This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (aka “The Guy with the Red Tie”), founder and CEO of GarysGuide and proud owner of a whole bunch of black suits, white shirts and, at last count, over 40 red ties. You can reach him at gary [at] garysguide.com.

R.I.P. and Godspeed, Neil Armstrong--a pioneering astronaut, American icon and international hero, who on July 20, 1969, became the first man to set foot on the moon, making history and instilling a deep sense of pride in every man, woman and child on earth. As Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted: "Neil Armstrong was the spiritual repository of spacefaring dreams & ambitions. In death, a little bit of us all dies with him."

In more earthly concerns, it looks like a ton of Silicon Alley folks have submitted panels for consideration for SXSW 2013 this year. Here's the comprehensive list we've compiled, based on your emails and feedback. Go show some love for these panels with your valuable votes. Remember, the deadline for voting is August 31.

And now let's see whats going down in the Alley this week...

What are Funders Looking For in Strong Startups
With Brian Cohen (chairman, New York Angels), Ben Lin (managing partner & COO, Greak Oaks Venture Capital) and Steve Brotman (managing partner & founder, Silicon Alley Venture Partners)
Monday (Aug. 27), 6:30 p.m. @ Foley & Lardner LLP, 90 Park Avenue, 39th Floor

Reddit Entrepreneur/Startup Meetup
With presentations like, "How I quit my job to start my startup," "Things I wished I knew before I quit my day job," "How I used kickstarter to finance my startup"... You get the idea.
Monday (Aug. 27), 7 p.m. @ WeWork Labs, 175 Varick St., 4th Floor

Beer and Social Media! Joios and Digital MBA Talk and Taste.
Eight interesting beers will be featured, plus remarks from Chris Gallant, founder of the Bronx Brewery.
Tuesday (Aug. 28), 6:30 p.m. @ City Tavern, 22 E 13th St.

Second Hardware Startup Meetup!
Speakers include Jeff Glasse (CEO, Kogeto), Charley Hendee (CTO, Tactonic Technologies) and Diego Vargas (CTO, Wattvision)
Tuesday (Aug. 28), 7 p.m. @ Collab, 304 Hudson St.

North Brooklyn Breakfast Club
With Shelley Bernstein (Brooklyn Museum), Seth Porges (Cloth) and Jose Serrano-McClain (Trust Art).
Wednesday (Aug. 29), 9:30 a.m. @ Enid's, 560 Manhattan Avenue, Brooklyn

GreenspaceNYC Hackathon
With focus on several sustainability use-case scenarios, such as mapping green building resources in New York City.
Wednesday (Aug 29), 3 p.m. @ Wix Lounge, 10 West 18th St., 2nd Floor

State of the Startup Industry: Design
Featuring Dan Maccarone (cofounder of Charming Robot and Hard Candy Shell) and Matias Corea (cofounder & chief designer of Behance).
Wednesday (Aug. 29), 7 p.m. @ General Assembly, 902 Broadway, 4th Floor

Queens Tech End of Summer Drinks
Have drinks, meet interesting techies, learn about tech projects in Queens, and collaborate on exciting ideas.
Wednesday (Aug. 29), 7 p.m. @ Alewife, 5-14 51st Avenue, Long Island City

Websdays Rooftop Pool Party w/ Sailthru
A rooftop pool party at Thompson LES, featuring an open Wodka Vodka bar. Yes, that does sound awesome.
Wednesday (Aug. 29), 7:30 p.m. @ Thompson LES, 190 Allen St.

New York Mobile App Developer (MAD) Meetup
(Reverse) pitches by PaperTrail, Postable, Tappible, OneTok and TapFame.
Thursday (Aug. 30), 7 p.m. @ Magnani Caruso Dutton, 138 West 25th Street, 4th Floor

More events on the horizon...
NY Games Conference on Sep 05 @ Museum of Jewish Heritage
September NY FinTech After-party and Networking on Sep 05 @ Butterfield 8 Restaurant & Lounge
2012 Tech Does Fashion Week (#TDFW): A Kickoff Party on Sep 07 @ AlleyNYC
Comedy Hack Day on Sep 08 @ Pivotal Labs NYC
Digital Money Unconference-- From NYPAY and Consult Hyperion on Sep 11 @ Google
FinovateFall 2012 on Sep 12 @ Jacob K. Javits Convention Center
Investor Feedback Forum (New York) on Sep 13 @ Columbia University - Schapiro Center
Design for Manufacturing Summit on Sep 20 @ Dumbo Spot

Until next week. Stay thirsty social, my friends! ;)

Mr. Cohen.

