is likely to be one of ownCloud’s strongest selling points to enterprise subscribers, but I have a suspicion that the open source underpinnings will prove to be extremely useful in the long term, too.

HTC’s is the Cinderella story of the mobile market — they’ve gone from low-key provider of Windows Mobile hardware to Android-powered smartphone titan within the span of just a few years.

Impressive as that is, HTC has done much more than just push out smartphones. In the past year alone, HTC has inked big deals with Beats Audio, Dropbox, and LogMeIn, with rumors of a potentially final MOG acquisition swirling around to boot. It’s pretty clear what HTC is trying to do here: they’re trying to buy an entire ecosystem for their devices, and frankly, good on them for it.

The Android end of the smartphone spectrum has always struck me as a bit more cut-throat than the rest. While Apple is content to churn out one new smartphone a year, and most Windows Phones feel very similar in use, players like HTC, Samsung, and Motorola have continually pushed out Android devices to meet every desire and fit every niche.

It’s not always the best practice though, and some of these companies are starting to realize it. HTC announced late last year that they would focus their new smartphone efforts around a smaller number of “hero devices,” and Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha announced they would be paring down their smartphone portfolio shortly afterward.

But great hardware is only ever part of the equation. The experience that users have with those devices is what really has the potential to turn them into manufacturer devotees, and rather than sink gobs of time, money, and manpower into building out an ecosystem around their devices, HTC is wisely letting their checkbook do the talking with their high-profile partners.

TechCrunch has covered the Beats Audio and Dropbox deals in the past, but the recently announced LogMeIn partnership strikes me as particularly savvy. Going forward, HTC devices will have a “LogMeIn Rescue applet” installed (that is, if the device’s carrier gives them their blessing) that will allow their HTC tech support to remotely access and diagnose a smartphone’s particular woes. With this in place, HTC seeks to establish themselves not only as the creators of great hardware, but your supportive partner if things go unfortunately awry.

At first glance, the MOG deal seems puzzling — the Google Play Store has within it a perfectly usable music portal after all. But if MOG indeed becomes part of the company’s Beats Audio division, then Beats Audio becomes more than a fancy badge and a special audio profile on a phone. It could become the music hub of choice for HTC users; why buy a track for $1.29 a song when you can access 14 million songs with one touch? And if HTC can whip up a smart pricing model (or give it away for free like all that extra Dropbox storage), well, that’s one more reason to buy an HTC phone over all the others.

It may seem a bit lazy of HTC to ink deals with these companies rather than work up their own solutions, but let’s not forget that they’ve tried in the past. Anyone remember the HTC Watch service, which allowed users to stream movies directly to their handsets? It never seemed to pick up much traction on its own, but these new strategic deals together make for a compelling argument to buy HTC. I imagine that they’ll want customers to come for the solid hardware, and stay for all of the benefits that HTC users are (or will be) privy to. That, more than anything else, is what will turn regular customers to dyed-in-the-wool fans and it never hurts to have a few more of those.

Today marks another step in the evolution of cloud services for consumers: Jolicloud, the Paris-based company that was one of the first to move on offering users a “cloud-based desktop,” today moved on another product that extends what users can do in the cloud even further, with the introduction of Jolicloud Me.

Available from today in private beta on Android, iOS and HTML5, Jolicloud Me is a kind of uber-organizer for all of your online assets, aggregating them and automatically sifting them into categories base on file types — eg, images, music, video and so on — and what’s especially nice is that it takes them from all of the disparate places that you may currently use for these services — and even those that you may have used once but have given up on over time.

For starters, the service is launching with integration for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Picasa. Tariq Krim, the founder and CEO, says the plan is to add more sites and services to that list — including your email, similar to the kind of service that Attachments.me offers where it automatically saves your email attachements in a cloud-based folder. He adds that, for now, having Facebook and Twitter already loops in the bulk of recent sharing, since those are the two most used today: “the backbone of sharing right now,” he how he describes it, and also because they are open to other services like Spotify.

