Mr. McClure, in shadow

The advent of 500 Startups first-ever Demo Day in New York drew a standing room only crowd to General Assembly yesterday for a long night of seed stage pitches and free beer that went an hour past its 9pm bedtime. Betabeat knew we were in the right place when we overheard, "We want to create a better music experience, better than Pandora," pass for small talk over by the cheese and crackers table. The sight of TechStar's David Tisch in a backwards baseball cap and khaki shorts ("business shabby" strikes again!) high-fiving Dave McClure was another promising sign.

All of the startups pitching were graduates of Mr. McClure's 500 Startups, a Mountain View-based accelerator program, and many flew in from the Valley in search of local froth and perhaps a glimpse of the tall buildings. Each co-founder walked out to their own theme music, with soon-to-be baby daddy Jay-Z making a surprisingly popular choice.

When Mr. McClure started his antic night at the mic by telling the crowd, "I'll write a check for whoever brings me and Paul [Singh, a principal at 500 Startups] a beer. Look at 'em come out, look at 'em come out," followed by "I didn't mean for you guys to give me your beer" after a gentleman towards the front handed him a half-empty bottle, we knew it was gonna be a good night.

Here's what you missed:

Tout: Software that takes the inefficiencies out of repetitive emailing and lets you track the results. The app sends out more than 1,000 emails a day and already boasts 450 paid accounts  Highlight: Tawheed "TK" Kader walked out to a mash-up of Biggie and XX. No surprise there, the man drinks his martinis with 16 olives. Clearly he likes to customize.

Vidcaster: An online video platform that lets clients like Airbnb control their environment under their own domain name rather than rely on YouTube.  Highlight: CEO Kieran Farr worked as a taxi driver around San Francisco while bootstrapping his startup.

Tinfoil Security: A security service to prevent small businesses from being hacked that crawls your website like Google, but looking for vulnerabilities instead of content. Highlight: Co-founder Ainsely Braun showed a PowerPoint slide with the logos of dozens of organizations like the FBI and Wordpress while she said, "Every single company here got hacked in a way we could have prevented."

Ovia: A recruiting service that helps speed up the time to hire with a video interview process that narrows down the number of candidates companies have to meet with in person. Highlight: After CEO Rodrigo Martinez's high-octane presentation ("Who's gonna make it happen?! We're gonna make it happen!!"), Mr. McClure quipped that Mr. Martinez had gotten lessons from Tom Cruise.

Kibin: A proofreading and editing service for things like school papers that offers quality-checked turn-around in less than 24 hours. Highlight: Co-founder Travis Biziorek came up with the idea when he was trying to find someone to help him with his personal statement for law school. He never ended up going.

Snapette: A mobile app focused on shoes and bags that relies on crowd-sourced photos to show users what's new and in stock in the stores around them. Highlight: The crowd at GA cheered wildly when co-founder Sarah Paiji announced that she had just dropped out of Harvard's MBA program yesterday. That was matched by the booing when Ms. Paiji mentioned that she had worked at McKinsey and Goldman before catching startup fever.

Daily Aisle: A Kayak-like service for your wedding day that helps brides find venues and vendors. Highlight: One person offered a pity hand-raise when the presenter asked, "Who here loves spending time with women who are planning their wedding?!"

Culture Kitchen: Classes, recipes, and ingredient subscription boxes that help you cook ethnic food "like the grandmother you wish you had." Highlight: Mr. McClure's intro: "How many of you are white people? How many of you like ethnic food? That's the problem! You're all fucking white and you don't know how to cook that shit!"

App Grooves: A/B testing for app developers that lets you get feedback on things like which logo and keywords potential users might find more appealing. Highlight: Describing the service as a "Hot or Not for apps."

Skipola: A service that automates the process of ordering from restaurants that only use the phone. Highlight: The pitch to get restaurants to download Skipola's platform? "Are you tired of getting calls from Skipola . . ."

Storytree: An app that helps families (or even groups of friends) collect and share memories with question prompts, videos, and photographs. Highlight: FINE, we'll admit it. Betabeat almost cried during the video presentation, which got the loudest applause all night. We dare you to watch and not get verklempt.

Console.fm: "An easy button for awesome music" that culls browser-based playlists from the web (at the rate of 20 to 40 new songs per playlist per day) to solve the problem that "rocking out is hard." Highlight: "We want you to have Console.fm parties in your pants all the time." Oh yeah, and their adorable plans to dominate Facebook.

CraftCoffee: A service that delivers boxes of artisanal coffee to your door, sorta like a well-designed wine of the month club, but the only side effect is a caffeine buzz. Highlight: Founder Michael Horn's refreshing honesty: "I started with a more traditional e-commerce site and it was a total disaster." He just closed the seed-stage round yesterday, but conceded to the crowd, "If you really wanna invest, I might talk to you about it."

