Meet The Startups Vying For The Crunchie For Best Overall Startup Of 2015
There are only a few short weeks until the 9th Annual Crunchies show on February 8 at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House. At the show, some of the best and brightest startups and leaders are contending for the opportunity to win a Crunchie in one of the 12 categories up for grabs.
Today’s feature takes a look at the finalists for the Best Overall Startup of 2015, an award given to the company that had the most impact on the tech landscape over the course of the year. Below are the companies that have been selected as finalists for the Best Overall Startup award, as well as a look at the companies who have won this award previously.
The 2015 Nominees
Docker
Docker is an open platform that allows developers and system administrators to quickly and easily build, ship and run distributed applications using containers, discrete programming building blocks.
Slack
Slack is a team communication and sharing app that is trying to help change the way we work. It features real time communication and collaboration tools, letting users collaborate and share files easily. And, everything shared is searchable to team members can always find what they need, when they need it.
Snapchat
Snapchat began as a service that let users share pictures that automatically disappeared after a brief period of time. That’s still largely how the service is used, but the company has added longer-duration stories, live stories and a Discover channel that connects users with content from brands like ESPN and CNN.
Uber
If you don’t know what Uber is by now, you’ve definitely not been paying attention. The concierge transportation service connects passengers with drivers at the tap of a button on Uber’s mobile app. The whole transaction is cashless and seamless, and users can rate their experience so the company and its drivers get feedback about how they’re doing to provide a better experience.
And it won the Best Overall Startup of 2014 Crunchie at last year’s show. Could it win two years in a row?
Xiaomi
One company you might not know too much about is Xiaomi, a Beijing, China-based company that makes all sorts of consumer electronics, predominantly smartphones and wearables. Xiaomi is third only to Fitbit and Apple in the number of wearables it shipped in Q3 2015, though it lost its long-running lead in Chinese smartphone sales to Huawei in that same quarter.
Past Winners
Facebook – 1st, 2nd and 3rd Annual Crunchies Winner
Arguably no startup out there has had the impact that Facebook has had on the way we communicate online, and it showed with the social network winning the Best Overall Startup award the first three years the Crunchies were held. With over 1.5 billion monthly active users, Facebook remains a behemoth in the social networking space.
Twitter – 4th Annual Crunchies Winner
After Facebook won three years in a row, it was time for another social network to steal the crown — Twitter. Unlike Facebook, Twitter limits users to 140 characters when sending tweets — though that may soon grow to 10,000 — and became an indispensable part of the way people communicate and share things on the web. It now has 320 million monthly active users.
Dropbox – 5th Annual Crunchies Winner
Dropbox is a cloud storage platform that provides users with a certain amount of free storage that can be accessed anywhere, with premium options with more storage available to purchase. Cloud storage has been one of the major innovations of the smartphone era, and Dropbox was essential in ushering it into the mainstream.
GitHub – 6th Annual Crunchies Winner
If there’s one thing that’s made it easier for developers to collaborate on projects, it’s GitHub. GitHub is the world’s largest open-source community that lets developers share projects with others, and offers integrated issue/bug tracking, feature requests and collaborative code review that helps developers improve their software with help from the community.
Kickstarter – 7th Annual Crunchies Winner
If you’ve ever backed a crowdfunding campaign, chances are you did it on Kickstarter. The service launched in April 2009, and pretty much put crowdfunding on the map. Since its launch, there have been just under 99,000 successfully funded projects on Kickstarter, with over 10 million backers contributing over $2.15 billion to help make these projects a reality.
Will Uber repeat as Best Overall Startup in 2015, or will the ridesharing service make way for someone else to steal the crown? Find out for yourself and check out the other amazing startups at the 9th Annual Crunchies awards in February, and the best way to experience the Crunchies is to be there yourself.
Tickets to the show are still available starting at $115, and you can pick up your ticket to the event that’s best described as the Oscars of Startups and Technology on our ticketing page.
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