Startupland, he explained, can only stay insulated from broader economic forces--like, say, today's warning about a new global recession--so for long: "The LP's that fund booms are, after all, pension, municipal, and sovereign wealth funds. Consumers need disposable income to invest in the latest products,  as do the companies who serve them and advertisers who reach them."

The latest venture capital numbers and tales from the boardroom seem to indicate that some of Mr. Ries' predictions are coming to pass.

In a trenchant blog post over the weekend, Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson said, "it is a tougher time for early stage consumer internet companies than I have seen since the 2001-2004 time frame. And I think we are still in the early innings of this more challenging environment," noting reports of a 42 percent drop in VC funding for consumer web and mobile companies for the first nine months of 2012 (year-over-year).

Looking at same report from Dow Jones VentureSource, the Wall Street Journal noted that:

“Just under half of the 165 companies in the consumer information services sector that raised first rounds in 2010 have raised a subsequent equity round and fewer than one-quarter of those who raised a first round last year have done so.”

Those numbers spurred fears of what Ed Zimmerman called a "Series A Funding Cliff," where the emergence of seed funds and so-called micro VCs has not been matched by an increasing number of funds in the next stage. That results in the kind of bottleneck that's bound to create carnage, though at the the moment, the impact has been softened by “the seemingly inextinguishable thirst by larger companies” like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Groupon to “acqui-hire” talent, he explained.

Meanwhile, between heady times and inexperienced entrants, "investors have gotten a little sloppy," says The Verge:

The temptation to pick up a company on little more than a good first impression or a colleague’s recommendation was strong. One entrepreneur who raised over half a million dollars for his startup last year told me that he fudged the presentation to investors — the technology didn’t work yet, so he used a video and pretended it was live.

But the constriction is not just at the seed stage. Last week, Bloomberg noted that investors were wary of sky-high valuations in ecommerce companies like Fab, Gilt Groupe, and celebrity-infused BeachMint and ShoeDazzle.

After pouring more money into retail startups in the third quarter than in any period since the dot-com bust in 2000, venture capitalists concerned over the formation of an e- commerce bubble are balking at deals they consider overpriced. The valuations in recent funding rounds and executive exits suggest investors are no longer willing to sink cash into online stores that don’t have proven growth prospects.

Concern over growth prospects--and profitability!--are also hurting Foursquare's attempts to raise a $50 million round, the Wall Street Journal reported last week.

Foursquare is expected to bring in about $2 million in revenue this year, people familiar with the matter said, by selling targeted coupons. That is well behind the pace set by Facebook, which generated $153 million in revenue selling ads in its fourth year, and Twitter, which sold $45 million in ads at the same point in its history, according to research firm eMarketer.

Foursquare also faces "a backdrop of growing skepticism about young technology companies in the wake of deep stock-market declines for their publicly traded peers," i.e. Zynga, Groupon, and Facebook.

Mr. Wilson's astutely analyzes some of the underlying causes of this capital crunch, including competition for consumers' attention as large platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn "suck up a lot of the oxygen" of time spent online in the English-speaking world.

there are still occasional new entrants into this list and departures too. tumblr and pinterest have risen a lot in the past couple years while myspace has declined. but consumer behaviors are starting to ossify on the web and it is harder than ever to build a large audience from a standing start.

What's more, he argues, the turn towards mobile means has led to difficulties in getting that coveted homescreen spot. Careful observers of the startup scene have no doubt witnessed startups get "stuck in the transition" from having a good-looking product that does what it promises fail to get a large user base. As Mr. Wilson says:

you need to master the "download app, use app, keep using app, put it on your home screen" flow and that is a hard one to master.

For some evidence of that, look at a mobile-first companies like Foursquare. As the Journal noted, only 8 million of the company's 25 million registered members use the app at least once a month.

Perhaps because of those challenges in adoption and engagement, Mr. Wilson notes that momentum for late stage investors is moving away from consumer towards enterprise. Dave McClure of 500Startups vehemently objected to that shift in interest, calling it a "huge error," and seeing an upside even in the flailing trajectories of Groupon and Zynga, especially as nearly "every possible internet distribution channel has MORE users than ever before – whether it be search, social, mobile, video, local, SMS, email, chat, etc.":

The number of recent internet services that have grown from nothing to hundreds of millions of users is frankly rather astonishing – Pinterest, Instagram, Groupon, Zynga – all of these took less than a few years to get to hundreds of millions of users and in some cases billions of revenue. While Groupon & Zynga have certainly fallen Icarus-like from higher heights, it’s still the case that both are amazing for how fast they grew and acquired users via search, social, and other channels.