New York Angels, a loose affiliation of angel investors that hear pitches and conduct diligence together, just announced that vice chairman Brian Cohen will take over as chairman. He replaces David Rose, founder of the group that has invested more than $45 million in the last ten years.

Mr. Cohen is heavily involved in running the organization's small staff and coordinating the Angels' monthly meetings. As chairman, he will "focus on making the New York Angels the hallmark mentor organization to the exploding startup community in New York City," according to a press release. He also plans to expand the group's presence outside of New York.

Mr. Cohen, who was the first investor in the web's social media darling of the moment, Pinterest, is hoping to give the Angels a bit of an update. He plans to increase the organization's speed as well as its reach "to make it easier for aspiring entrepreneurs to get funded faster by smarter angels," according to the release. Mr. Cohen will expand the organization's mentorship and education programs, and hopes to partner with more angel investor groups across the country.

A decade ago, New York Angels was the only game in town. Today, with money flying fast, the Angels network has fallen a bit behind. New York has a growing number of startups, but it also has an increasing number of angel investors interested in seeding them.

New York Angels is not a fund and does not invest collectively, though members collaborate on due diligence. Each member makes individual investment decisions. The New York Angels process includes, as we wrote last year, an online application, a pitch to a screening committee, a meeting to refine the pitch, a second pitch at the monthly breakfast and a due diligence meeting before the interested angels will follow up with the entrepreneurs individually.

The network's sluggishness prompted one entrepreneur, Adam Neary, to call the process "broken." By contrast, the angel group Founder Collective is known for being efficient. And given that a room of 500 investors now has only 24 hours to decide whether to give money to a Y Combinator startup, the Angels have found themselves shut out of a few deals.

Could this be a new era for the Angels? Mr. Cohen has created the OPEL Award for Entrepreneurial Service Leadership in New York City, established liaisons with New York University and Columbia University, and created a “Future Angels” internship program for MBA and finance grad students. New York Angels is also working on its refreshed database, Gust, which is similar to AngelList.

Mr. Cohen also has "made it a requirement for every member of the New York Angels’ Board of Directors to contribute in some significant way to improving the opportunities for bright entrepreneurs in New York City."

via LinkedIn

Pinterest, the only hockey-stick startup with the distinction of being embraced by women and Mormons, gets the full New York Times treatment today with a profile by Jenna Wortham, well-timed to the clusterfuck hullabaloo currently underway in Austin. While other startups clamor over themselves to preach to the choir and woo early-adopters, Pinterest user base began in Des Moines, Iowa, where cofounder Ben Silbermann grew up.

While the startup's hearting-the-heartland approach has caused "some headscratching" at SXSW, its also infected investors with a wicked case of envy. "It defies the mold that you have to build something for New York and San Francisco and then spread it out from there," Chris Dixon, who is slated to interview Mr. Silbermann on stage tomorrow, told the Times, adding, "Everyone’s envious. I’m envious. I wish I was an investor. I wish I’d created the site.”

One investor who may be immune? New York Angels founder Brian Cohen, who also has the distinction of being Pinterest's very first investor.Mr. Cohen tells Mashable how he met Mr. Silbermann and cofounder Evan Sharp when the two were just "a couple of young guys from NYU" at a business plan competition. (Mr. Silbermann's LinkedIn profile, however, lists him as alma mater as Yale.)

According to Mr. Cohen, what distinguished Pinterest, which went through 30 to 40 iterations, was the founders' ability to listen:

That listening started with a different product Silbermann was working on at Cold Brew Labs — an app called Tote. The idea was the first woman’s fashion catalog on the iPhone. Cohen told me Silbermann watched user behavior on Tote. “As the app was being used, he recognized that women were grabbing, tagging specific items that they were able to view later when they got home,” said Cohen. What Silbermann saw was that huge numbers of people were grabbing items and sharing them with friends. “He recognized that these women were sharing their tastes.”

