We opened up nominations for the upcoming Crunchies Awards a week ago. In that week, over 13,000 nomina­tions have been cast, for thousands of startups and products.

Nominations stay open until midnight December 12. At that time, we’ll take a day or two to tally the results, remove any spam and fraudulent votes, and the top five nominees in each category will go up for a general vote. The winners will be announced on January 18 at a ceremony at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco.

Remember that some of the awards are specific to new 2007 products startups. Others (most of them) are more general and aren’t tied to the launch date of the company.

Tickets will be made available soon. The theater holds nearly 1,000 people, and there will be a big party afterwards.

The competition would not be possible without our sponsors. Thanks to Sun Microsystems Business Analytics, Microsoft and Charles River Ventures for sponsoring the Crunchies. Contact us if you’re interested to sponsor an award or other part of the evening festivities.

If you are a startup and want to encourage your users to nominate you, blog and website badges are available here.

And rememeber that this is not solely a TechCrunch effort. We are partnering with GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb and VentureBeat on this as well.

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