Despite their respective reading of the tea leaves, neither Mr. Wilson nor Mr. McClure is backing off consumer Internet investments. And the decreasing cost of building scaleable software-based companies means one can live lean to survive harsh startup cycles. But especially in New York's app-happy tech scene, entrepreneurs might want to look down at their home screens and keep Mr. Wilson's litmus test in mind.

This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (aka "The Guy with the Red Tie"), founder of GarysGuide and mentor at ER Accelerator. You can reach him at gary [at] garysguide.org.

So, it was a busy week. Steve Jobs (who loves black turtlenecks almost as much as I love red ties) resigned. Twenty-five thousand New Yorkers checked into Earthquakepocalypse (and lost some respect with Californians in the process). And Hurricane Irene gave us a few gusts of wind, a few drops of water and a lot of @ElBloombito. But nothing is more important than the upcoming SXSW 2012 Panel Picker deadline (September 2). See, where I come from, we look out for our own. So I've put together a list of panels representing our local New York startuppers. Go show some love and vote for them and email me if you want your panel to be added to the list.

And now, here's whats going on in your neck of the woods this week ...

Use The News! An Introduction to the New York Times API
Zoe Fraade-Blanar (interactive consultant, New York Times and adjunct professor, NYU ITP) will give you the straight-up dope on how to tame the "vast, powerful and a little confusing" monster that is the New York Times data services API.
Monday, 6 p.m. @ General Assembly, 902 Broadway 4th Floor

Ruby for Kids. Sharing with kids how much fun programming is
You know what they say. It's never too early to get them hooked. Just don't be too upset when ur kid whips up a snazzy social app and snags seed funding before you do.
Monday, 6:30 p.m. @ Warren Weaver Hall, 251 Mercer Street

Outloud.fm - NYC Tech Talks
You can't turn around without bumping into a social music listening startup these days. Following in the smart footsteps of Turntable.fm and Console.fm comes a new one, Outloud.fm. Co-founders Steven Huynh and Mike O'Brien will tell you what its all about and how they built it using node.js and redis.
Tuesday, 7 p.m. @ Meetup HQ, 632 Broadway

PHP is dead: No startups use it... except these awesome ones
Personally I think the start-up world is big enough for everyone, yes, even you Cobol. But if PHP and Ruby want to meet up at the back of the school to duke it out, I'd pay to watch that.
Tuesday, 7 p.m. @ Refinery29, 30 Cooper Square 4th Floor

Producteev and Meetup host Old School Game Night Tourney for Startups
Start-ups. Game Night. Swag. Networking. Hot Dates. Pizza. Cold Beer. Prizes. Co-founders. Charades. Honorary trophy. How can you not like this event?!
Wednesday, 7 p.m. @ Meetup HQ, 632 Broadway 3rd Floor

500Startups NYC Demo Day
The place to be to hang out with super angel (errr... micro vc), master of 500 hats and the guy who introduced 'AARRR!!' to the silicon valley vocabulary, Mr. Dave McClure himself. Bonus drinking game--down a sake bomb everytime Mr. McClure can't remember the name of one of his own start-up investments. I kid, I kid :)
Wednesday, 7 p.m. @ General Assembly, 902 Broadway 4th Floor

The Product Group September 2011
It's 2011. Surely you're not still torturing ur friends with Evites, are you? You, dear reader, need Paperless Post. And to learn more about their swoon inducing designs and graphics so-good-you-can-lick-them, come meet up with their product guru, Itai Ram.
Thursday, 7 p.m. @ MTV, 1515 Broadway

Graph Based Machine Learning with Applications to Media Analytics
Social graphs, interest graphs, taste graphs, knowledge graphs. Every start-up worth its salt is dropping the graph bomb in VC meetings and sprinkling it liberally in their pitch decks. But let's be honest. How many of us really know what the heck a graph is? So go chat with Intent Media scientist and former IBM researcher, Lei Ding and get the inside skinny on nodes and routes.
Thursday, 7 p.m. @ AOL HQ, 770 Broadway 6th Floor

Credit Card Processing Basics
No, you won't learn about how to deal with deadbeat clients or what ur start-up business model should be. What you will learn is how to get the dough from a customer who actually wants to pay you. You don't wanna be leaving money on the table, now do you?
Thursday, 8 p.m. @ General Assembly, 902 Broadway 4th Floor

NYC Startup and Dim Sum Enthusiasts Meetup
Cuz startupping + dimsumming is a match made in geek foodie heaven.
Saturday, 10:30 a.m. @ Jing Fong Restaurant, 20 Elizabeth Street

More on the horizon ...
September NY Tech Meetup @ NYU Skirball Center on Sep 6
An Insiders Guide to Angel Investing with Thomas Wisniewski @ General Assembly on Sep 7
Video Hack Day with Shelby.tv @ General Assembly on Sep 10
Open Video Conference @ New York Law School on Sep 10

Until next week. Stay social, my friends!

Mr. Kader.

