Undulations

The Crunchies 2011 Awards by TechCrunch has just been announced, and the results hold many an interesting tid-bit. Here’s a quick look at what caught my eye about this year’s Crunchies.

• Siri beat Lytro to the “Best Technological Achievement of the Year”, which is unfortunate. Siri is indeed a countable advancement in speech recognition; but in comparison, Lytro is a revolution in imaging technology. Being able to tell your phone to text your Mom when you get home does not match up to the sheer technological achievement of being able to capture an entire light-field in an image, and refocus later at your whim.
  This win probably reflects the higher impact of Siri (familiar to the millions who own an iPhone 4S) as compared to Lytro, which is in prototype stage and is relatively much lesser known.
• Google+ was declared the “Best Social Application” of the year. This was my second favourite surprise of the Crunchies (the biggest surprise was the New Device category) – Google+ beat the millions of iPhone users who are proud of their Instagram profiles, the large chunk of Facebook users who’ve by now gotten their timelines, and thousands of vocal and techno-affined Twitter users. This in my opinion is conclusive evidence against the arguments that Google+ has lost its initial sheen and has few regular users.
• Evernote won the “Best Mobile Application” Crunchy, which co-incidentally was also the only cross-platform application that was nominated, while all others were iOS specific apps.
• I’m a bit surprised that Rovio did not make it to the win or runner-up in the “Best International Startup” category – I’m not saying that Piexie Urbano did not deserve the win, but I honestly expected Angry Birds fans to win this one.
• Perhaps the biggest surprise was the “Best New Device” category, where Nest won, followed by the Kindle Fire. The iPhone 4S, iPad 2 and the Galaxy Nexus were all left behind - perhaps due to its stature as a new class of device and focus on content-consumption, but Amazon has proved its point that the Fire packs some serious heat.
• The other categories were mostly unsurprising, with the likes of Codecadamy, DropBox (which ended up as the “Best Overall Startup”), Path and Pinterest getting the attention they deserve.