Serenastyle Blog

Friday, Teresa and I walked around the MacWorld expo—only to be slightly disappointed by the products on display. I mean, how many iPhone cover makers do we need? How many wannabe Adobe Suites really have something else to offer? I was hoping to witness something revolutionary, something unique—but I guess there are just more copycats than innovators out there. Before we left, we recorded a short video in the Youtube booth:

Correction, last MacWorld expo with Apple.

Afterwards, we grabbed an early dinner at Samovar before we dropped by the Disqus office. I really should’ve brought them a present or something for helping us innumerable times with blog commenting compatibility issues. On the walk to the Herbst Theatre for the Crunchies Awards, I admitted to Teresa that I thought it was slightly embarrassing to always be introduced as “the creators of uhh…My Mom is a Fob.” Her ingenious response was, “Yeah, well, I'm sure that's how Eric Nakagawa felt when people first introduced him as the guy who invented I Can Has Cheezburger.”

Teresa and I arrived at Crunchies half-an-hour-too-early—in fact, I think they were still labeling the trophies when we walked into their meeting room. Well if you came to Crunchies, we were the two girls behind the center table, checking in VIP sponsors and press. Of course, we had our fan girl moments when people like Zuckerberg walked right by. It was almost more exciting than seeing Ashton Kutcher at TC50 last summer.

We got to watch more than half of the ceremony, and to be honest, I thought the Richter Scales were more creative than any of the companies standing on stage that night—they came up with every imaginable Valley inside joke/web reference.

Nah, I was kidding. All the companies present that night deserved to be there, but we knew Facebook would win “Best Overall Startup”, we knew FriendFeed would win “Best New Startup”, and we knew the Twitter guys would win “Best Startup Founders”. We also knew that the iPhone 3G would win “Best New Gadget”—but did you guys have any clue when it came to “Best Design” or “Most Likely to Make the World a Better Place”? Yeah, I haven’t heard of half the finalists in those categories—so I looked them up. Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised.

Best Design

• Animoto (runner-up) - Animoto analyzes your photos and music and creates a custom video for you. 
• Cooliris (winner) - Cooliris is a plug-in that creates something like an expansive 3-D browser wall. It'd be cool if I had a giant monitor...except, I only have my 15" MBP. 
• Friendfeed - you know. 
• Infectious - Threadless for gadget art?! I'd totally submit. I almost bought a laptop sticker at MacWorld too. 
• Lala - wow, even easier to use than last.fm, and I get full-length songs. 
• Sliderocket - forget PPT and Keynote, Sliderocket creates web-based slides that aren't even possible offline (I mean, c'mon, searching and tagging?! easy importing via Flickr and Youtube?!). As someone who's sensitive to aesthetics, I think I'm in love.

Most Likely To Make The World A Better Place

• Akoha - social reality game, where you earn points by doing good deeds IRL 
• Causes - you've seen it on Facebook. 
• CO2Stats - CO2Stats somehow calculates your web's energy usage, optimizes it, then buys renewable energy from wind/solar farms to neutralize your site's carbon footprint. Calling all Berkeley hippies... 
• GoodGuide (winner) - you've prob seen/heard of it; it's like Yelp for natural products. 
• Kiva (runner-up) - All you VCs who only invest in rich Valley kids shall now be guilt-tripped. There are more people in Africa, you know. 
• Better Place - forget race car trade shows/meetupz, we all goin' hybrid and eventually oil-independent. It's the new hip thing to do, ya digg?!

For a complete list, please visit TechCrunch.

The after party in City Hall was—a new experience. Everyone assumed we were both over 21, we just kept grabbing bad-tasting vodka, and we “partied with people twice our age” (in Teresa’s words). I wouldn’t consider it partying since I relate partying to dancing, and obviously, the DJ there had no intention to start any sort of dance floor.

Instead, it was more like a massive social gathering with older geeks and their surprisingly hot +1's. We had our antisocial moments playing Guitar Hero in the corner of the game room, but we also ended the night with much “professional” socializing (aka business-card collecting). I’d say, it turned out better than I expected. I’m willing to bet, Teresa and I were the youngest there—and it’s better to start meshing with the crowd now than later. I’m almost 100% sure that I want to stay in the Valley and work in the tech industry (along the lines of design, innovation, entrepreneurship).

Lastly, MC Hammer flew in from the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas earlier just to catch the Crunchies. Damn, he’s hella legit.

I totally grabbed that last photo off of Flickr. Thank you, NandorFejer, for uploading!

Apparently, Laughing Squid caught the back of our heads as well.

It's funny how we know people by their online aliases—not their real names or what they look like in real life. When Teresa and I were going through the lists, we were drawing blanks. Dear press, please register with your Twitter names next time. MC Hammer doesn't show up with a name badge saying "Stanley Kirk Burrell".