What do Garrett Camp (founder, StumbleUpon), Brendan Eich (CTO, Mozilla and creator of JavaScript), Jesse James Garrett (president, Adaptive Path), Tariq Karim (founder, NetVibes), and Joshua Schachter (founder, del.icio.us) have in common?

They were all part of the tech celebrity judge panel that picked Shareaholic as a Grand Prize winner of Extend Firefox 2, a Mozilla sponsored contest for the best Firefox extensions!

The winners were announced last week. Three Firefox extensions, including Shareaholic (!!), were named Grand Prize winners after being selected from a list of more than 100 submissions.

About Extend Firefox 2:

Extend Firefox is a developer contest to encourage development and innovation in Web experience through add-ons to Firefox 2.

All entries were judged and scored by a panel of experts based upon excellence in: (a) User Experience (30%); (b) Creativity (30%); (c) Platform Leverage (15%); (d) Technical Correctness (15%); (e) Open Source and Use of Standards (10%).

Check out Mozilla’s official announcement and rest of the winners and runners up here.

The grand prizes are awesome, but we are very much more excited about how many more people will now find out about Shareaholic as a result of winning the contest, and the resulting momentum. If you don’t already have Shareaholic, you can get it here.

A big thank YOU for supporting, using, and believing in Shareaholic. Much more to come :)

March 7-11, 2008
SXSW Interactive
Austin, Texas

The SXSW Interactive Festival features five days of exciting panel content and amazing parties. Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the event celebrates the best minds and the brightest personalities of emerging technology. Whether you are a hard-core geek, a dedicated content creator, a new media entrepreneur, or just someone who likes being around an extremely creative community, SXSW Interactive is for you!

It’s going to be my first time attending. It sounds like A LOT of fun, can’t wait! Ping/tweet/email me if you’re going, would love to connect and catch up :)

David will also be in the Austin area the weekend following SxSW Interactive.

A couple of days ago, David and I decided that it was time to put up an about us page for Bzzster.

Though not everyone wants to know more about us, and it is probably the last page that most people will visit, we don’t want to disappoint those who do want to know more about the people, idea and values behind Bzzster and Shareaholic.

About Bzzster: http://bzzster.com/about

—

What is Bzzster’s mission?

Bzzster’s goal is to be the best way to recommend videos, news stories, blog posts, etc to friends and colleagues - open, easy, opt-in, customizable, and all leading to one thing - a tool to extend conversations.

Who’s behind Bzzster?

David Cancel [blog]

David is the co-founder & CTO of Lookery. Before starting Lookery he co-founded Compete.com where he was the CTO from 2000-2007. David oversaw Compete’s overall technology strategy, including the design of its patent-pending architecture. Before Compete he was the CTO of BuyerZone.com, now a part of Reed Elsevier [NYSE: RUK]. In the late 90’s he was a part of the founding team of Bolt.com & part of Lycos.com.

In addition to Lookery, David is on the board of directors of Geezeo.com, and the advisory boards of Compete.com, Visible Measures, MyPerfectGig, Sonian Networks and Swift. David is originally from New York City and now lives in the Boston, MA area with his superstar wife and daughter. He loves making something from nothing.

Jay Meattle [blog]

Jay is the Product Manager of Compete.com. He manages the overall development and growth of Compete.com, a rapidly growing and award winning competitive web intelligence service. Before managing Compete.com, Jay was part of Compete’s client services group where he worked with companies such as Bank of America, Lycos, and Yahoo!, helping them better understand and leverage online consumer behavior. In 2000, he founded HEPGURU ventures, a company focused on building IT-enabled services in the consumer internet and media & marketing verticals.

Jay received a B.S. cum laude in Computer Science from Tufts University. He minored in Entrepreneurial Leadership and Multimedia Arts. At Tufts he was awarded the MacJannet scholarship. Jay now lives in Cambridge, MA and hopes to spend more time in India. He loves creating, and lives for technology and innovation.

Contacting Us

If you’d like to contact us, please email us at at anytime. Let us know what you think in the Bzzster discussion group or check our help pages for more information.

Headquarters: Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 USA

We pushed out Shareaholic v1.3.3 this past weekend! This version was a near complete re-write, with many interface, functionality and under the hood improvements.

Check out the latest release at shareaholic.com, and remove some of the clutter that piles up from installing all those social bookmarking and sharing bookmarklets!!

• Shareaholic v.1.3.3 supports the latest version of Firefox 3 - beta 2 ! Now when Firefox 3 rolls out, you’ll be able to keep sharing with minimal interruption.
• The list of supported sites continues to get longer, especially when you compare it to the list initially supported — which consisted of just five sites. By popular demand, this version adds support for:
  
• You can now customize Shareaholic by selecting only the services you care most about and use to appear in the drop down menu!

  In the drop-down menu, click “Customize”:

  
  
  Shareaholic’s Options menu will come up:
  

• In addition to the main menu, the context menu now displays Digg and Del.icio.us stats as well!

  

The reviews, encouragement, and suggestions keep rolling in for Shareaholic! We just released an update incorporating some of the suggestions. Thank you everyone. More coming soon.

Get the latest version (Shareaholic v.1.3.1) of the add-on from shareaholic.com or Mozilla.

A very big thank you to everyone who has taken the time to review the Shareaholic firefox add-on, and provided us with very useful feedback. Response thus far has been incredible!

We’re also grateful that the good folks over at Mozilla decided to include Shareaholic in Mozilla’s official add-on directory. Thanks guys!

Some early coverage:

   

   

Today, based on user feedback, we’ve released an update which adds support for Twitter and Ma.gnolia. Also features a new context menu plus a number of other tweaks and fixes. Get the latest version here.