Open up your mind and say, ahh...

The History of Mashable Awards

 

A year and a half after founding Mashable from Scotland in 2005, CEO Pete Cashmore still hadn’t met his staff. They had each been working remotely, sight unseen, yet remained linked by common beliefs.

Cashmore finally met the Mashable team at the first annual Mashable Awards event in January 2008, which also happened to be his first visit to San Francisco.

Now into our fifth awards season, we’re still celebrating that first (unorthodox) Mashable Awards success.

Every year, we call out to our community to recognize the best apps, social networks, startups and memes, but also to predict future innovation. Over the years, participation has grown from 250,000 votes and nominations in 2007 to 1.3 million in 2010.

For the first three years (2007-2009), the Mashable Awards were, in fact, called the Open Web Awards. Cashmore remembers that first trip to San Francisco’s Palace Hotel in 2008. “I was suddenly surrounded by 500 or so people who really loved Mashable and wanted to talk about what we were doing, which was incredibly surprising but also very humbling for me,” he said at the Mashable Connect conference at Disney World earlier this year.

At the time, Mashable was primarily covering startup culture of the tech/web variety. However, after encountering an Open Web Awards crowd so intensely enthusiastic about social media, he redefined Mashable’s vision. “I came away from that event knowing that these social influencers at the center of this social media revolution were who I needed to write for,” Cashmore remembers. “It was about community, and it was about conversations.”

That’s why the Mashable Awards are now a collaborative effort between readers and editorial. “In the early days, our editors didn’t have a role in helping pick the winners,” Cashmore explains. “Now the community and our editors work together to choose the best of the web.”

It was that precise community conversation that kept the Mashable Awards momentum over the years. Mashable’s audience has grown more global, and therefore, better informed about worldwide innovation. COO Adam Hirsch notes that the awards continue to be an invaluable opportunity to expand editorial perspective. “While we might see specific people or products out there that we would assume are the winners,” he says, “because its a public platform and our audience is global, it has helped us discover new people and new tools around the world.”

That unprecedented increase in social media literacy around the world paced Mashable’s community expansion. By the third and fourth annual Mashable Awards, Twitter hashtags were going crazy, Hirsch remembers. Soon, brands got involved, both as sponsors and participants. “It’s been pretty impressive not just to see the involvement from the general public, but from the brands themselves and across their social media channels,” he says.

Although Hirsch describes the awards as less of a “platform for discovery as much as it is for recognition, a hats off to good work,” the Mashable community has consistently been an accurate predictor of what’s next in web culture.

For instance, Cashmore remembers that YouTube won in the awards’ early years. “They didn’t do too badly,” he observes ironically. This year, he predicts the awards will reflect today’s international mobile craze. “We’re seeing an unprecedented mobile boom that shows no signs of stopping.”

The Mashable Awards are now becoming a yearly staple for readers. Hirsch notices, “It’s become wider known, people know that it comes every year now.” They’re excited because they feel empowered, which is what the Mashable mission is all about. Hirsch explains that the awards are meant to “give our audience a voice to tell the media and the world what their best of X’s are.”

So, what’s your best of X? There’s still time…

This year we’ve presented 28 different categories to which you can nominate your picks for best smartphone, must-follow politician on social media, game of the year, etc. Once we close nominations (Nov. 18), we’ll narrow each category down to seven finalists. Then you take the reigns and vote between Nov. 21 and Dec. 16. We’ll announce your winners on Dec. 19, 2011.

What logically follows? Why a party, of course! Mashable has invited you to the Las Vegas MashBash at CES on Jan. 11, 2012 in the Mirage hotel’s smokin’ nightclub, 10OAK. To say we’ve come a long way is an understatement, if you’ll allow us a humble pat on the back.

Remember, you may nominate once per day in each category.

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The Categories

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Social Media

• Best Social Network
• Up-and-Coming Social Media Service
• Must-Follow Actor or Actress on Social Media
• Must-Follow Musician or Band on Social Media
• Must-Follow Athlete on Social Media
• Must-Follow Media Personality on Social Media
• Must-Follow Business Personality on Social Media
• Must-Follow Non-Profit on Social Media
• Must-Follow Politician on Social Media

Tech

• Best Smartphone
• Best Mobile Game
• Most Useful Mobile App
• Most Innovative Mobile App
• Most Useful Tablet-Based App
• Best New Gadget

Business

• Viral Campaign of the Year
• Most Innovative Use of Social Media for Marketing
• Must-Follow Brand on Social Media
• Best Branded Mobile App
• Best Social Good Cause Campaign
• Most Digital Company of the Year
• Breakout Startup of the Year

Entertainment

• Game of the Year
• Viral Video of the Year
• Best Music Service or App
• Best Online Video Streaming Service or App
• Most Social TV Show
• Best Social Movie Campaign

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The Winners

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Award winners will be announced on Mashable on Monday, Dec. 19. Following the competition, we’ll celebrate our winners at MashBash CES on Jan. 11, 2012, at the 2012 International CES convention at 1OAK, the hot new nightclub at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas.

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The 2011 Mashable Awards Are Presented by Buddy Media

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Buddy Media is the social enterprise software of choice for eight of the world’s top ten global advertisers, empowering them to build and maintain relationships with their consumers in a connections-based world. The Buddy Media social marketing suite helps brands build powerful connections globally with its scalable, secure architecture and data-driven customer insights from initial point of contact through point of purchase.

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Via Mashable: http://www.mashable.com

Airline Seeks Electric Assist to Cut Costs, Delays

Via Wired Autopia: http://www.wired.com/autopia/

Take the Interview Enhances Job Candidate Screening With Video

Take the Interview, which came out of startup accelerator DreamIt Ventures last summer, attempts to do this through video screening. Candidates use their computer cameras to record answers to a series of questions from potential employers. When they’re finished, an employer can easily flip through the videos to cull candidates worth meeting in person, and they don’t need to waste time on the phone or in an interview with the ones who aren’t.

“It’s not just about what people say, it’s about why they sound like, how they pull themselves together,” Weinblatt says.

The service costs between $45 and $300 per month depending on how much a company plans to use it. Since launching in August, more than 350 customers, including Boston University – Kaplan and Living Social, have signed up.

Weinblatt says Take the Interview is contemplating a collaboration with another company that is creating a candidate screening platform — sans video — that crowdsources skills tests appropriate for specific positions. That would help the platform evolve from merely making interviews easy to fast-forward and pass around into a comprehensive screening platform. The startup has already made its first move toward expanding its offerings with an option to attach a portfolio or answer questions in text format.

It will also, at the public suggestion of well -known venture capitalist Fred Wilson, be adding more extensive scoring features to its current five-star rating system that will help employers keep track of their favorite candidates.

“It’s a way to cut through the crap and get to the right person,” Weinblatt says.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, drewhadley

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Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Via Mashable: http://www.mashable.com

Kindle Cloud Reader Comes to Firefox

Via Mashable: http://www.mashable.com