Why the move to personal organization? Krim said that it was because of customer feedback. “Being a desktop was not enough. People wanted to have data,” he said. “We found that there was no easy access to all of our data online so we built it.”

Although a lot of cloud startups these days are likened to Box and Dropbox, Krim points out that this is not where his company competes — yet: “Our goal is not to be Dropbox, but to help maintain a relationship or connection to data that you own. Everything you liked, received or generated in one place.” In fact, the company integrates with the files you store on services like Dropbox and other “cloudifiers” (his word, not mine).

It seems very obvious, and certainly the kind of service you can imagine Apple and Google and probably Facebook are looking to develop and offer themselves — if not try to buy Jolicloud to get there a little quicker. For now, the advantage is that Krim’s organizer is here now, and it traverses boundaries across services in ways that walled gardens from the likes of Apple or Facebook (sometimes breached via APIs) may not.

Jolicloud is of the “lean and mean” startup variety: just 15 people based out of Paris. And for now the service is envisioned as totally free to use. So what will the business model, longer term, be? Krim says it will likely be around a kind of insurance policy, or way of securing data for life.

“It’s too early to talk about this, but it’s clear that there is a lot of value for people who want to keep the data forever.” He says this is the kind of thing that Jolicloud could offer “potentially with partners”, or maybe going solo… That’s one to revisit for competitive threats in the future.

Krim said today at the London Web Summit that any attendee who wanted to give Jolicloud Me a spin should email him. While I won’t start putting out his email in this post, that at least is a sign that the private beta could be a little easier than you might think to try out, if you’re interested. For what it’s worth, in my little test of it, it’s a speedy little service that I could see myself using to help organize my pretty haphazard forays into different photo services and more besides.

Last year, Dropbox raised a whopping $250 million funding round at a valuation in the ballpark of $4 billion. The raise had been rumored for months so it didn’t come as a huge surprise, but it still raised plenty of eyebrows. Because while Dropbox is totally awesome (I use it every day), at this point people see it as a convenient way to sync their files between computers — which it already does pretty well. So what’s all the money for?

Today, we’re getting our first taste of what’s next, and what cofounder and CEO Drew Houston calls Dropbox’s mission to solve all of the “hidden problems” that people have with technology, many of which we’ve simply become accustomed to dealing with.

Their first solution to one of these hidden problems? Helping you keep all of your photos, from all of your devices, in one place. And to get things started, they’re launching a new version of their Desktop and Android clients that’ll automatically upload your photos to your Dropbox account. Snap a few photos on your phone, and, without having to hook up any wires, they’ll be on your computer within a minute or two.

I know what you’re thinking, because it’s the first thing I said to CEO Drew Houston and Product Manager Aseem Sood: “err, don’t iCloud and Google+ already let you do this?”

I’m pretty sure they saw it coming.

The first thing they pointed out is that there are a lot of people out there who aren’t using either of those services. Most Dropbox users aren’t using Macs at all, so iCloud is out of the question (actually, iCloud will work with Windows if users install the iCloud Control Panel) and Google+ is still just getting started (yes, the service has lots of users signed up, but how many of them are using it and have the app installed on their phone?).

Dropbox also does a couple of things that Google+ doesn’t: for one, it’ll automatically sync the full-sized version of your images — Google+ sync will downscale images to 2048px at their longest edge. And Dropbox can also sync any photos it detects on your PC: if you plug in a camera or SD card into your computer and it detects images, you’ll have the option of automatically adding them to your Dropbox folder.

This new feature could potentially eat up a significant amount of space in your Dropbox folder, so Dropbox will also be gradually boosting the limit for free users from 2GB to 5GB (they won’t do this all at once — as you use the photo feature, you’ll be able to gradually accrue more free storage). Houston explains that the goal of this feature is to make life easier for people, not to get them to upgrade to larger Dropbox storage limits, which is why they’re offering the additional free space.

