All credit goes to the Crunchies

It's awards season, of course, but here that doesn't just mean the Golden Globes or the upcoming Oscars. The Valley cares as much, if not more, about the Crunchies.

We used to have the Webbys, but they moved to New York, so they don't count. Plus the Webbys make you pay to be considered for an award and have so many categories (119) that pretty much everyone who pays wins something. There's no appeal in that for hyper-competitive Valley types.

These days, winning a Crunchie is what you brag about. The awards, hosted by a quartet of insider technology websites, celebrate the year's best start-ups, websites and technology innovations.

The prizes are in a modest 20 categories and winners are chosen by online popular vote.

The 2008 event has just been held in San Francisco, where the top award, for best overall start-up, went to Facebook. Yes, that's an old start-up, but it's still one in the sense that it's yet to make money. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, took best start-up CEO.

Best actual 2008 start-up was, deservedly, FriendFeed, which lets you track everything your friends are posting to social networking sites.

The trio behind Twitter won the best start-up founder award. The best mobile start-up was Evernote, which syncs anything you capture on your phone with your other digital devices. In that category I was rooting for Posterous, which lets you blog from your phone or email. It's so simple that even I have a Posterous site.

My favourite category was best time sink application, won by Tap Tap Revenge, an addictive iPhone game created by hot Palo Alto start-up, Tapulous.

* Next week's inaugural events are financed, as usual, by private donations. The biggest block of money coming out of Silicon Valley, reports the San Francisco Chronicle, is from Google. Six execs, including CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Larry Page, have ponied up a collective $150,000 (£102,600). They'll be looking for more out of it than just a good seat at the parade — hint: try Googling "lobbyist".

* A new twist in the Steve Jobs health saga. Now he says things are "more complex" than his doctors originally thought. Jobs is taking a leave of absence from Apple until June, but staying as CEO. Valley sentiment is split between those who see Apple as cooked and the rest who say this is the time to buy.