Techcrunch August Capital Event Wrapup

Thank you to the nearly 1,100 people who flowed through the Quadras Conference Center for our Mobile Web Wars event and the party at August Capital immediately afterwards. We were able to donate $7,500 to Malaria No More, which will protect at least 750 children from Malaria for five years.

This was our third annual party held at August Capital, who continue to graciously co-host the event with us at their offices, which includes a huge outdoor deck. Here are our wrap ups of the 2007 and 2006 parties at the same location. Thanks in particular to David Hornik, who continues to convince his partners that it is a good idea to have a thousand or so over caffeinated, slightly intoxicated entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and press roaming their hallways.

If you weren’t able to attend the event, you can see the official photo stream here and more here and here – some are also included below.

As I said in my brief moment on stage at the event, real world events are a really important part of the Silicon Valley community. We meet and interact with so many people over the Internet and by phone and never have a chance to meet them in person. To have the chance to spend a few minutes talking in person over a beer makes those relationships real. Small, intimate events are always best, but sometimes it’s fun to get a ton of geeky people together, too, and just see what happens.

One thing that really makes the party special: Hugh MacLeod has made a lithograph illustration for each of the three events, and personally signs and numbers each one for attendees. This year’s lithograph is below. Thank you so much for doing these, Hugh. We’ve framed each one and hang them proudly in our office.

There were also 20 product demos around the event. Webware’s Rafe Needleman crowns Plista the most interesting, and we’ll likely see more articles about them soon.

If you’ve written about your experience at the event please leave a link in the comments below and we’ll add it here: Mobile platform tug-of-war, TechCrunch Mobile Web Wars Roundtable, TechCrunch August 2008: Defining a Culture, Techcrunch Party: For the win, At the TechCrunch party, TechCrunch 3rd Summer Meetup, My new white iPhone is now property of TechCrunch (plus this), Post TechCrunch Party!, NYC Crashes Techcrunch Party, TechCrunch August Capital 3, TechCrunched for Time, and TechCrunch August Capital 2008 — serious fun (and more to come).

Thank you to our sponsors, who pay for all the food and drinks and other expenses. We couldn’t do this without you:

Affinity Circles is the leading provider of exclusive social networks for established, professional organizations seeking to promote career advancement opportunities among their members.

Blurb is a company and a community that believes passionately in the power of books: making, reading, sharing, and selling them.

Cannonball Wine Company is one of our favorite wine providers that makes great wine at a great price.

Center’d helps people plan any event or activity, simple or complex, and discover new places to go and things to do based on the opinions of trusted friends.

Engine Yard focuses on Ruby on Rails application deployments and operations support, so you can focus on developing your application and business. Customers have started during development and grown to millions of users without stress along the way.

Etchstar.com provides turnkey on-demand product customization solutions, working with leading OEMs and retailers to offer online shoppers premium products featuring custom art and text via engraving and direct-to-garment printing. Etchstar’s massive but tightly curated licensed art library includes Pink Floyd, Wu Tang Clan, The God Father, Family Guy, the CIA, SpongeBob, UCLA and only the best user uploaded art and logos.

EventBrite is the world’s largest online event management and self-service ticketing site. Distinguished by its ease-of-use and cost-effectiveness, EventBrite has helped tens of thousands of companies, organizations and non-profits take advantage of the Internet to promote and sell-out their events.

Future Works and the Future Works Studios are joining us as the official August Capital media sponsor. Thanks guys!

Helpstream is a brand new customer service application built for the Web using innovative SaaS technology to provide engaging service-driven communities for organizations who are dedicated to exceptional customer support.

Hugh MacLeod, the man behind Gapingvoid.com, is well known for what he modestly calls, “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”. When Hugh is not doing his pithy cartoons, he works closely with some Fortune 100 businesses, finding new ways to better tell their stories.

IDrive.com is an online backup service for consumers and small businesses provided by Pro Softnet Corp. IBackup.com is another variation with additional emphasis on SMB market with Exchange, SQL Server and Disaster Recovery capabilities. With over 250,000 user base between these two services, we are a leading player in the online backup space.

Jaduka enables companies to harness communications to create more effective operations. With Jaduka’s Web Services APIs, applications can trigger individual or group calls; provide automated alerts; manage surveys; activate digital content; and administer account and transaction information for a variety of solutions.

Kaboodle is the #1 social shopping website where people discover, recommend and share products. With over 8 million monthly unique visitors, at the heart of Kaboodle is a fun and engaging community of people who love to shop.