It sounds great, and I’ll be enabling it immediately, but there are still some obvious areas for improvement. Images that are synced to your Dropbox account are placed in a special Photos folder, but they’re just sorted in chronological order — there isn’t any intelligence around event or location detection, for example. Another potential issue is that Dropbox doesn’t offer any tools for managing or editing these photos, so it’ll be up to you to drag them into iPhoto or another photo editing app (the best solution will likely be to make your Dropbox folder your default image folder).

Houston agrees that they’re just beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible here, so I’m sure we’ll see improvements soon. Oh, and don’t worry iOS users — Dropbox will be updating its app to include this functionality soon as well.

It’s worth nothing that, while this is the first time Dropbox has baked this functionality into its official app, it’s been possible to do the same thing on Android using third-party applications that take advantage of the Dropbox API. Of course, the official app has a much bigger install base.

Attachments.me, the startup that promises to take the pain out of searching through email attachments, is gradually ramping up the services it’s offering to users: from today, it is launching an option to automatically file your attachments to specific folders in the cloud; and it has also expanded support to include Box, which now joins Dropbox in its list of supported cloud storage partners.

The news caps off some significant developments we’ve seen at attachments.me since announcing a seed round of $500,000 from Foundry Group last year: others have included Dropbox support and Gmail extensions for Chrome and Firefox.

The addition of an automatic filtering feature underscores the growth of time-saving services that we’re seeing around cloud storage — in other words, it’s not just yet another set of dumb folders for filing things away. In this case, attachments.me will let users set up rules to decide how attachments get stored, and then when the attachments come in, they’ll automatically go to specified folders.

The service sounds promising, if somewhat limited in this first iteration: for starters, attachments can be filtered by sender and file type — but not subject or other keywords. Also, a user can only set up the rules in attachments.me’s Chrome extension.

However, it’s worth nothing that in a blog post announcing the new service, co-founder Jesse Miller says that this is just 1.0 of this service: “We have a ton more options we are going to add to automatic filing,” he writes.

One of these, apparently, will be letting users set up automating rules via the tools’ iPhone app as well. Another area that has room for expansion: the platforms that attachments.me supports overall. It has yet to add other email providers, apart from Google’s Gmail.

Meanwhile, the new support for Box is a logical next step for attachments.me as it looks to grow its customer base, which currently accounts for some 40 million Gmail attachments.

Specifically, it could see attachments.me make bigger inroads into the enterprise segment: Box.net last year signed a strategic deal with HP to offer its cloud services on selected HP desktops, and, on the back of an $81 million Series D round of funding in October 2011, Box could have other, more aggressive expansion plans on the cards, too.

Dropbox has no shortage of fans or users these days — their stellar wins at the Crunchies are proof of that — and now the cloud storage service is leaning on them to test an experimental new build of the Dropbox Android app.

While the thrill of being on the bleeding edge is probably enough for some people to take the plunge, the real meat of the experimental build comes in the form of the new auto upload feature for photos and videos. It’s pretty much exactly what the name implies: as soon as you snap a photo or take a video with your Android device, it automatically gets uploaded to your account. And in usual Dropbox fashion, it just works.

I was actually a bit surprised to see how well the feature worked right out of the gate. Once you breeze through the app’s new splash screens and start taking pictures, it takes only seconds for your shots to start trickling into your account. The 180MB file size limit has been given the axe too, so that Oscar-worthy film you’re putting together on your Galaxy S II should make the transition just fine too.

So what’s in it for you, aside from the ability to immediately shove your media into the cloud? More free storage, that’s what.

For every 500 MB of photos or videos that gets uploaded, another 500 MB will be added to your Dropbox account. Provided you stick with the process long enough, you’ll eventually walk away with 5GB more space than you had coming into it. Not bad Dropbox, not bad at all.

Dropbox just kicked off a similar campaign on their forums to test their slew of desktop clients, but motivated users shouldn’t bother trying to double-dip in attempt to snag 10 GB of storage. If you’re content to do a spot of beta testing in exchange for some nifty features, feel free to download the .apk right here.

Clearly controversy is swirling around web lockers and online storage companies in the wake of the Federal swoop on Megaupload, but if it all goes wrong rest assured that DropBox founder and CEO Drew Houston has a second career to fall back on.

