So we’ve tabulated the nominations and the votes are in for the 2012 Crunchies. More than 600,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories, and, along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2012′s best in technology. Voting begins now. We’ve also updated our categories this year. For the first time, we’ll recognize enterprise, education, hardware, e-commerce, content discovery, collaborative consumption, and ye old hockey stick growth. We’ve seen Felix Baumgartner risk it all for a jump from space in his crazy suit, the Curiosity land on Mars with some epic tweets, and Google record our lives through Glass. It should be quite the match-up for Best Technology Achievement. Newcomers like FiftyThree’s Paper, as well as Medium from Ev Williams and Biz Stone’s Obvious, have caught our attention for design, joining Facebook Timeline, Square, and Svbtle in the Best Design category. Jim Goetz, Marc Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz will vie for your votes along with Matt Cohler, Michael Moritz, and Peter Thiel for VC of the Year. Goetz knocked it out of the park with the IPOs of Palo Alto Networks and Ruckus, as well as the acquisitions of Karma by Facebook and eMeter by Siemens. Matt Cohler continued to prove his understanding of the consumer Internet with the substantial acquisition of Instagram by Facebook. Michael Moritz saw the value in Kayak long before industry incumbents decided it was better to purchase, rather than compete with them. Thiel continues to take big risks and reaped the benefits of his Facebook investment in 2012. He’s the chairman and sits on the board of Palantir, arguably one of the hottest companies of 2012. And Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz continue to shake up Sand Hill Road with their modern operating style and key investments. Sexy enterprise companies will take the stage by storm with their vertical’s resurgence in popularity. Asana offers organizational nirvana while Box gives us our place in the cloud. Cloudera, Plexi and Zendesk round out the group. This year’s Best Mobile App category pits previous 2011 Crunchies winner for Best Location App, Grindr, against Google Maps – every iOS device owner’s first love – and Evernote, Instagram, and Square. Speaking of good match-ups, the CEO of the Year competition includes some of the Valley’s finest: Twitter’s Dick Costolo, Evernote’s Phil Libin, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, Google’s Larry Page, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. It’s going to be a
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