It’s kept us awake the last couple of days until ungodly hours, but it’s now live. The Crunchies is an awards ceremony co-hosted by GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat and TechCrunch, meant to celebrate internet technology and innovation. You can nominate companies for awards in 20 categories, and out of those nominations, 5 candidates are picked for voting on each category. Then in January 2008, a ceremony in the San Francisco Herbst Theatre will award the best of the best.

In the last few days our team built the infrastructure for the crunchies, designed the brand for ceremony and sites and built the web applications to allow voting and nominating companies. Now we definitely need a couple of hours of rest. All in all, it’s been a good time working with the people at Techcrunch again.

Note: Want to participate by nominating a company? Visit the Crunchies weblog and the nomination page and vote away! You can catch more posts about the crunchies at the participating blogs: Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat, GigaOm and Techcrunch.

How things have changed. A year ago, just about every device was closed and locked behind closed doors and proprietary information. Now we’re seeing Android, the Chumby, and now Bug Labs. It’s exciting that people are waking up to the power of allowing people to hack - and to have a device as platform. Bug Labs in particular is getting me very excited.

Fred Wilson has been blogging a bit about these guys (they’re a part of the Union Square Ventures portfolio) for a while, but this morning he’s posted a video by Robert Scoble that got me begging for one of these:

I’m not even going to ramble about how this project is going to create a whole bunch of new hardware hackers (which is fantastic) and getting people to try out new ideas and prototypes for future devices - because that’s all obvious if you watch Robert’s video (or read his post). I just want our team here to get one of these and hack away at some ideas we have.

Bug Labs guys - please don’t pull a Chumby on me. I was on the initial list for the Chumby prototypes but because I moved back to Europe, I never got one. Not one of the first limited few (which they kept emailing me about), not one now that they’ve launched. I can’t order the damn thing. Be smart about this, please?