Earthmine won in its category of "Best technology innovation / achievement."

The blurb:

Earthmine picks up where Google Earth leaves off, bringing deep semantic data to 3D panoramas of the real world. Earthmine’s system can keep track of the objects found in the real world and attribute information to each of them, such as latitude, longitude, elevation, and other attributes.

- Techcrunch

----- original post 12/31/07-----------

BlinkGeo suggests we vote for UpNext ("UpNext is the new and exciting way to explore and discover your city.
Rather than sifting through pages and links of data, UpNext enables you glide around your city, virtually. Exploring has never been easier") in the Crunchies, the latest Web popularity contest. This one's put on by a few sites you might have heard of: GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat and TechCrunch. I read the first and last on the list now and again.

The awards have quite a range - nominations totalled 82,000 (!) and were cut down to 100 - five competitors in each of 20 categories. I don't have time to check them all out to vote intelligently (here's the list) and I suspect only a few mere mortals will have heard of them all. Unfortunately, there's no blurb on the site explaining what the nominated companies do or how they do it - you must visit the sites and do your own "homework."

That said, the lists are interesting and include other geo-orgs than just UpNext. I saw: Zillow (twice) and earthmine. Oh and Justin.tv is in there - that company was one of finalist from the Amazon startup contest.

I couldn't find what (if anything) winners "receive" - perhaps its just PR? Why mention this? I thought readers might find some useful information by looking over companies in categories like Best business model or Best user-generated content site.