The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (or just “Davos” to those in the know) is a great place for the world’s millionaires and billionaires to loosely affiliate with each-other (as Paul Simon might have put it) and part of that looseness extends to the Piano Bar of the Hotel Europe in the tiny – but 5-star-hotel-packed – village.

A short snow-bound walk past the security checkpoint teaming with soldiers, you can climb the stairs to the hotel bar where Piano singer Barry croons AOR hits most of these magnates will fondly remember. Occasionally he hands the mic over to a willing Karaoke singer, and last night Houston took up the challenge.

His rendition of Rocket Man is pretty good, so we’d like to re-assure anyone concerned that should DropBox find itself shut down by the Feds and Houston’s $400 million net worth (according to Forbes) is decimated by legal fees, Drew can always pick up tips at the Piano Bar in the Hotel Europe.

In a conversation with WIRED UK’s David Rowan on stage at the DLD Conference in Germany, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston acknowledged that he did in fact have a “great meeting” with the late Steve Jobs in 2009.

Houston said about the get-together that Jobs had heard of them and asked to meet with him. Even though he was generally gracious, Houston said, Jobs expressed that he felt Dropbox was more of a feature than a product or business and gave him a “bit of a hard time” about that.

Jobs went on to float an eventual acquisition by Apple, but Houston said he did not name a price, at least not at the time. Forbes reported earlier that Dropbox ended up turning down a “nine-digit acquisition offer” from Apple.

Dropbox now has 50 million+ users saving billions of files daily, and is valued at $4 billion.

Not bad for a company that one of the world’s most brilliant minds ever once called a feature.

Also check out our Founder Stories series featuring Houston:

On Pitching Dropbox: “Tom Cruise In Minority Report Is Not Carrying Around A Thumb Drive”

Drew Houston: “Dropbox Users Save A Billion Files Every Three Days”

How Dropbox Got Its First 10 Million Users

Houston: “In 18 Months, You Are Going To See Little Dropbox Buttons Everywhere”

Update: Tickets are now sold out. Be sure to keep your eye out for ticket giveaways and for when we release our next batch of tickets.

The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.

For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks this year. You’ll also find Best Social App, the NYC-dominated category of Best Shopping App, Best New Startup and the year’s best VC’s and Angel Investors. Newcomers like TaskRabbit’s Leah Busque and Keith Rabois for his angel investments (Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yammer, Path, YouTube) made the list of finalists, as well as industry favorites such as Marc Andreessen, Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus and Ron Conway.

There are some pretty good match-ups this year. Google+ is up against Facebook Timeline for Best Social App, along with the New New Twitter, Instagram, and Path 2.0). The Kindle Fire is competing with the iPad 2 for Best New Device. And Pinterest, Turntable.fm, Nest, Fab, and Codecademy are all vying for Best New Startup (even though two of those were complete pivots). LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman is up for Angel of the Year. His seed investment in Zynga is worth 160 times what he paid for it. But AngelList founders Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi are also finalists in the category for helping to democratize angel investing, along with Conway, Rabois, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, and Kevin Rose (who has a killer portfolio that includes Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga, and Square). Who will win?

Everyone is eligible and encouraged to vote. The rules state that you may vote once per day, per award category, until voting closes on Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 11:59pm PST. There are 20 award categories open for voting, recognizing the top accomplishments across a variety of fields and roles. If you are one of the finalists, create a badge and get your community excited about this honor and get them to vote for you. Winners will be announced on January 31, live at the Crunchies.

In addition to today’s announcement of the Finalists, we are happy to release our next batch of tickets through Eventbrite. The release begins now, so act fast and get them while you can.

