This year’s third annual Crunchies Awards have just concluded, and we’re happy to say that it was an overwhelming success. For those that weren’t watching, we’ve included the list of nominees and winners below. Our most sincere congratulations to the winners and to all of the nominees as well. It was an incredibly tight race for many of the categories, and it’s safe to say that everyone on this list is at the top of their field.

We’d like to take a moment to point out Facebook’s win for “Best Overall Startup Or Product”, which marks the third year in a row that the company has taken home the top prize. Facebook continues to innovate and deploy features at an impressive rate while still showing incredible growth. Ours hats go off to you.

If you’d like to watch the event for yourself, you can watch an archived version of the live stream here.

Best Technology Achievement:
Backblaze
Bing (Microsoft)
Chrome OS (Google) (Winner)
Google Wave
PuSH
Silverlight (Microsoft)

Best Internet Application:
Animoto
Dropbox (Winner)
Groupon
MOG All Access
Posterous
Yelp

Best Social App:
Aardvark
Brizzly
DailyBooth
Farmville(Winner)
SocialVibe
StockTwits

Best Bootstrapped StartUp:
atebits (Tweetie)
Shoes of Prey
Tinychat (Winner)
Wildfire Interactive
wizehive
Wufoo

Best Mobile Application:
foursquare (Winner)
Google Voice
Gowalla
Kindle for iPhone
Skies of Glory
Tonchidot

Best International:
Amiando
Jolicloud
Playfish
Spotify (Winner)
TweetDeck
vente-privee.com

Best Time Sink Application:
Canabalt
Civilization Revolution (iPhone)
DailyBooth (Winner)
I Am T-Pain
Pandora
Zoosk

Best Design:
Animoto (Winner)
Brizzly
Chrome (Google)
Clicker
Facebook Mobile
Threadsy

Best Enterprise:
Amazon Web Services
Atlassian
Azure (Microsoft)
Chatter (Salesforce)
Google Docs/Office (Winner)
Yext

Best CleanTech:
CalStar Products
Locust Storage
Picarro
Sappphire Energy
Sun Run (Winner)
Tendril

Best New Gadget:
Apple Magic Mouse
Barnes & Noble nook (Winner)
litl webbookMotorola Droid
Sonos S5
Zune HD

Best Tech PR:
Brew Media Relations
LaunchSquad
OutCast Communications
PerkettPR
Spark (Winner)
SutherlandGold Group

Best Angel:
Betaworks
Chris Sacca (Lowercase Capital)
Jeff Clavier (SoftTechVC)
Ron Conway (SV Angel) (Winner)
Y-Combinator
Yossi Vardi

Best VC Firm:
Accel Partners (Winner)
Charles River Ventures
Benchmark Capital
Greylock Partners
Sequoia Capital
True Ventures
Union Square Ventures

Founder Of The Year:
Aaron Patzer (Mint) (Winner)
Elon Musk (Tesla)
Jack Dorsey (Square)
Jeremy Stoppelman & Russ Simmons (Yelp)
John Borthwick (Betaworks)
Omar Hamoui (AdMob)

CEO Of The Year:
Josh Silverman (Skype)
Marc Benioff (Salesforce)
Mark Pincus (Zynga) (Winner)
Neil Young (ngmoco)
Richard Rosenblatt (Demand Media)
Tony Hsieh (Zappos)

Best New Startup Or Product Of 2009:
Aardvark
Bing (Microsoft) (Winner)
Foursquare
Hunch
Milo
Spotify

Best Overall Startup Or Product Of 2009:
Android (Google)
Facebook (Winner)
LinkedIn
ngmoco
Twitter
Zynga

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After discovering that Apple had registered iSlate.com in late 2006 (we dug a little deeper and found trademarks had been filed for ‘ISLATE’ in both the United States and Europe by a company that was most likely a dummy corporation set up by Apple), MacRumors has now discovered another possible name for the upcoming Apple tablet.

