The 9th Annual Crunchies are fast approaching, and as we look ahead to what’s shaping up to be our best Crunchies yet, we thought it’d be fun to take a trip down memory lane and revisit some of the Crunchies of yore.
Mars was on the minds of voters at the 6th Crunchies in 2013. The Mars Curiosity Rover launched from Cape Canaveral in November 2011, landed on the Red Planet on August 6, 2012 and won the Crunchie for Best Technology Achievement in 2012.
Google Glass was the runner-up to the Mars Curiosity Rover for the Best Technology Achievement award, which makes sense because, while we’ve gone all in on Mars by trying to send a bunch of people to the planet by the mid-2030s, you probably don’t see too many people walking around wearing Google Glass. Only this guy.
Back on Earth, teens and young adults were getting down with Snapchat, the Fastest Rising Startup of 2012 that was on a quick, meteoric rise to the top of the teen texting throne. And when they weren’t snapping they were on BuzzFeed, the Best Time Sink of 2012 with all of the quizzicles and listicles.
2012 was also a big year for education and collaboration startups, with the Best New Startup of 2012 (Coursera) enrolling millions of people in MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), and GitHub, the Best Overall Startup of 2012, serving as a place for coders to collaboratively work on coding projects, learning from each other along the way.
Crowdsourcing ruled the roost at the 7th Crunchies in 2014, with Kickstarter taking home the prize as the Best Overall Product or Startup of 2013 by changing the way companies get funded. Then there was Bitcoin, the grassroots peer-to-peer system for online payments that really took off in 2013 and won the Crunchie for Best Technology Achievement.
You definitely won’t believe who won the Fastest Rising Startup award, but if you happen to guess who it is, you would totally restore my faith in humanity. Yep, that award went to Upworthy, the hyper-viral news/clickbait site that your friends on Facebook are probably still cluttering your feed with.
2013 was also the year virtual reality started to go mainstream, with the Oculus Rift — the Best Hardware Startup of 2013 — making it seem normal to put a dorky-looking development VR kit on our faces. And it was when we all decided to swipe right on Tinder, the Best New Startup of 2013 that changed the online dating scene.
Which startups and founders will take home awards at this year’s Crunchies? The nominees for each category will be announced sometime in January, with the winners revealed at the 9th Annual Crunchies on February 8, 2016, at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco.
And the best way to experience the Crunchies is by being there in person. For as little as $115, a ticket to the Crunchies gets you into the main event as well as the incredible after-party that includes a hosted bar, hors d’oeuvres, networking and other fun surprises we have in store for you.
You can snag your tickets over on our ticketing page.
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