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 photo stream here and here - some are also included below.

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The Google/Digg acquisition negotiations were in full swing as of last Tuesday, had passed the term sheet stage and the two companies were in final negotiations in the $200 million range. But sometime this last week Google decided to walk from the deal. Digg was notified on late Thursday or Friday.

Google was in the due diligence stage of the deal, where they peer deep into Digg’s technology and financial statements. Most term sheets are non binding, so anything that gives the buyer pause can be used as an excuse to walk away - but generally the buyer already has a very good idea what they are getting well before the term sheet stage.

Two sources close to the companies suggested that some issue that came up during technical due diligence was to blame. One source said that the issue was more personality driven, and that Google decided after spending more time with Digg’s top team that there just wasn’t a fit.

Either way the deal appears to dead and can be added to the long list of failed Digg acquisition deals. And when a company is “left at the altar” other buyers are usually hesitant to step in.

So what will Digg do now? We’re hearing they’ll just push through with a new round of financing. Digg hired Allen & Co. to represent them in the sale, but the investment bank is just as good at closing massive venture financings, too (they represented both Slide and Ning in their recent a half billion dollar valuation financings).

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Here’s the live stream of our Mobile Web Wars Roundtable, which starts at 3PM PT and ends at 5 PM. The Roundtable is a freewheeling discussion about whether the mobile Web is finally here and which platform will win going forward. While the iPhone seems like a slam dunk right now, can older platforms like Nokia’s Symbian or Windows Mobile replicate its success? Does Apple have anything to fear from Google’s Android? To help answer these questions we have an amazing group of mobile startup CEOs, top iPhone app developers, and other technologists on the RoundTable.

Please add your own comment or questions inside the video player or Twitter them to MobileWars. I will try to incorporate questions from the Web audience in the discussion.

Free video streaming by Ustream

We are also streaming live via cellphone camera on our Kyte channel:

The participants on the Roundtable are:

David Rivas, Nokia, Vice President of Technology Management for S60 Software
Walt Doyle, CEO Ulocate
Tom Conrad, CTO Pandora
Greg Yardley, CEO of Pinch Media CEO
Bart Decrem, CEO of Tapulous
David Hornik, partner, August Capital
Jed Stremel, Director of Mobile at Facebook (replacing Joe Hewitt)
Guy Ben-Artzi, Founder of Real Dice and CEO of Mytopia
Jason Devitt, CEO of Skydeck
Gannon Hall, CMO of Kyte
Sam Altman, CEO of Loopt
Marc Davis, chief scientists of Yahoo’s mobile group
Omar Hamoui, CEO of AdMob
Richard Wong, partner at Accel
Andreas Weigend, people & data (former chief scientist, Amazon)
Tatsuki Tomita, SVP of Consumer Product, Opera
Mike Rowehl, chief architect, SkyFire
Mary Ann Cotter, CEO, Cooking Capsules
John Faith , GM and VP of Mobile for MySpace

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Jed Stremel, Director of Mobile at Facebook, just announced at our Mobile Web Wars Roundtable that Facebook’s iPhone/iPod app has reached 1 million users.

Facebook is currently ranked as the 6th most popular free application on Apple’s App Store, and has been among the store’s top applications since the store’s launch on July 10. We posted initial download numbers for the apps soon after the store’s launch (Facebook had around 9,000 downloads at the time). Since then, Apple has changed its policy and no longer posts the number of downloads for each app, so we need to rely on developers to report their figures.

We’ve asked MySpace for their corresponding numbers. Off hand, John Faith, GM and VP of Mobile for MySpace was able to tell us that their mobile WAP site sees 1.7 million uniques a day (users can access the MySpace WAP site without using the native application). This is certainly a large figure, but it doesn’t provide a direct comparison. We’ll update the post when we can get more comparable numbers.

At Facebook’s f8 conference this week, the company announced that it would soon be open sourcing its iPhone application, so we can expect to see a number of copy cats in the near future.

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In a blog post today Google says they’ve identified 1 trillion unique URLs on the web. It’s actually more, they say, but some web pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other.

What they note way down in the fourth paragraph, however, is that they don’t actually index all of those pages, so you can’t find them on Google. Estimates on the true size of the Google index are a mere 40 billion pages or so.

Why don’t they index all the pages they’ve found? Some of them are spam. But it’s also very expensive to index sites. And the fact that Google indexes many news sites, blogs and other rapidly changing web sites every 15 minutes makes all that indexing even more expensive. So they make value judgment on what to actually index and what not to. And most of the web is left out.

Google also says “But we’re proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine.”

That may be true today, but it probably won’t be true next week (check back here then). Google knows that as well as we do, and that’s why they posted this today.

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We look forward to seeing you tonight at the 3rd Annual August Capital Meet-Up (the pictures are from last year’s event). Details on the event are below. If you are attending, things kick off at 5:30, right after the Mobile Wars round table across the street.

Attendees: please remember to tag your photos and videos with TechCrunch and TCAugust2008. And if you write about the event afterwards, please add a comment here with a link so that we can add it to our wrap up post. Also, if you want us to use any photos you take in the wrap up post, please add an appropriate creative commons license notice.

I’ll be twittering, FriendFeeding and live videoing periodically from the event as well.