MacRumors bases its report on the filing for a US trademark for ‘IGUIDE’ by another Delaware-registered company called iGuide Media LLC, which can be linked to Cupertino by means of signatures on the documents coming from Apple’s Senior Trademark Specialist, Regina Porter.

Let’s dig a little deeper, once again.

Domain names

There’s no indication that Apple owns any domain name that contains the term ‘iguide’. The identity if iguide.com is shielded from public WHOIS records, but not by Mark Monitor, the brand protection firm Apple usually works with. The domain name iguide.net belongs to a company called iGuide Media, a marketing and design firm started by Jon Warren back in 1997 and led by a Brian Noon from 2002 to 2006, when the company was sold.

I checked a couple of other TLDs (.ca, .fr, and more) and found no indication that Apple owns any of those.

Trademarks

Two trademarks were filed for ‘IGUIDE’ by iGuide Media LLC (through a James Johnston) in the United States: a principal and a service mark, both on 18 December 2007. The description of goods and services given to iGuide Media is very similar to the one given to Slate Computing, the supposed shell company set up by Apple used to register the trademark for ‘ISLATE’, although it leans a bit more to a focus on software and services than hardware.

On the exact same day, iGuide Media LLC filed for a trademark in Europe as well: search OHIM for ‘iguide’ and you find a trademark filing that has all the Apple marks on it: the legal representative is ‘EDWARDS ANGELL PALMER & DODGE UK LLP’ (the same as for ‘ISLATE’ and ‘MACBOOK’, among others), and the priority country is Trinidad & Tobago, the same as when Apple filed for the ‘iphone’ trademark in Europe.

Noteworthy: the status history suggests that the community trademark application was registered (not filed) in February 2009, and that the full examination of the CTM application has been completed very recently, on the 18th of December 2009 to be exact.

Final thoughts

If I were betting man, I’d still be putting my money on the name iSlate for the tablet, Magic Slate for a possible peripheral, and iGuide for a service linked to the hardware device(s).

Here’s why:

- Apple doesn’t seem to own, directly nor indirectly, any ‘iguide’ domain names
- The ‘ISLATE’ and ‘MAGIC SLATE’ US trademarks were not filed for separately as a service trademark, unlike ‘IGUIDE’
- The ‘ISLATE’ US trademark was filed earlier than ‘IGUIDE’, by a different shell corporation (and the same as ‘MAGIC SLATE’)
- NYTimes editor Bill Keller’s mention of an ‘Apple slate’ device in a past speech
- According to Trademarkia, the ‘ISLATE’ trademark application was extended a second time last September, to show use in commerce
- The slightly different description for ‘goods and services’ for both Slate Computing and iGuide Media

Or, of course, we’re all wrong, and none of these names will ever be actually used by Apple. I would deem that unlikely, but we can’t know for sure.

Besides, has Apple announced that it’ll be selling a tablet computer yet?

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Old media loves nothing quite so much as writing about their own impeding death. And we always enjoy adding our own two cents – the AP not knowing what YouTube is, the NYTimes guys reading TechCrunch every day, etc.

Speaking broadly, I like what Reuters, Rupert Murdoch and Eric Schmidt are saying: the industry is in crisis, and the daring innovators will prevail. Personally, I still think the best way forward for the best journalists, if not the brands they currently work for, is to leave those brands and do their own thing.

But as one of the innovators in the last go round, I think there’s a much bigger problem lurking on the horizon than a bunch of blogs and aggregators disrupting old media business models that needed disrupting anyway. The rise of fast food content is upon us, and it’s going to get ugly.

Old media frets over blogs and aggregators that summarize content and link back to the original source. They can’t make a business in that world, they say, so they run the other way and try to find a way to protect and charge for content.

These are the cavemen, or whoever, who were afraid of fire when it was discovered because it burned, or was too technologically advanced to really understand. The smart guys used it to cook their meat and keep them warm, and multiplied.

For our part, we throw a party when someone “steals” our content and links back to us. High fives all around the office. At least there’s some small nod in our direction. And the aggregators like TechMeme can figure out who broke the news. Page views are lost, but reputation is gained.

