With more than 1.3 million nominations and votes, we’re pleased to announce the 2010 Mashable Awards winners.
The Mashable Awards, our annual contest highlighting the very best of tech and the web, received a record number of votes this year. After entering the final round, we narrowed the list to the top five nominees in each category based on your votes. The winners received the most votes from readers like you, and we want to thank each of you for participating.
The winners were announced Thursday at the Mashable Awards Gala, which was hosted by comedian Baratunde Thurston, The Onion’s director of digital, at the Cirque du Soleil Zumanity theater at the New York New York Hotel. The gala featured a special Cirque du Soleil Zumanity performance, appearances from guests like Antoine Dodson, as well as the DJ/VJ stylings of remix masters Eclectic Method. Stay tuned for more highlights from the Mashable Awards show, but in the meantime we’d love for you to join us in celebrating this year’s winners.
Congratulations to all the winners!
Best Social Media Management Tool: HootSuite
HootSuite is an advanced social networking dashboard aimed mainly at professionals who need to leverage sites such as Twitter and Facebook for their business needs. HootSuite relies on a freemium business model. Its free version allows you to add five networks and supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, MySpace, PingFm and WordPress.
HootSuite is best for actively managed accounts because its design focuses on streams, which are housed in customizable tabs. You have the flexibility to organize tabs by account, network or content, making it easier to monitor a specific type of feed more closely.
Most Creative Social Media Campaign: Stand Up For WWE
In an effort to “set the records straight” about inaccurate media portrayals, World Wrestling Entertainment launched the Stand Up For WWE campaign, using social media and video to gather support from its fans. It also posted a list lesser known facts about WWE and inaccuracies and corrections to media portrayals from across the web with facts accompanying the claims. The campaign included videos with its superstars as well as the likes of President Barack Obama.
Best Social Media Customer Service sponsored by BlackBerry: Eurail.com
Eurail.com is an e-commerce site for Eurail train passes for travelers from all around the world. Eurail offers rail passes to non-European residents wanting to explore Europe.
Its social media presence is focused on customer service and the company regularly updates and replies to its customers on its Twitter account, Facebook Page and more.
Best Internet Meme sponsored by Dynadot: Bed Intruder
The “Bed Intruder Song” from Auto-Tune the News was the most-watched, non-major label video on YouTube this year with 47.5 million views. The auto-tuned parody of a news cast featuring Antoine Dodson inspired hundreds of others to create their own videos as a tribute. The song even hit the Billboard Hot 100 across every single genre.
Best Music Discovery Service: Fizy
Fizy is an international music site based out of Turkey that was designed with the goal of being simple and easy to use. It’s simple. It enables you to listen to music track-by-track, create playlists and play songs from your homescreen that you may have never heard of. Just a simple search and it plays the tracks you’re looking for. If the track has a video available, it will show you that as well. It has a database of more than 75 million mp3s. The site supports 26 languages.
Best Use of an API: Qwitter Client
Qwitter uses Twitter’s API to notify you when any of your Twitter followers stop following you. Simply give the system your Twitter name, an e-mail address to contact you, and you’ll receive a summary e-mail at least once a day telling you the users who have stopped following you. It’s that simple, and yet highly useful.
Must-Follow Personality: Super Junior
Super Junior is a Korean pop boy band with 13 members and a strong presence on social sites like Facebook. The band, which was formed in 2007, attracts millions of views on YouTube.
Best Social Media Service for Small Business: ReachCast
ReachCast is a social media and web presence management tool for small businesses that specializes in search discovery, social media marketing and conversation and reputation management through a distributed presence and custom tools to reach local consumers.
Currently in beta, the service offers content publishing, reports, tracking and social media integration.
Entrepreneur of the Year: Doug Walker
Doug Walker is one of the creators behind That Guy With the Glasses website, which showcases content for movie buffs and video gamers.
The site was launched in 2008 and is home to episodic series including Walker and other contributors. Walker is best known for his series 5 Second Movies, The Nostalgia Critic and Ask That Guy with the Glasses. Before the website, Walker was a video personality on YouTube, where he created satirical video reviews of movies.
Best New Gadget: iPad
It’s hard to believe that it hasn’t even been a year since Apple launched the iPad, a device that has turned the tablet form factor into a must-have. Apple is expected to sell 13.3 million iPads this year, up from… well, up from zero iPads in 2009. It’s not just the fact that Apple single handedly created a new multi-billion-dollar revenue stream, but that it’s redefining all of computing. Notebook sales have dropped since the iPad’s introduction. Apple accelerated the rise of HTML5 with its tablet device at the expense of Flash. Its influence is already affecting countless web apps. Oh, and it’s redefining the meaning of “mobile.”
Most Promising New Company: PSGive.org
PSGive.org is a site focused on increasing awareness and funding of non-profits by enabling users to participate in online events. Users buy tokens to participate in events that give you a chance to win cool prizes, like the iPad, while benefiting a charity of your choice. In some ways it is like an online charity auction.
Must-Follow Non-Profit: @TWLOHA
To Write Love On Her Arms (TWLOHA) is a non-profit focused on advocating for hope and help for people struggling with depression, self-injury, addiction and suicide. It leverages various social sites to inform, inspire and invest in treatment and recovery for people who need help. Since 2006, the organization has responded to more than 150,000 messages from people in 40 different countries and has worked to spread the message of hope to universities, concerts, festivals and churches.
