The Crunchies is an awards event sponsored by four leading review sites: GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat and TechCrunch. They’ve created twenty award categories to “recognize the year’s most innovative technical, creative and business accomplishments of key companies, products and people”.

At APPLEBOX, we are what you call ‘hyper-local’, in that our online service really focuses on those within a small geographical area (i.e. around our store). So on an international scale we’re pretty much off the radar (although we recently raised some eyebrows as a showcase example at a tech blog).

Regardless, APPLEBOX is innovative in how we use technology to completely redefine the mass market offering of your local video store.

So we think we might have a remote chance of being noticed if you nominate us for the Crunchies! Nominations are open until Thursday, so just click the Crunchies circle above and enter APPLEBOX in as many categories as you like. I’d suggest consumer start-up, but there’s plenty of others and I think APPLEBOX also qualifies for the boostrapped start-up, design, international startup-up and business model categories. It’s up to you, there’s no right and wrong, and voting is anonymous.

If you do nominate us - many thanks from myself and Sarah!

UPDATE 13/12
Nominations are now closed!

See that green up there? in our site header. Thats RGB HEX #49DD36, which is trying to approximate pantone 802c which is a beautiful vibrant green that Ben picked for us. Which Sarah and I both love, but since find out that pantone 802c is in a gamut range that CMYK printing can’t really cope with. RGB visuals (such as our monitors) get close, but also still don’t quite hit that pantone 802c - which btw I actually didn’t see until today, when the print guy showed me the pantone swatch. Wow - so that’s our colour huh? And we can get it printed on our DL flyers (but with a custom effort to work up from a spot colour), but not quite on the window vinyls, and the sign writer doesn’t like it and the magnets might be a touch out, and the barcode printers will have to buy different ink which will double the cost of the first print run. What joy! And to think I was just dealing with good ‘ol #49DD36.

Zeldman used to talk about making the transition from print to web - well going the other way throws a few curve balls as well!

It gets way crazy trying to flesh out a back catalogue. For this first store, I bought about 2800 DVDs from a liquidated store for a great price - but there are big holes in the catalogue we want filled. So, Sarah’s sorting through thousands of titles and THEN coming up with another 600 or so (including TV series) that we need on top of that. Then there’s the standard monthly buy - its all driving her nuts - so duck if you’re going to ask if we’ve got Twin Peaks (she’s got a deadly arm!)

I used to work in the corporate world. I had my place: analysis - specs - development. Outside my world, server guys provisioned servers. Network guys kept the network humming. Sys Admins administered systems (know unix? sure! lt gives me a directory doesn’t it!!!). Desktop guys rolled out new desktops. I never appreciated how much their presence kept my wheels turning … until now.

I bought my server, installed SLES10, found a data centre and hosted it. It took me WAY TOO LONG. I learned my sys admin and dealt with linux, apache, tomcat, ssl, webdav, jboss, mysql and all the quirks along the way. And that also took WAY TOO LONG. I’m not the uber-hacker who eats this stuff for breakfast. Its been a long hard push. And then there’s the J2EE stack: spring/hibernate/acegi/axis, modelling with UML and androMDA code gen, and then a hefty browser JS stack.

Its the config that kills me! Every component needs its own config, its own tweaks. And back in the day, there was an expert on hand who could (as Ben Stiller would say) ‘just do it’. Not in this startup! I gotta do all that, and on top of it still develop a product. Gotta know the market, watch the competition, create a business that’s more than the underlying tech.

Yet every little hiccup pushes out the development time. Loose sessionId’s with apache proxying to tomcat? Drove me nuts, lost a day. A day here, half there, 2 days the following week … it pushes and pushes out. Want a reason not do a startup? The workload will close to break you, pure and simple.

Ok - I’m havin’ a bitch! Its been one of those days … it ain’t all bad!