Congrats to all the Crunchies winners, but especially Techmeme, StumbleUpon, Automattic, & Toni Schneider

The Crunchies were given out on Friday and the complete winners list was put up on Saturday.  Congrats, of course, go out to all of the winners, but there are a few winners who I want to give special attention to:

Best bootstrapped startup: Techmeme.
Founded and developed solely by Gabe Rivera, Techmeme serves as the front page of the tech blogosphere. The site’s advanced algorithms identify the day’s top stories by making sense of conversations across the web’s best blogs.

Best Startup CEO: Toni Schneider (Automattic)

Schnieder has lead the company from its roots as a open source alternative to Movable Type into a multi-million dollar enterprise that saves the world from blog spam and offers a free hosted blogging solution that competes with Google’s Blogger.

Most likely to succeed: Automattic (WordPress)

The open source blogging platform that powers the long tale and turned into a multi-million dollar spam fighting and hosted blogging service.

Best use of viral marketing: StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon’s service lets users bookmark and discover new sites they love. With only a $1.5 million investment in 2005, StumbleUpon gew to over 4 million Stumblers and was bought by eBay in 2007 for $75 million Source: 2007 Crunchies: The Winners

Gabe Rivera has done something great with Techmeme.  It might not be perfect, even Gabe sees that, but it is my source for finding the best conversations on the hot topics.  I generally know what the hot topic du jour is, but it’s who is chiming in and saying what that I use Techmeme for.

Automattic, well I’m a huge fan.  Congrats to all my friends as Automattic, Lloyd, Matt, Donncha, and especially Toni for pulling in the Best Startup CEO award!

StumbleUpon, before it was scooped up by eBay, was based in Calgary, so I have to give props to them.

With this kind of recognition, I wonder what is coming up for both Techmeme and Automattic.  Sure I could guess, but what fun would that be?  I’ll just have to see if I can dig up some tips.  Maybe DEMO in a couple weeks will give me some ideas.

Photo of Mike Arrington, Toni, and Matt by Scott Beale