18th Annual Webby Awards nominees announced

Nominees for Webby Awards, which celebrate Internet achievement, were announced today, and they range from famous -- or infamous, as the case may be -- celebrities to groundbreaking tech companies, mobile apps and games.

The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a group of 1,000 internet experts and professionals, announced the nominees for the 18th Annual Webby Awards on Tuesday. The academy will choose regular award winners, and the public will also have a chance to cast their votes for some of their favorite nominees at the Webby People's Voice Awards.

All winners will be announced on Tuesday, April 29.

"This year's Nominees really start to show the promise of a connected society where our social interactions help shape and enable so much of our daily life," David-Michel Davies, Executive Director of The Webby Awards, said in a statement. "We are excited to share these outstanding works with the world and see which ones the public will choose as Webby Winners."

The organizations with the most nominations are Vice Media with 11, The New York Times with 10 and Google Inc. with nine.

Celebrity nominees -- including Beyonce, Justin Bieber and Ellen Degeneres -- continue to push boundaries on the web. Among the nominees for viral online videos is "24 Hours of Happy," a 24-hour music video starring Pharrell Williams.

For mobile apps and games, nominees include the secret-sharing app Whisper, vacation rental site Airbnb, and QuizUp, a trivia game app with over 220,000 questions.

The Citi Bike app, used for New York City's bike sharing program, is among the apps nominated in the city and urban innovation category which also includes PulsePoint, an app that lets people trained in CPR help people nearby who are in need of assistance.

The nominees in the viral ads category include "The Epic Split" featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme, in which the action film star does a split in between two Volvo trucks, along with "Real Beauty Sketches" by Dove.

This year's Webby Awards saw a record number of honorees and nominees from around the world, with more than 12,000 entries from over 60 countries. Of these, 8 percent were selected as nominees. The U.K. had the most honorees and nominees with 176 honorees and 72 nominees.