Here are your Finalists:

Best Technology Achievement (2010 winner: Google Self Driving Cars)
Lytro (Related posts)
NFC (Related posts)
OnLive (Related posts)
Siri (Related posts)
Tesla Flat Pack Battery (Related posts)

Best Social Application (2010 winner: DailyBooth)
Facebook Timeline (Related posts)
Instagram (Related posts)
Google+ (Related posts)
The New New Twitter (Related posts)
Path 2.0 (Related posts)

Best Shopping Application (2010 winner: Groupon)
Birchbox (Related posts)
Fab (Related posts)
Gilt Groupe (Related posts)
Lot18 (Related posts)
Warby Parker (Related posts)

Best Mobile Application (2010 winner: Google Mobile Maps for Android)
Evernote (Related posts)
Flipboard (Related posts)
Pandora (Related posts)
Spotify (Related posts)
Square (Related posts)
TaskRabbit (Related posts)

Best Location Application (New category for 2011)
Airbnb (Related posts)
Foursquare (Related posts)
Grindr (Related posts)
RunKeeper (Related posts)
Uber (Related posts)

Best Tablet Application (2010 winner: Flipboard)
djay (Related posts)
Eventbrite At the Door (Related posts)
Fotopedia (Related posts)
GarageBand (Related posts)
Netflix (Related posts)
StumbleUpon (Related posts)

Best Design (2010 winner: gogobot)
Gojee (Related posts)
Orchestra (Related posts)
Path 2.0 (Related posts)
Pinterest (Related posts)
Quora (Related posts)

Best Bootstrapped Startup (2010 winner: addmired)
Github (Related posts)
Imgur (Related posts)
Instapaper (Related posts)
Onesheet (Related posts)
Tap Tap Tap (Camera+) (Related posts)

Best Cloud Service (New category for 2011)
Asana (Related posts)
Box (Related posts)
CloudFlare (Related posts)
Dropbox (Related posts)
Okta (Related posts)
Twilio (Related posts)

Best International Startup (2010 winner: Viki)
Badoo (Related posts)
Klarna (Related posts)
Peixe Urbano (Related posts)
Rovio (Related posts)
SoundCloud (Related posts)
Wonga (Related posts)

Best Clean Tech Startup (2010 winner: SolarCity)
Alta Energy (Related posts)
Array Power (Related posts)
EcoATM (Related posts)
EcoMotors (Related posts)
Hara (Related posts)

Best New Device (2010 winner: iPad)
Galaxy Nexus (Related posts)
iPad 2 (Related posts)
iPhone 4S (Related posts)
Kindle Fire (Related posts)
Nest (Related posts)

Best Time Sink (2010 winner: Cityville)
Modern Warfare 3 (Related posts)
Quora (Related posts)
Skyrim (Related posts)
Turntable.fm (Related posts)
Words With Friends (Related posts)

Biggest Social Impact (New category for 2011)
Charity: Water (Related posts)
Khan Academy (Related posts)
Kickstarter (Related posts)
Practice Fusion (Related posts)
Twitter (Related posts)

Angel of the Year (2010 winner: Paul Graham)
Ron Conway (Related posts)
Paul Graham (Related posts)
Reid Hoffman (Related posts)
Keith Rabois (Related posts)
Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi (AngelList) (Related posts for Naval) (Related posts for Babak)
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5th Annual Crunchies Awards
Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall
201 Van Ness Ave.
San Francisco, CA

7:30pm – midnight – Awards Ceremony and After Party
A night of celebration with festive attire.

Our sponsors help make the Crunchies happen, if you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities during the ceremony or after-party, please contact Jeanne Logozzo at jeanne@techcrunch.com.

For press credentials, please fill out this request form and confirmations will be sent separately via email.

The new year is right around the corner, and many of us are in dire need of some organization. Luckily for all you fandroids out there, DropBox 2.0 has finally made its way onto the Android Market. The app has brand new features and a totally revamped layout.

You’ll find a little arrow to the right of each file in the app, which will then lead you to a pop-out menu. From there you can share, delete, and favorite, which is a brand new feature to DropBox. From the main menu, you’ll see three tabs up top including Dropbox, Uploads and the newly added Favorites.