But for every link there are dozens of sites that outright steal our content with no attribution. Not just spam blogs, even the NYTimes does it. This isn’t a copyright issue – the stories are rewritten by actual people. But it’s far cheaper to simply take the news and rewrite it – if you can get away with it – than to hire people who do actual journalism. Over time, it becomes a competitive tax that is difficult to bear.

But even then, companies like ours can find a way to compete.

So what really scares me? It’s the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It’s the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.

On one end you have AOL and their Toyota Strategy of building thousand of niche content sites via the work of cast-offs from old media. That leads to a whole lot of really, really crappy content being highlighted right on the massive AOL home page. This article, for example, is just horrendous. One of AOL’s own blogs trashes the company’s spinoff, rambles for miles without any real point, and adds a huge factual error to top things off (”the company is losing money”). Hiring a bunch of people who couldn’t keep their old media jobs and don’t have the stomach to go out on their own and then slapping little or no editorial oversight onto these masses of sub-par journalists leads to an inevitable conclusion – cheap, crappy content. And that crappy content is given a massive audience on the AOL portal.

On the other end you have Demand Media and companies like it. See Wired’s “Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model.” The company is paying bottom dollar to create “4,000 videos and articles” a day, based only on what’s hot on search engines. They push SEO juice to this content, which is made as quickly and cheaply as possible, and pray for traffic. It works like a charm, apparently.

These models create a race to the bottom situation, where anyone who spend time and effort on their content is pushed out of business.

We’re not there yet, but I see it coming. And just as old media is complaining about us, look for us to start complaining about the new jerks.

My advice to readers is just this – get ready for it, because you’ll be reading McDonalds five times a day in the near future. My advice to content creators is more subtle. Figure out an even more disruptive way to win, or die. Or just give up on making money doing what you do. If you write for passion, not dollars, you’ll still have fun. Even if everything you write is immediately ripped off without attribution, and the search engines don’t give you the attention they used to. You may have to continue your hobby in the evening and get a real job, of course. But everyone has to face reality sometimes.

Forget fair and unfair, right and wrong. This is simply happening. The disruptors are getting disrupted, and everyone has to adapt to it or face the consequences. Hand crafted content is dead. Long live fast food content, it’s here to stay.

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Guest author Edo Segal (@edosegal) has launched and sold several companies. In 2000 he founded eNow, which he sold to AOL in 2006 (after it was renamed Relegence). Today, he runs his Incubator/Investment vehicle Futurity Ventures, which recently launched a new search engine for wisdom.

Media scarcity is dead. In the future my son will have a flash drive that he will pay $29 for that will have the capacity to hold all movies and music ever released by a major label, studio or tv/cable network. It will take 30 seconds to clone the data over the network to a friend who will pay $14.99 for a device with double capacity a year later. How does the media industry survive such a coming disruption?

For many of us that have been in this game for a while, the word “convergence” harbors some shameful vibes. It conjures up many false hopes, dashed dreams and misfires. Nevertheless, I would contend that convergence is upon us and it has arrived from an unexpected delivery man: Steve Jobs. Apple has created a media consumption experience that has reduced friction to such a point that soon the consumer will not know if he is buying music, a movie or a game. The notion of App is changing. The lines between these different forms of media are quickly blurring and soon will be completely artificial. Already these distinctions are merely fossilized conventions that stem from consumers’ discovery habits. As those evolve, like learning that it is easier to go to Amazon and search to find a product than going to aisle 9 at the store. The coming confusion of the consumption experience where a user won’t care or know if what they are buying is a movie, a game or a music track presents vast opportunity.

The prospects for the old media industry appear bleak, as the rest of the media industry follows the music industry into decline. Indeed in my discussions it is apparent that the smart money in Hollywood already sees the writing on the wall. While the trend will take longer, it is clear which direction the wind is blowing. The main lesson to learn is that the market will punish you if you don’t deliver the goods.

