Announcing the 2009 Crunchies Finalists.

Voting is now open for the third annual 2009 Crunchies Awards to celebrate the best technology accomplishments of 2009. Everyone is eligible and encouraged to vote once per day per award category through Wednesday, January 6 at midnight pst. There are 18 award categories to recognize accomplishments across a variety of fields and roles.

Finalists, grab a badge to get your community to vote for you as a winner. And please email us, so we can get you prepared for the ceremony.

Finalists were chosen by GigaOm, VentureBeat and us based on your popular nominations (over 141,000 actually) and our critical eye for the major accomplishments of companies, products and people in 2009. The fine print rules are here.

Wednesday at noon PST, we will release the first batch of 150 tickets to the Friday, January 8 awards ceremony to be held at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco, starting at 7:30 pm. Orchestra seats are $65 and balcony tickets are $45. Both tickets get you into the after-party across the street in City Hall's Grand Rotunda through midnight. We have fewer than 450 total tickets to publicly release to the ceremony, so these may go nearly as fast as our Avatar screening.