Some files are put into Dropbox simply because they are pictures so cute, or documents so brag-worthy that you need them on all your devices (just in case the opportunity arises to show them off). Once a file is favorited, you can access it even without an internet connection because it’ll be saved straight to the device. That said, I’m willing to bet the Favorites tab will be oft-used.

Dropbox 2.0 also includes the ability to rename files straight from the app, along with bulk upload. Speaking of the Uploads tab, users are now able to upload from and export to local storage, which is a welcome addition.

Past that, you’ll also find a few bug fixes in the update which is pretty standard for a huge roll-out like this, along with support for ICS. (You G-Nex owners were worried there for a second, huh?)

If you’re looking to get more out of your Dropbox then head on over to the Android Market and start updating.

Merry Christmas!

[via IntoMobile]

Very very quietly (there is almost no Google footprint), investment bank and securities firm Goldman Sachs held its “Private Internet Company Conference” this week in Las Vegas. During the two-day conference, which lasted from November 29-30th, a gaggle of companies presented their business models to an elite audience composed of bankers, investors and peers.

Attendees listened to talks given by A16Z‘s Marc Andreessen and Square’s Keith Rabois (who gave the keynote on Tuesday night). SV Angel’s Ron Conway was also there, being himself. All in all the experience was very, very fun I heard. Makes sense.

So why hold a conference for early stage companies if you’re an IPO underwriter? Well, the event basically functions as an extremely foresighted form of lead generation. According to multiple people I spoke to, these are the 30 or so startups Goldman has designated as potential IPO candidates. And it wants to make a relationship as early on as possible, in case some of them actually do and need Goldman’s services in the process.

So who are these white-hot startups then? Well here you go! (I might be missing one or two, so if you’re on this list or know of someone who should be on this list, please email me and I will put you/them on if your story checks out.)

In alphabetical order:

• Airbnb
• Beachmint
• Beauchamp
• Birchbox
• Bluekai
• Badoo
• BOKU
• Box.net
• BranchOut
• Cloudflare
• Coupons.com
• DropBox
• Eventbrite
• Gogobot
• Hipmunk
• Instagram
• Jawbone
• Klout
• Narrative Science
• Ness computing
• Pinterest
• One Kings Lane
• Peixe Urbano
• Polyvore
• Quantcast
• Quora
• Rent The Runway
• Rue la la
• Rovio
• Shopkick
• Specific Media
• Survey Monkey
• Square
• TrialPay
• Trunk Club
• Tumblr
• Uber
• Warby Parker
• WePay
• Xoom
• ZocDoc
• Zoosk

Each startup presented for 30 min to an audience of about 60-80, except for the four or so smaller ones like Gogobot, who presented to all 500 people for 15 minutes. Goldman did a great job of curating the overall list, even though I would have added Spotify to the mix.

But that’s just me.

Update: Screencaps of the full agenda, below. Rumor has that Dropbox was held to be the most likely IPO candidate, by a consensus of conference chatter. And making the list for the Dropbox/IVP party on Tuesday night was a big deal, I’m hearing.

Top image via: Greekshares

By any measure Drew Houston and his Dropbox team are having a hugely successful run. In Houston’s final Founder Stories episode with TechCrunch editor, Erick Schonfeld, Houston says he plans to maintain this momentum by focusing on mobile, and just about everything else.

Houston says Dropbox has secured a new agreement with HTC, where it “is going to be baked into tens-of-millions of [Android] phones” and like Facebook, Dropbox plans to stamp its product on everything. “In 18-months you are going to see little Dropbox buttons everywhere.”

But will Dropbox’s strategy be strong enough to fend off popular sites like Instagram and Twitter, which also store digital content submitted by large user communities? Or put more bluntly “five years from now, will I even need Dropbox?” asks Schonfeld.

Houston believes the answer to both questions is yes.

“We can help you get stuff out of each of those little silos or little boxes and put them all in one place so that all that content can be more useful to you and we can help you share it and we can help you see it on your iPad or see it on your TV.”

We’ll see how it all plays out.

Until then, make sure to watch episodes I, II and III of Schonfeld’s interview with Houston.