Kontagent is an application that integrates tightly with platforms such as Facebook to offer widget and application developers a high level of analytics data. Developers can use the tool to track the application’s usage and adoption rate, and a number of other details that more basic analytics programs can’t offer.

Kosmix scours the Web to automatically generate home pages for any topic from Le Corbusier to Burning Man, and connects consumers to the information that makes a difference in their lives. Spend less time searching and more time exploring, discovering and learning at www.kosmix.com.

Limbo is the largest mobile community in the US with over 2.5 million members. All of our services are free to our members. Limbo amplifies your social life – giving you quick and easy access to more activities, people and places. Limbo is headquartered in Burlingame, Calif., and backed by Azure Capital, DFJ, and NEA.

Loopt, based in Silicon Valley, uses location technology to improve the way people connect, share and explore in the real world. Loopt’s interoperable and accessible social-mapping service is available across multiple carrier networks and supported on over 80 mobile devices.

Malaria No More‘s mission is simple: to end deaths due to malaria. The world has known how to beat this disease for more than a century, yet it remains the number one killer of children under five in Africa, claiming more than 1 million lives a year.

Media Temple is an industry leading, inc. 500, privately held, profitable web hosting and software application service provider in California. Since 1998, (mt) has provided businesses worldwide with professional-class network environments for web, email, applications, and rich media content.

Mixx is a branded social media site and active online community dedicated to connecting users and publishers through communities and tags. Launched in October 2007, Mixx has more than 2 million users and is the social media platform of choice for major publishers such as CNN, Los Angeles Times, USATODAY, New York Times and thousands of blogs.

Mobissimo simultaneously searches more than 200 different travel sites in 30 countries and five continents, including major global airlines, low-cost carriers, consolidators, and hotel/car rental sites, to find the best fares and rates online.

Mo’Jiva‘s flexible mobile-web advertising platform allows agencies, publishers, advertisers and sales-reps to leverage and add-value to existing relationships and content partnerships by providing an extension to fully manage mobile marketing strategy.

Pandora is a personalized radio service, available anytime and anywhere on the PC, in the home and on mobile devices, including the Apple iPhone. By simply entering a favorite song or artist, a listener is instantly launched into a personalized listening experience, full of discovery as Pandora explores their favorite part of the music universe.

Plista is a user-centric real-time personalization and recommendation network based on collaborative filtering. It allows for enhancing end-user experience by recommending more relevant content, products and ads. It works with any item and via various channels: as a widget, per API, or browser plug-in.

ScanDigital converts old photos to digital format. Customers send in their loose snapshots or albums, and the company scans and color-corrects them. The photos are given a permanent online home on the company’s photo sharing site, to which customers can upload additional images.

SezWho provides a universal distributed profile allowing site visitors to discover quality content based on people. Additionally SezWho provides the capability to rate content from which we derive context specific author reputations.

Snap is a distributed media network, reaching 10% of the US audience and 35 million unique global users each month in 48 languages (June 2008). Snap’s product is called Snap Shots and is used on over 2,000,000 websites and blogs, to improve user experience by revealing the content that users want and delivering it to them right where they are, without forcing them to click links or conduct searches.

Socialmedia.com is the largest independent social advertising network. Over 5,000 applications from Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Hi5 participate in socialmedia.com’s network, attracting a global audience of over 30 million monthly unique users.

Stormhoek is a little South African Winery that has built global awareness through the use of social software. Located in Stellenbosch, South Africa, Stormhoek thinks that wine is about Love, Passion, Spontaneity, Dreaming Big, Celebrating, and Changing The World.

Tapulous is building a family of fun and social applications for iPhone. The company’s first release, Tap Tap Revenge, is currently the #1 download on the App Store

TokBox is a first-of-its-kind, video communication service that makes it effortless for anyone to make video calls, send video mails or embed video communication into any website – for free! TokBox is located in San Francisco, California and is privately held.

Topix is the leading news community on the Web, connecting people to information and discussions that matter to them in every U.S. town and city. Topix also helps media companies to engage their online audiences through syndicated forums, hyper-local platforms, RSS feeds, and more.

vSNAX Videos is a free application that delivers mobile video clips to iPhone and iPod touch users from more than 35 premium media partners including AccuWeather.com, CBS, Ford Models, Ripe TV, and MTV Networks’ VH1, Spike and GameTrailers.

Zivity provides subscription-based reality entertainment and social networking for an 18 and over audience. Zivity’s initial focus is a community-powered showcase of professional-quality photography promoting female beauty and expression.