Voting begins for the Crunchies. Awards, party Jan. 18

The nomination process for the Crunchies is complete. You’ve helped us narrow the list of possible winners for the awards, and it’s now time to vote on them.

The Crunchies is a joint effort between us, GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb and TechCrunch, and aims to recognize the best technology innovations and start-up achievements.

Some 82,000 nominations were made for companies in each of twenty categories. Five companies in each category have made it to the final vote. Starting now, you can vote for the startups you think are the leaders in each of the categories, ranging from “best business model” to “best CEO.”

Voting goes through January 10. An Awards Ceremony will take place on Friday, January 18 at the Herbst Theater across the street from City Hall in San Francisco, and it will followed by a party. Tickets to the event will go on sale in the next week or so, so stay tuned.

A word on sponsorships. If you’d like to sponsor a particular Crunchie award, contact us here. We at VentureBeat are especially proud of the clean-tech award, because we think that sector is so important right now. But the other award categories are all noteworthy too, from “best bootstrapped,” to “best start-up of 2007,” to “best overall” (see full list below). Many thanks to the existing sponsors Adobe, Charles River Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Microsoft, OurStage and Sun for assisting us with the event – we could not do it without them.

If you’re a finalist, congratulations on making it this far. You can grab a badge to let your users know about the Crunchies.

Best technology innovation / achievement
Earthmine
Like
Move Networks
Twine
Viewdle

Best bootstrapped start-up
FriendFeed
PoliticalBase
ProductWiki
Techmeme
UpNext

Best new gadget / device
iphone
Kindle
Ooma
Pleo
Wii

Best business model
Glam Media
Imeem
Prosper
Weatherbill
Zazzle

Best design
Etsy
Jackson Fish Market
Netvibes
Smugmug
Songza

Best enterprise start-up
37Signals
Attributor
EditGrid
Ribbit
Zoho

Best consumer start-up
1800FREE411
23andMe
LinkedIn
Meebo
Zillow

Best mobile start-up
AdMob
Fring
Loopt
Shozu
Twitter

Best international start-up
Atlassian
Gizmoz
MusicShake
Netvibes
OpenAds

Best user-generated content
Digg
Facebook
Geni
Instructables
Yelp

Best video site
Aniboom
Hulu
Joost
Justin.tv
Tokbox

Best clean tech start-up
A123 Systems
Ausra
Gridpoint
NanoSolar
Tesla Motors

Best use of viral marketing
Flixster
iLike
iminlikewithyou
RockYou
StumbleUpon

Best time sink site
College Humor
Duels
kdice
Kongregate
Pandora

Most likely to make the world a better place
Causes
DonorsChoose
Kiva
One laptop per child
ZeroFootprint

Most likely to succeed
Kayak
Mint
Slide
Wordpress
Zivity

Best start-up founder
Reid Hoffman
Max Levchin
Kevin Rose
Evan Williams
Mark Zuckerberg

Best start-up CEO
Gina Bianchini
Dick Costolo
Toni Schneider
Rob Solomon
Lance Tokuda

Best new start-up of 2007
Hulu
iMedix
Joost
Ribbit
Tumblr

Best overall
Digg
Facebook
GrandCentral
Twitter
Zillow