SiliconBeat

I spent last Friday night at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco watching the Crunchies. The third annual version of the tech award show was co-hosted by three leading high-tech blogs: GigaOm, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch. According to the official Cruchies description, the show aims to “recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year.” You can read a nice overview of the event and after-party by Jessica Guynn of the Los Angeles Times.

It was an entertaining, if low budget, affair. In fact, the casual nature of the show in such a fancy space was quite charming. There were corporate jugglers providing entertainment and the reliably funny Richter Scales served up a nice glee-club style spoof (see video above).

You can check out the award winners here. But the mix of nominees and winners left a muddy impression of the event. What, exactly, is the point of the Crunchies? Read the rest of this entry »

(updated below)

VentureBeat’s Paul Boutin reports today on a new smartphone sales report, but methinks he missed the real news.

The new data comes from IDC. Boutin makes much of the fact that according to IDC’s report — at least as quoted by him; I’ve only seen the press release, not the full report — the BlackBerry Curve was the top-selling smartphone in the United States last quarter, outselling the iPhone 3G S.

“Despite all the buzz, attention and money thrown at iPhones and anything to do with iPhones, the new iPhone 3G S came in second,” Boutin writes.

Read the rest of this entry »