Betabeat first met Tout's Tawheed Kader--TK, as he's known--at South By Southwest, where he was pitching an app that takes some of the pain out of repetitive emails. He already had paid subscribers and we heard glowing reviews from people who were using it. But apparently we weren't the most important contact Mr. Kader made at the festival. He met Dave McClure over dinner and vodka. "The funny thing is, I ended up pitching Tout to just about everyone on that table except for Dave," Mr. Kader says.

"The only real exchange the two of us had was when Dave stared at my vodka martini with 16 olives (because that's just how I roll), and asked 'Hey TK…. howʼs that drink treating you?' Needless to say, Dave and I connected soon after, and before I knew it, not only was he investing in Tout, but he also convinced me to move out to California for the summer to join the 500 Startups Accelerator program."

Mr. Kader also met Joshua Baer of Capital Factory, who became an investor, at SXSW. His other investors/advisors include Esther Dyson, Eric Ries, Owen Davis, and others, including another email entrepreneur, Vivek Sharma, and a diamond cutter, Daniel Eskapa.

UPDATE: We heard back in April that Tout planned to raise $500,000 for its seed round, but Mr. Kader said this round was set for $250,000 and was oversubscribed. (Maybe the extra money can go for cocktail olives?) "We're doing out 500k+ round come Demo Day at 500Startups," the founder said in an email.

Tout plans to use the money to expand the team. Mr. Kader has already recruited a community manager, Margaux Guyonneau, a southern girl who moved to the city after she got the job off Twitter.

"Toutʼs singular goal is to help people communicate better via email," Mr. Kader writes in a blog post. "The way we do this is by identifying patterns that exist in how people communicate and then optimizing for those patterns. We think Repetitive Email (what weʼre working on now) is one such pattern. As we get closer to perfecting this pattern, we want to move onto other patterns as well including: Scheduling, Introductions, Contact Info Sharing and even Group Discussions."

The Valley is beautiful, Mr. Rosen says, and he's had more exposure and mentoring for his start-up than he ever could back home. But he doesn't plan to stay. The founder plans to defy convention by moving back to New York after incubating his start-up on the West Coast, and he's starting to think he might be part of a trend.

San Francisco and Silicon Valley still have a lock on engineering talent, patron companies and major investors in the tech world. But with its status as a media hub and the enthusiasm and attention around some New York-based companies (Etsy, Kickstarter, Foursquare and others), New York is becoming more attractive as a place to headquarter a web-based tech company.

"I was driving home and I remember thinking, don’t be such a fucking idiot, just call this guy and tell him to get his ass out here and stop wasting time with this bullshit,” Mr. McClure told The New York Observer. The bullshit was that Mr. Rosen had been hustling business development for a West Coast start-up, which it is hard to imagine him being bad at--he's a natural networker who berates himself if he can't remember someone's name. A gaggle of entrepreneurs had accosted Mr. McClure that day at General Assembly, but Mr. Rosen was the one the investor brought home.

Mr. Rosen had been splitting his time between his job and his start-up, Speakergram, with only a few hours left for sleep. He had good relationships with investors in New York and never missed a networking event or a meetup. But it just wasn't happening for Speakergram in New York. He had a lot of interest--the Foursquare team and Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian were early adopters of the app, which streamlines requests for speaking engagements--and investors were keeping an eye on him. But no one in a position to mentor or fund the company was ready to do so quite yet.

Now Mr. Rosen gets intensive tutoring in design, data and distribution at 500Startups. He’s demo’ed for influencers Tim O’Reilly and Jason Calacanis. In New York, his mentors were full-time CEOs with their own businesses to run. But in Mountain View, the former Googlers who roam 500Startups are often effectively retired, happy to spend hours talking to a young entrepreneur or give him rides home.

There are drawbacks, though. He misses his family, friends and girlfriend, but he also misses the scrappiness and diversity of the New York tech scene.

“In New York, it’s all blowing up, it just hasn’t happened yet,” he said. “One thing I really miss most is the strong New York City camaraderie. We’re smaller and scrappier and fighting harder to prove ourselves.”

And sometimes all tech, all the time gets a little boring. “My friends in New York City, one would be in marketing, my good friend was a producer at MTV. Other friends are lawyers, other professionals might be bankers… Here you go to the party and everyone is in tech,” he said. “It’s not like I’m tired of talking about my company, but it’s all we talk about.”

He's heard similar sentiments from founder friends who are considering grooming their start-ups in New York.

Right now Mr. Rosen is working 17 and 18 hour days to get ready for the 500Startups Demo Day in April, and he estimates he'll be in California until May or June. But after that, he’s hoping to get back east. “I’ve been viewing this as a business trip,” he said. “I’ll be out here as long as I need to be until I can get to a place where I can come back home,” he said.