All (a full 100%) of the ticket proceeds from the Meet-Up will be donated to Malaria No More, an inclusive, grassroots movement to control malaria, a preventable and treatable disease that kills more than one million people each year. The $10 price of a ticket is the cost of an insecticide treated bed net that can protect a child or several children from malaria for up to five years. This Meet-Up is the most popular TechCrunch party of the year, and an extraordinary showcase for a select group of sponsors.

The Guest List is now full - we wish we had more space to accommodate all the ticket requests. We’re planning additional events this year and hope you can join us next time. Due to the size of the guest list, we will be checking individual IDs for entry into the party.

Meet-Up Details:

Time: 5:30 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.
Venue: August Capital, 2480 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA 94025
Flickr Tag: TCAugust2008 + TechCrunch

We’ll be hosting over 20 start-up demos on the deck. Thank you to our event sponsors who are making tomorrow evening’s event possible. The entire TechCrunch team sends out a big “thank you†to this year’s August Capital Meet-Up sponsors. Please join us in a big group hug with the following sponsors:

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.

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If you want to know where the mobile Web is going, join us here at TechCrunch at 3PM PT for the live video stream of our Mobile Web Wars Roundtable The mobile Web is finally here and developers have to choose what platform they want to bet on. Do they go with Apple’s beautiful walled garden, wait for more open Android pastures to arrive, or do they hope that Nokia figures out how to update Symbian into something that can compete with the newer platforms?

Right now, the iPhone has the momentum and the apps. Will Apple repeat the mistakes it made in the PC era and keep its platform so tightly controlled that it will leave an opening for a more open platform to become the Windows of the mobile world. And what platform has the chops to lay claim to that title? A lot of people are hoping that will be Android, despite a lack of phones and grumbling among developers that it is not ready yet. How long does Android have to get its act together?

We have a great panel to help answer these questions (and ask better ones). You can watch it live here on TechCrunch and ask your own questions. Twitter them in to MobileWars.

Here’s who will be there:

David Rivas, Nokia, Vice President of Technology Management for S60 Software
Walt Doyle, CEO Ulocate
Tom Conrad, CTO Pandora
Greg Yardley, CEO of Pinch Media CEO
Bart Decrem, CEO of Tapulous
David Hornik, partner, August Capital
Jed Stremel, Director of Mobile at Facebook (replacing Joe Hewitt)
Guy Ben-Artzi, Founder of Real Dice and CEO of Mytopia
Jason Devitt, CEO of Skydeck
Gannon Hall, CMO of Kyte
Sam Altman, CEO of Loopt
Marc Davis, chief scientists of Yahoo’s mobile group
Omar Hamoui, CEO of AdMob
Richard Wong, partner at Accel
Andreas Weigend, people & data (former chief scientist, Amazon)
Tatsuki Tomita, SVP of Consumer Product, Opera
Mike Rowehl, chief architect, SkyFire
Mary Ann Cotter, CEO, Cooking Capsules
John Faith , GM and VP of Mobile for MySpace

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Noted Computer Science professor Randy Pausch passed away today after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. Dr. Pausch was a founder of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University and worked on the Alice program, an animated educational system for high school and college students.

It’s not difficult to find educators in CS who are as personable as Dr. Pausch was but it is definitely rare to find one filled with such kindness and an undeniable love for life.

He is survived by his wife and children Dylan, Logan, and Chloe. Donations can be made to the Carnegie Mellon’s Randy Pausch Memorial Fund.

His last lecture:

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Redlasso, the video site that allows bloggers to post clips of television content, has shut down its beta in response to a recently filed lawsuit by Hulu-backers Fox and NBC.

In May, Fox, CBS and NBC issued Cease and Desist notices to Redlasso for copyright violation, which the company largely ignored. In June the company established a “Media Advisory Board” headed by a number of ex-studio execs that they hoped would help smooth things over with the networks.

Since its launch eight months ago, Redlasso has seen exponential growth amongst bloggers, and can be seen on a number of top news, gossip, and political blogs. The site allows users to watch recorded feeds of a number of television shows, and “clip” potions of them for playback on their sites. Among the channels available are ESPN, Fox News, and CNN.

Redlasso records and serves all of this content from its servers, without legal license for any of it. The company has long held to the belief that it is protected by the first amendment, and that the snippets that bloggers distribute qualify for fair use (the embedded clips can only be 10 minutes long). Fair use may apply to the snippets, but the site is still hosting entire episodes, even if they are only available to approved bloggers.

The site will continue to operate for its Bussiness and “Radio to Web” clients.

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Continuing the tradition of selling bad Web businesses for less than they were bought for (in the vein of Cnet selling Webshots for $45 million three years after paying $70 million for it), AOL is trying to unload online storage service Xdrive. Three years after buying Xdrive for a rumored $30 million (never officially disclosed), the price it is now trying to fetch is $5 million, and going south, says a source. Maybe AOL should put it on eBay.

It is a sad ending for Xdrive, which now will be best known for giving birth to MySpace (both Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe worked there). In an e-mail to staff explaining why AOL is powering down Xdrive and other businesses, EVP Kevin Conroy explained (bold added for emphasis}:

Subscription businesses are so AOL, circa 1999.

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