But the entertainment industry has a vested interest in the success of this new type of convergence, as within it lies the secret to its continuing prosperity. The only way to block the incredible ease of pirating any content a media company can generate is to couple said experiences with extensions that live in the cloud and enhance that experience for consumers. Not just for some fancy DRM but for real value creation. They must begin to create a product that is not simply a static digital file that can be easily copied and distributed, but rather view media as a dynamic “application” with extensions via the web. This howl is the future evolution of the media industry. It has arrived from a company that is delivering the goods. Apple has made it painless for consumers to spend money and get the media they want where they want it, proving that consumers are happy to pay for media if delivered in ways that make it easy and blissful to consume. For all the criticism Apple draws on the walled garden nature of its business, it has even come around to stripping DRM and allowing users to download mp3 files.

Even today if you look in the iTunes App Store you will see a myriad range of “Apps” that are just evolved ways to package media. While the traditional part of iTunes still mirrors the product taxonomy of a Tower Records, the App Store is creating a folksonomy of media products. It is where new ideas evolve, thrive and go instinctively based on market power. The App Store is where the action is. This is where evolution is unfolding as direct consumer spending spurs media development.

In preparing this post, Erick asked me, “Is Apple is a media company?” I thought about that and the answer is really that Apple is what media companies are missing. The missing part of the puzzle is what made media conglomerates such juggernauts in the past. Namely, distribution. The internet is stripping them of their control over the how their products are distributed. Media companies used to be able to create scarcity merely by delaying the distribution of their products across different channels—theaters, pay-per-view, DVD, cable channels, network TV, and so on. The internet disrupts this ability to create media scarcity. It is such a huge disruption, in fact, that it threatens the fundamental profit engine of the media business.

Both during my time interacting with senior management at Time Warner (where I worked at AOL after it acquired the company I founded, Relegence) and with some of my current portfolio companies that are working with the film and music industries, it is clear to me that many of the smart people running these media companies understand which way the wind is blowing. The music industry, as the one that has suffered most of the carnage, is ripest for change. Executives there are receptive to new ideas and move forward quickly, leaving me somewhat optimistic. It is also clear to me that it is hard for the industries which have not endured their level of pain to flee the golden cage of media’s past. But for those firms which rise to the occasion, there will be vast rewards. People’s hunger for good content will not subside. It will continue to grow, but so shall the unbearable ease of pirating it. The premise of extending the media experience to the cloud is a core necessity for the survival and growth of the media industry. It is the only way to for media companies to weather the coming tsunami of increased bandwidth and the ever open web. Hybrid media packaging with both files and an application layer in the cloud is core to a lucrative future.

For a great example of how change is happening see what Britney did today at @BritneySpears. It was, I believe, the first time a major artist premiered a music video on Twitter. This drives people to Amazon or iTunes to buy the track but in the not too distant future it could be the start of much more than that. A complete experience will unfold that will be interactive and convert to new revenue streams. Not just a purchase of a track but of an app that pulls consumers into an experience and further promotes user engagement and virality. Media becomes a platform with a funnel of traffic and conversions to alternative revenue streams. All boosted by the frictionless billing that Apple has created in the App Store. Media executives will have realtime metrics for their success as it maps to revenue and in turn this will accelerate innovation and help redefine media.

If you are a media exec and you look at your product and at the end of the day it’s a digital file that can be copied, then you have a serious problem with your format. Think of your product like a pie chart of the value you are giving the consumer. If 100% of the value is in that file, it is not a sound approach for defending the future of your business. However, if a portion of the experience is derived thorough an integration with a Web component that will yield additional value in functionality or social elements, then it will be more sustainable. There are many such examples emerging in the app store (I am T-Pain, TapTap and many more). Applications that let consumers interact with the media. Create things and share them with their friends. These will not only make the consumer the one who markets your product, but also create an unprecedented level of engagement. That level of engagement will directly map to reduction in piracy as consumers will pay for this experience and wont be able to copy it. Sell access and experiences, not media files.

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