Will Call: An app that lets you find tickets to a curated list of cool shows at the last minute. Highlight: Co-founder Donnie Dinch gave by far the funniest pitch of the night. Regarding a scenario wherein you might be playing Angry Birds on your couch when you see a Facebook update that your friends are at a concert: "I'm slinging birds, thinking they're getting laid." Regarding the market for unused tickets. "We don't think we can get all that $20 billion right away. Whaaat?" Regarding his co-founders: "Both gingers, both brothers, of themselves."

From.Us: A gift-giving service that lets multiple users contribute suggestions and the recipient decide what they want. Launched 45 minutes before the presentation. Highlight: "We all get shitty gifts and it sucks."

Cardinal Blue's PicCollage app: A sweet looking, seemingly easy-to-use app that lets you make collages of your photos in a jiffy and share it with friends. The video was another crowd favorite. "Hipsters love it, grandmas love it, everybody loves it." Highlight: During the slide about the founders, the presenter quipped, "You can see we have a lot of degrees, but don't worry, we get things done."

DailyGobble's Relevantmobile.com: A loyalty rewards system for chain restaurants that doesn't require software, but instead relies on users taking photos of their receipts. That way, restaurants have purchase history attached to a cellphone number and location. Highlight: Decision to rely on users with cameraphones, "Putting an iPad everywhere is not the solution to every single problem."

Zerply: A prettier, more relaxed, more social professional networking service where messaging is free and you can incorporate other online identities like Quora, Tumblr, and Twitter. Highlight: The pitch before the pitch, "For those of you that think LinkedIn is a great professional networking solution, you don't have to listen to this."

Volta: Lightweight CRM for phone-based companies that works with inbound and outbound calls. Highlight: Compatible with Skype, Twilio, Google Voice, iPhones, Androids, and landlines.

Welcu: A tool for managing high-end unique events like conferences. Highlight: Already has funding from Eric Schmidt and clients like Coca-Cola and BBDO.

LaunchRock: A service that lets startups (or even clients like Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen's upcoming t-shirt line) set up and track a "Launching soon" page. Betabeat was a frequent user even before the presentation. Highlight: Co-founder Jameson Detweiler, sporting some serious rockstar hair, talking about the barriers to getting users to broadcast the fact that they signed up to their friends, "You're not going to share this thing unless it's going to make you look cool to your friends."

So there you have it folks. You can see why it was a long night.  Thankfully, Mr. McClure, our cruise director for the evening, kept the energy-level high with occasional bursts of song or a request that we act out with Cobra-Kai Five with the person to our right. Here, let him demonstrate. Karate Kid reference, for the nostaglia win!

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!

But investors including Turntable friend Chris Sacca, 500Startups's Dave McClure and New York's Nihal Mehta are testing out the app, and comparisons are already flying. "Turntable.fm is to Yahoo as Console.fm is to Google. [It] just knows whats good music -- no humans required," writes Tawheed Kader, founder of Tout and current resident of the 500Startups incubator in Mountain View.

Console.fm is organized by channel--dubstep, trance, etc.--and is limited to electronic genres rightn now. Like Turntable.fm, it includes a heavy emphasis on the social aspect of listening to music. There's a chat room for each channel and you can privately chat with any user in your room. The tool bar at the top of the screen prominently features buttons to share a song on Twitter or Facebook, as well as the option to send a Facebook message to anyone with the link to the song.

Console uses its own algorithm to find popular tracks to include in each channel and plays the songs from Soundcloud. So, could the Bay Area-based start-up be a competitor to the hyped-up Turntable? One of the drawbacks of Turntable is that it requires constant attention--users have to rate songs in order to give the DJs points, and it tends to suck users in the way a full-fledged game like Farmville would, making it difficult to play in the background while you work. Console.fm is much less demanding. It's also not as democratic--there's no voting and the songs aren't chosen by users. Which can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how closely your music tastes align with your fellow Turntablists.

Users in the dubstep room were all over the Coding Soundtrack: Console.fm analogue. "Hahah, jumping onto the next best thing?" said one user in the Dubstep room. Shortly afterward, another user asked for a Turntable.fm invite. It seems for now that the services are dissimilar enough--each have unique draws--that users will either separate themselves in Console and Turntable camps or continue to use both.

Console.fm founder Alex Baldwin is also founder of Hello World, a LinkedIn/About.me for developers, which entered the 500Startups incubator this spring. "We're the guys from Hello World, part of the accelerator batch. This was a side project while we were waiting on another developer to refactor some code. All in all we spent about 3 days on the project," Mr. Baldwin writes at Hacker News. "The goal was to make something we could listen to at the office all day without having to click 'Awesome' every 5 minutes, but we went a bit overboard on the social features."