The tech industry’s big Oscars-style awards event the Crunchies took place in San Francisco last night and the big mobile winners included Snapchat, Tinder and Candy Crush Saga.
The ephemeral photo app Snapchat, which is rumoured to be valued at over $3 billion ( £1.8 billion), managed to nab the Best Mobile App award despite losing 4.6 million usernames and phone numbers to hackers last month.
Location-based matchmaking app Tinder won the Best New Startup award after taking the online dating world by storm.
Tinder is beloved by the millennial crowd as it dispenses with all the questions associated with online dating sites, instead cutting to the chase with a photo-centric service provided in a ‘hot or not’ style app.
Candy Crush Saga won the Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (time sink) award due to the addictive nature of the game, which has now been downloaded more than 500 million times and reportedly played more than 150 billion times.
The event also saw its fair share of drama as a small group of anti-tech activists gathered outside the Davies Symphony Hall, where the awards were being held, to protest the gentrification of San Francisco by tech companies.
Crunchies host and former Daily Show presenter John Oliver joked about the controversy, asking the attendees how they had managed to gentrify a city that had already been gentrified three times over.
The full list of winners can be viewed below:
Best technology achievement: Bitcoin
Best collaborative consumption service: Airbnb
Best e-commerce application: Wanelo
Best Mobile Application: Snapchat
Fastest Rising Startup: Upworthy
Best Health Startup: One Medical
Best Design: Pencil by FiftyThree
Best Bootstrapped Startup: Imgur
Sexiest Enterprise Startup: Zendesk
Best International Startup: Waze
Best Education Startup: Duolingo
Best Hardware Startup: Oculus
Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (time sink): Candy Crush
Biggest Social Impact: Edward Snowden
Angel of the Year: Chris Sacca
VC of the Year: Peter Fenton
Founder of the Year: Drew Houston & Arash Ferdowsi
CEO of the Year: Dick Costolo
Best New Startup: Tinder
Best Overall Startup: Kickstarter
Source: VentureBeat
