The 2008 Crunchies is an annual competition and award ceremony to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. here’s the list of winners and the finalists.

Google Ad Manager is a product within Google’s AdSense network based on a new hosted advertisement management tool.
Google Ad Manager has been seen as a direct threat to OpenX, an on-premise software solution (known previously as OpenAds and phpAdsNew) for managing the advertising campaigns on websites. Both solutions serve and track the performance of ad units sold either directly or introduced by third party networks like Federated Media or Google AdSense. But only Google can “use AdSense to fill unsold inventory or compete on price against other ad networks,” optimizing …

The Android platform is a software stack for mobile devices including an operating system, middleware and key applications. Developers can create applications for the platform using the Android SDK. Applications are written using the Java programming language and run on Dalvik, a custom virtual machine designed for embedded use, which runs on top of a Linux kernel.
If you want to know how to develop applications for Android, you’re in the right place. This site provides a variety of documentation that will help you learn about Android and develop mobile …

PlentyofFish is a free online dating service. The founder and sole operator, 29-year-old Markus Frind, runs the site from his 83-square-metre Vancouver apartment. The site pulls in more than $5 million a year from Google advertising.
Markus Frind, CEO and Founder of Plentyoffish Media Inc., graduated in 1999 from British Columbia Institute of Technology with a diploma in Computer Systems Technology. Over the next few years, he worked for several dot.com companies as the number of them in Vancouver began to wane. Markus ended up working at a company as …

Avant Browser is a popular freeware web browser from a Chinese programmer named Anderson Che, which unites the Trident layout engine built into Windows (see Internet Explorer shell) with an interface intended to be more feature-rich, flexible and ergonomic than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE). It runs on Windows 98 and above, including Windows Vista. Internet Explorer version 6 or 7 must be installed.
As of November 2008, total downloads surpassed 22.5 million.
Avant Browser is currently available in 41 languages.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.
Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, or email, or through an application such as …

Safari is a proprietary Internet web browser developed by Apple Inc. First released as a public beta on January 7, 2003 on the company’s Mac OS X operating system, it became Apple’s default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10.3, commonly known as “OS X Panther.” Apple has also made Safari the native browser for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
On June 11, 2007, a version of Safari was released for the Microsoft Windows operating system, supporting both Windows XP and Windows Vista.