Best Location-Based Service: Foursquare
Foursquare, the mobile location-based service, had a year of tremendous growth that paved the way for other location-based services, including Facebook Places. The service recently surpassed 5 million users, increasing its user base by a factor of 10 in just nine months. At SXSW 2010, the company announced it had more than half a million users. It also recently opened an office in the bay area.
Best Online Game: “Farmerama”
Farmerama is a free online game similar to FarmVille that focuses on tasks around tending a virtual farm by completing farming jobs like tilling the land, planting trees, sowing seeds, raising animals and more. The game has more than 20 million registered users. It also enables you to invite your friends to help you with growing your farm. You also compete against other farmers online and can barter and trade with them as well. The challenges largely revolve around the goal of raising the most cattle. The game of course includes plenty of social activities that enables you to communicate and converse with other players online.
Best Website User Experience: Gaia Online
Gaia Online is an anime-themed social networking site. Founded in 2003, the social and forums-based site originally began as an anime community and moved toward social gaming and forums with some 1 million posts made daily with 23 million registered users. The site includes virtual currency known as Gaia Gold, which is distributed regularly to users as a reward for activity and participation, and Gaia Cash, which can be purchased with real money and is used to buy virtual gifts. The site includes various mini games, which can be played to earn gold and virtual items. The site also includes virtual worlds, such as Gaia Towns in which users can interact with one another’s avatars.
Breakthrough Website Design: Twitter
Twitter rolled out a new version of its web interface in September. The new Twitter homepage redesign was robust, transforming the site to be more like a stand-alone application, offering support for multimedia, keyboard shortcuts, and easy access to various types of content. The new design also has different dimensions (originally based on the golden ratio).
Best Web Video: Jay Park
Jay Park is a Korean-American actor, singer and dancer who has leveraged video to entertain his fans. The American-born personality initially became famous after getting the lead role for Korean pop boy band 2PM. At the end of 2009, he left the band to focus on a solo career in the U.S. In 2010, he posted a cover of B.o.B.’s “Nothin’ On You” on YouTube, which received 1.5 million views in the first 24 hours. It prompted Warner Music Korea to release the track, which went to number one on Korean music charts.
Must-Follow Brand: AllKPop
AllKPop is one of the top destinations for the latest Korean pop culture news and gossip. Launched in 2007, the site has leveraged social media to reach more than 3 million monthly readers and is the most trafficked English language Korean pop blog in the world.
Best Mobile Device: iPhone
This year, Apple released its latest version of the iPhone, selling 1.5 million on the first day. Despite a reception issue that angered its users and poor reviews, Apple still sold millions of iPhone 4 devices and even quickly sold out internationally in countries like China.
Best Mobile Game: “Angry Birds”
Angry Birds is a simple yet very addicting mobile game that has received more than 50 million downloads with 80% of users keeping the mobile app installed on their devices. According to Peter Verterbacka from Rovio, the makers of the game, there are 200 million minutes a day spent playing the game. The game is also making its way to the Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3.
Best Mobile App sponsored by Mobile Future: DriveSafe.ly
DriveSafe.ly is a mobile application that reads text and e-mail messages aloud in real-time and responds to the messages automatically without the driver having to touch or look at the phone. It helps you, well, drive safely. The application, available for BlackBerry and Android devices, will soon be coming to the iPhone and Windows Mobile. According to its website, it has prevented more than 380 million texting-while-driving incidents. The app features include Bluetooth and radio transmitter compatibility, easy activity, hands free use, reading shorthand in messages and an optional customizable automatic responder.
Best Mobile Platform: Android
Android is Google’s mobile operating system, which it bought in 2005. This year, however, the operating system became the top-selling smartphone OS. Android-powered devices also outsold the iPhone this year and the future looks even better as Android grows in popularity among users and app developers.
Best Mobile User Experience: eBuddy
eBuddy is a mobile and web messaging company that created the first independent browser-based IM service with e-Messenger in 2003. Its technology enables users who use various chats like AOL, Google Talk, MSN, Facebook, etc. to chat on one aggregate interface from their mobile device. Its mobile messenger is available through mobile web browsers or through iPhone and Android apps.
Most Creative Social Good Campaign: Twitchange
Twitchange is an innovative charity auction that enables you to bid on the famous for a chance to have them Twit-talk to you. It bills itself as the “first-ever celebrity Twitter auction,” and offers up a hefty list of celebrities, from Simon Pegg to Pete Wentz. Users donate money for the chance to have these celebrities follow you, retweet you or mention you in a tweet and all the money raised goes to aHomeInHaiti.org, which will then be able to finish rebuilding the Miriam Center, a home for children with cerebral palsy, severe autism and other disabilities.
Most Influential Social Good Champion sponsored by Yahoo!: John Cena
John Cena is a WWE personality and actor who leverages his social media presence and influence for good. He’s been heavily involved with the Make-A-Wish Foundation since 2004, granting the wishes of children with life-threatening illnesses. He’s earned the foundation’s highest honor, the Chris Greicius Award and was later named Wish Ambassador by the organization. He uses his online presence to encourage his fans to take part in the foundation’s mission to grant wishes, and most recently he is encouraging the donation of Delta frequent flyer miles, which he’s already contributed 3 million matching miles for.
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