Past episodes of Founder Stories featuring Eric Ries, Julia Hartz and Christopher Poole are here.

Dropbox co-founder Drew Houston has one of the hottest startups in the game. With $257.2 million in funding and a $4-billion valuation it’s poised to triple an already impressive user base of 45-millon. So when did Houston know he was sitting on something pretty? Erick Schonfeld finds out in episode III of Drew Houston’s Founder Stories interview.

Houston says there “were a couple of important inflection points.” The first occurred after Dropbox released a demo video that captured Y Combinator’s attention and helped Dropbox secure an invitation to join the exclusive startup program. Milestone two occurred a year later when Dropbox released a separate video on Digg during its private beta launch.

In that second video, Houston says his team layered “easter eggs… aimed at the Digg audience” into the otherwise mainstream presentation. The splash of creativity worked. Within 24-hours Dropbox “had 75,000 people signup for the wait-list.” They were expecting 15,000, tops.

Not wanting to risk testing a buggy product on all 75,000, Dropbox carefully screened who could kick around early versions by extending invites through “a Gmail style closed beta.”  Their strategy paid off. Just seven months after public launch Dropbox hit 1-million users. Roughly a year later they counted 10 million.

With success in hand, Houston offers this advice to founders: “Research what other companies have done” but be cognizant of the fact that “often what works for one company is just completely the wrong thing for another company.”

Make sure to check out the entire video for additional advice and watch episodes I and II of Houston’s interview with Schonfeld.

Past episodes of Founder Stories featuring Alexis Ohanian, Fred Wilson and Kevin Ryan are here.

Episode IV of this interview is coming up.

In episode II of Erick Schonfeld’s Founder Stories interview with Dropbox co-founder, Drew Houston, Houston describes how releasing a demo video to Hacker News during Dropbox’s early days catapulted his company into elite company.

“I hoped that the response would be good so that Paul [Graham] and Y Combinator would see it.” The response was better than good. Houston says the video held the top spot at “Hacker News for a couple of days” and it turns out the right people were watching. One viewer was Arash Ferdowsi, who was so impressed that he paired up with Houston as a partner. Houston also credits the video with helping him receive almost immediate and valuable feedback.

Asked if he was worried about copycats stealing the concept at the time – Houston responds, “It is easy for me to explain the idea, it is actually really hard to do it.”

Below, Houston takes us inside Y Combinator and describes how Paul Graham weighed in with key advice while Houston was under the Y Combinator wing. ”Our first sort of marketing attempt was like throwing spaghetti at a wall …we really struggled in terms of how to articulate this with investors because we had never really done that before, and Paul was really helpful to us in terms of distilling down the idea into a much shorter and sort of more compact presentation.”

Advice in hand, the team went before a room full of investors at Demo Day, where you get “waived like a piece of steak” and hit it out of the park by walking them through an admittedly risky demo that could have wiped-out their entire PowerPoint presentation.

Having survived the high-wire act, Houston says today, “Dropbox users save a billion files every three days.”

Make sure to watch the entire video for additional insights and be sure to catch the first episode of Schonfeld’s interview with Houston here.

Past episodes of Founder stories featuring Eric Ries, Fred Wilson and Dustin Moskovitz are here.

Episode III of this interview is coming up.

Dropbox co-founder, Drew Houston recently sat down with TechCrunch Editor, Erick Schonfeld to discuss the origins of Dropbox – a service that allows users to upload and access their files from virtually any device, anywhere. With $250-million in funding and 45-million users, Dropbox is shaking up the world of digital storage.

The roots of Dropbox were planted when Houston was a student at MIT. “You could sit down at any of tens-of-thousands of computers on campus and not only your files but your whole environment was just in front of you and kind of followed you around.” Then graduation hit and Houston says he was thrown “back to the stone age.” He had just launched a company but didn’t feel secure carrying it around in his jeans on a thumb drive.

Solving his own issue, Houston created Dropbox and pitched it to Y Combinator with the premise that “Tom Cruise in Minority Report is not carrying around a thumb drive.”

