We Sponsored the 2009 Webbies. Hey – that’s five words!

Last evening, Limelight Networks attended the Awards Gala for the 13^th Annual Webby Awards, hosted by Saturday Night Live’s Seth Meyers and held at Cipriani in New York City.

The Webby Awards have long honored the best of the Internet – the new and different innovations on the web, and the creative people behind those innovations. Hailed as the “Internet’s highest honor” by the New York Times, The Webby Awards is presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a 650-person judging academy whose members include David Bowie, Harvey Weinstein, Arianna Huffington, Matt Groening, Vinton Cerf, and Richard Branson.

The Webbys celebrate what’s brilliant online, and that’s why we are proud to be a sponsor for this year’s event. We couldn’t think of a better alignment for our brand. To quote Biz Stone’s five-word acceptance speech from last evening, “Creativity is a renewable resource.”

Visit http://www.webbyawards.com/ to see our sponsorship in action. We’re delivering the on-demand video of the winners on the site, using LimelightDELIVER and our Adobe Flash infrastructure.

We also want to provide a special congratulations to all of the winners, many of whom are Limelight Networks customers. Thank you for continuing to push our industry forward with your innovation.

Update: Kelly Samardak for Just An Online Minute has posted more pictures on Flickr.

Here are some pictures from last night’s event:

Sponsor’s list greeting attendees. That’s our logo bottom left.

The “ICanHazSponsor” slide during the opening session.

Host Seth Meyers delivers the opening monologue.

Beaker delivers a five-word acceptance speech (“Mep. Mep. Mep. Mep. Mep.”) on behalf of the Muppets Online

Seth Meyers introduces Seth Macfarlane.

“Free. Open. Keep one web,” says Tim Berners-Lee as he received a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Other highlights from last night include:

Multiple winners such as: NPR (7); NYTimes.com (6); NBC.com (6); Next New Networks (5); PBS (4); BBC (4); The Onion (3); Digg (3); Sundance Channel (3); YouTube Live (3); and Wired.com (3).

Achieving both critical and popular consensus, 36 works won both a Webby Award and a People’s Voice Award including: Boston.com’s “The Big Picture”(Best Use of Photography); “1000 Awesome Things”(Best Cultural/Personal Blog); “Stickman Exodus”(Best Animation); “Prop. 8: The Musical”(Best Comedy: Short or Individual Episode); “Mint.com”(Best Financial Services); “TheAtlantic.com”(Best Magazine); “Flight of the Conchords Lip Dub”(Best Television); Current TVs “Hack the Debate”(Best Use of Interactive Video); “The Extreme Sticky Notes Experiments”(Best Branded Content); and “Xero”(Best Banking).

Newcomers this year include Qik (Best Use of Mobile Video), aki-aki (Best Social Networking-Mobile), Animoto (Best Services and Applications), and Yearbook Yourself (Viral Marketing).

The judges and public parted ways in several popular categories. For Viral Video, pop phenomenon “Shiba Inu Puppy Cam”earned the public’s top votes, while “The Website is Down: Sales Guy vs. Web Dude”was selected by the judges. For Best Individual Performance, the Academy chose Isabella Rossellini for “Green Porno,”while fans selected Eden Riegel for “Imaginary Bitches.”And for Best Weird, judges embraced “Jason Nelson’s Digital Oddities,”while the public voted for “FAIL Blog.”

Winners of the 13h Annual Webby Awards hail from 14 countries including: United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, The Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, Denmark, Greece, India, Germany, France, and Brazil.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 9:15 am and is filed under Content Delivery Network. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.