Roundup: VC industry cut in half, Obama is LinkedIn, Google-Nasa and more

Summary:
*VC industry cut in half?
*Obama reaches out through LinkedIn
*Google internal docs on RSS strategy leaked
*Google to carry NASA equipment in jet
*Google Health loses executive
*Google about to bring Adwords to mobile search
*Nokia’s MOSH social network claims traction
*AOL’s Digg clone rebranded

VC industry cut in half? — Are there too many VCs chasing too many similar ideas — off the financial cliff? Recent stats coming from the national VC lobby group, NVCA, suggest VC is suffering some fallout. In 2000, there were 1156 different venture firms that made at least one new deal. In 2006, there were only 597. That’s almost a 50 percent drop! (Venture firm OVP makes the observation in its newsletter.)

Obama asks LinkedIn users how he can help small businesses/entrepreneurs — See his question here. Already lots of answers.

Google’s internal projects for Google Reader and RSS feeds — Details are leaked here.

Google’s co-founders will carry scientific equipment for NASA — This is part of a deal that grants them landing rights at Moffett Federal Airfield, near Mountain View, Calif., for their jet. The co-founders will carry the equipment on their Boeing 767 (see Chronicle story ). Other reports say Google is paying $1.3 million dollars for the right.

Google Health unhealthy? — Adam Bosworth, who headed up the Google Health project, has left Google. Google’s Marissa Mayer is taking over Google Health. The move comes after Google has been slow to unleash what many expect to be an ambitious health offering. Screenshots leaked out a few weeks ago about its upcoming offering.

Google is about to bring ads to mobile search — Details here.

Nokia’s new content sharing network gets 6.5M page views since launch early last month — Called MOSH (for “mobilize” and “share”), the network for gaming and other social networking features such as video-sharing, is picking up users in India, Russia, Vietnam and China, the company says. It has yet to launch in the U.S.

AOL’s Digg clone rebranded — Netscape will be rebranded as Propeller.