He was accepted.

Below, Houston briefly describes how he tested Dropbox – without actually releasing Dropbox. It’s a strategy Eric Ries recently wrote about on TechCrunch. 

Aware that releasing a flawed beta would result in customer backlash, Houston made and posted a video describing his software. “It turns out we got the same feedback from all of our prospective users that we would have gotten from putting code in their hands, except it was a ton less effort.”

Speaking of feedback, when asked about the “file folder structure” of Dropbox, which was created before the iPad, Houston says Dropbox will apply a “post-PC non-file and folder centric approach to everything” it does.

Make sure to check out the full video for additional insights.

Past episodes of Founder Stories, featuring conversations with Eric Ries, Scott Heiferman, and Fred Wilson are here.

Episode II of this interview is coming up.

Despite a couple big-name companies like Groupon and Zynga lining up for IPOs, the demand for private company stock on alternative exchanges keeps rising. Private stock transactions on SecondMarket in the first three quarters of 2011 totaled $435 million, a 73 percent increase over the same period last year. In the third quarter alone, there were $167 million worth of transactions on SecondMarket, up 49 percent from the second quarter.

Who is buying all of these shares? SecondMarket breaks it out in its third quarter report. Wealthy “accredited individuals” made up the largest share of buyers (63 percent by dollar amount), followed by asset managers (22.3 percent of transactions), hedge funds (7.8 percent), and venture capital funds (5.1 percent). VC funds became much more active on SecondMarket in the quarter, accounting for 17.5 percent of the transactions by number. Last quarter, VCs made up less than 1 percent of transactions (and only 0.2 percent by dollar amount).

On the seller’s side, former employees made up the bulk of completed transactions (64.5 percent). But current employees took the No.2 spot with 16.9 percent of transactions , nearly quadruple the 4.4 percent of transactions they represented in the second quarter. The number of transactions with investors selling doubled to 8.4 percent, signaling that secondary markets are becoming a more accepted liquidity valve for current employes and shareholders. Founders represented the smallest amount of transactions, at 3.6 percent, but that is up from 1.9 percent last quarter.

SecondMarket also tracks the “most watched” companies on its service, which is an indication of investor interest. The most watched companies didn’t change from last quarter: (Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, Zynga, Foursquare, Dropbox, etc.). But there is a new group of “rising stars.” These include Turntable, Jetsetter, and Klout. And then bubbling up just below the rising stars are the “newbies”: Pinterest, Billfloat, Firstwind, Proofpoint, and Zaarly. Hmm, is there a correlation between how much press a company gets and interest on SecondMarket?

Red-hot startup Dropbox — you know, the file syncing service that just raised $250 million at a $4 billion valuation — has announced something this week that’s getting slightly less attention than its massive funding round, but is exciting all the same: the company has released an improved version of its APIs, making the service better both in native apps (on mobile devices) and web apps alike.

Dropbox first launched its API in May 2010, and it’s been implemented in loads of mobile app since then. But it’s had a few issues that have been remedied with the new version of the API.

For one, it’s now adding support for ‘app folders’. Prior to this update, if you wanted to let a third-party app hook into your Dropbox account, you’d be giving it access to your entire account — which didn’t necessarily make sense for, say, a camera app. Now apps will be able to associate themselves with a single folder (which the user can move and rename as they’d like), without having to hand over the keys to the kingdom.

Likewise, security has now been beefed up using an authentication system that doesn’t require you to enter your credentials within a third party app itself. Instead, when you go to authenticate with an app, you’ll be swapped over to either the mobile web version of Dropbox or your native Dropbox app (Facebook and some other services use a similar mechanism).

The API also gives third party applications access to the versioning/revision system that Dropbox uses, which’ll let users jump back to previous versions of files and undelete them.

Finally, while the original version of the API was made primarily for native mobile apps, this new version works for web apps (including those on the desktop) as well.

Update: A previous version of this post said the security updates and other features applied to only mobile eapps, but they’re actually relevant to any app built using the Dropbox API (including web apps).