Kick-ass roof deck? Check. Blazing Valley sun? Check. Add 1100 attendees from the tech startup world ranging from entrepreneurs, bloggers, vloggers, venture capitalists, strong mojitos and a couple of rappers (MC Hammer and Chamillionaire), and you have a must-attend Silicon Valley event.

Thingfo’s partner Mobissimo sponsored a table to demo our new MobiFriends social travel community. Next door to us was Chris McGill of Mixx and formerly Y News. Great catching up with Chris, Mixx is coming out with a lot of cool features. Me, Kate, Adam, and Szymon demo’d MobiFriends to a parade of interesting people.

After attending two years now, and also going to a lot of smaller meetups and the big conferences while working on Thingfo, I have to say that the TC August Capital event is one of the best networking events of the year.

More of my pics on flickr, and more from Michael Arrington here and Brian Solis here.

Solis sums it up, Tech Crunch August capital

“is to the Palo Alto Web 2 community what the running of the bulls is to Pamplona”.

You just have to be there, because of the atmosphere, the quality of the people and thus, the quality of the interactions. Compared to a lot of the smaller mixers and tech meetups, which can be more like a regular bar scene where you can’t talk and there are a lot of people just out to party, or the big conferences where there are several thousand people running between panel sessions, the Tech Crunch event is far better for good networking, conversations, and fun.

Why? First of all, if you’ve managed to get here you’re either a serious player in the industry or seriously trying to get there. People I had a chance to talk with were consistently focused, intelligent and knowledgable. But with those mojitos, beer, wine, and great music everyone was having a blast.

As always, it’s great catching up with friends from Yahoo, from both the “former” and the “current” columns: Sarah Ross, CMO for TechCrunch. Chris Mcgill, CEO and founder of Mixx. Jenn Dulski, CEO and co-founder of centerd. Jeff Weiner, exec-in-residence at Accel and Greylock, who presented a $7,500 check to malaria for none, where he’s on the board. David Beach (still at Yahoo) and also working on 12seconds.tv. Gil Ben-Artzy of Yahoo Corp Dev., the 2nd person to correctly name the old woman on Adam’s t-shirt (Golda Meir). Jen Cooper and Jim Squires now of mixercast.

But as I said earlier, the great thing about the TC events is meeting new people who are at the top of their game. I talked with quite a few interesting people, and it seemed that most really got what I was trying to do with Thingfo.

Monday Morning Blogger thinks it’s better to come and promote yourself with free beer than getting a sponsor table. I met Dominik and I think he is a great networker and self-promoter. But that may be more about Dominik than an average joe trying to pull off that stunt. If you do it wrong you’d come across as a joke, which he didn’t. However, having the laptop and being able to demo allows you to show people exactly what you’ve built. That’s even better than giving away free beer. Ok, fine. Almost as good. But you get my point — if you can demo, demo. (Which means, start building an iphone app for your startup.)

It was a great event, thanks to everyone we met and special thanks to TechCrunch, August Capital and Mobissimo.

(Cross-posted at mikegrishaver.com)