OK, here's the funny story: sending out the iNews message (asking people to vote for us) resulted in such a big traffic that their server crashed. And as soon as they restarted it (about 8 hours later), it crashed again. And again. And again. So after two days, they simply had to remove avast (the whole page refering to avast was deleted).
Avast got about 200,000+ votes in those two days, whereas a typical figure for a competitor's product was something like
5,000 votes during the whole 3-week voting period.
And these 200,000+ votes were submitted at the moment the server was actually up (instead of just returning the "Service unavailable" message - which cuts down the voting time to some 8-12 hours netto?).
Next day, I called them, asking why they removed us. They explained to me what I just said, and pretty much confirmed that we have already WON (but pleeeaaase, keep the user mass from our server now
).
But that was just the finalist round (I mean, we won the nomination and moved to the finale). However, the results of the finale were not, in any way, influenced by the results of the first round (public voting) - so it was quite a BIG surprise for us that avast has actually won the prize. In fact, it was such a big surprise that we didn't attend the gala event (we assumed that our chances of winning are so miniscule that it's pointless to go there). Well, you see, sometimes it pays to be optimistic (but it was probably still better than to go but not win).
Of course, with the US prize in our pocket we're looking forward to the European round (April) - we'll definitely not miss that (although I won't be there as I'm in the US at that time...).
Cheers
Vlk