Betabeat has mentioned before how Pinterest's boards and aspirational/consumerist bent look to us more like the next-generation of those snail-mail catalogs, except one you in create yourself. The Times likens it more to scrapbooking.

In search of Mr. Silbermann's New York University connections, we came across this video of a speech he gave at NYU-Stern in 2010, where he discussed the idea of collecting, something he used to do with bugs and stamps as a young boy in Iowa. Moving that impulse online, he said, is "fundamentally changing the way regular people discover the things around them":

Why is collection so basic to who we are? I think the answer lies in self-expression. If you walk around Brooklyn and ask people how they express themselves. Everyone's a musician or an artist or a filmmaker. But most of us aren't that interesting. Most of us are just consumers of that. And when we collect things and when we share those collections with people that's how we show who we are in the world. That's how we express our taste to the people around us."

Not that Pinterest, which boasts $40 million in financing, needs our help with the pitch. But we might stick with "regular" folks and leave out the less interesting part going forward . . .

Steve Gutentag from Sitesimon.

Betabeat moseyed up to Murat Aktihanoglu, the accented managing director of Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, after the program's demo day this morning in a basement auditorium at NYU's Stern School of Business. He had the overwhelmed, flushed face of a proud parent. "Oh, it was amazing," he said, eyes widening. ERA put its ten startups through 1,500 meetings, he had calculated, and all the companies have users and 80 percent have revenue. One of them had just signed up 35 cities and two Dubai landmarks: the biggest mall in the world, which serves 47 million visitors, and the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. 

"That was incredible!" said Brian Cohen, vice chairman of the New York Angels, ambushing Mr. Aktihanoglu at the podium. "Grand slam!" He pinched the director's cheek. "Murat is magical. He really is."

Mr. Cohen was impressed by the startups. "I go to all the demos," he said. "I was just at DEMO--I went to TechCrunch," he said. "This was quality."

The room was about three-quarters full--perhaps 300 attendees or so--including representatives from Union Square Ventures, TechStars, Founder Collective, Greycroft, Bessemer Ventures, and Bloomberg Ventures. Judging by the lines at the startups' tables, Public Stuff (who signed up the mall), Sitesimon and BuzzTable were the favorites.

Below are the startups and their raises:

Bespoke Post: Curated mail subscription service for products men want. Seeking $500,000.

Centzy: Comparison shopping engine for local services. Raised less than $100,000 of $500,000.

WebThriftStore: Provides a private label eBay solution for charities that enables anyone to turn their unused "stuff" into tax-deductible donations. Raised $625,000 out of $1.5 million.

BuzzTable: Establishes a direct line of communication between restaurants and customers. Raising $750,000.

Pricing Engine: A business intelligence service for digital marketers. Just started raising a $750,000 round.

LetGive: Provides a platform that connects application developers, charities and socially-conscious consumers. Seeking $750,000.

Parking Panda: A mobile real-time parking discovery tool. Has $50,000 committed for a $750,000 round.

PublicStuff: Enables cities to easily receive and manage service requests from citizens. Raised $100,000 out of $750,000 so far.

NumberFire: Analytics platform that uses quantitative modeling to analyze sports. Raised $400,000 out of $750,000.

Sitesimon: Analyzes browsing behavior and recommends web content with minimal user input. Raised $500,000, seeking $3 million.

Mr. Rose

Now, it seems, Mr. Rose is trying to adapt to these modern times through AngelSoft, the New York company he founded in 2004 to make software for investors to help them manage deal flow and collaborate with investors.

As Bloomberg reports, AngelSoft is launching an online marketplace to hookup potential investors with the right  to entrepreneurs and hoping "financial matchmaking" ensues. Along with the pivot, AngelSoft will change its name to Gust. See, thinking like a startup already.

Bloomberg says the matchmaking function is available to AngelSoft's 150 VC funds and 35,000 angel investors, although it doesn't specify how many of them are actively using the software. The idea is that investors will use the software to seek out new opportunities, track portfolios, and weed through requests. Gust will also have features for startups to privately post their progress and manage relationships with investors.

It's still debateable whether investors and startups will bite, especially considering competition from platforms like AngelList, more closely associated with the current funding landscape and without the cumbersome legacy associations. AngelList founder Naval Ravikant told Bloomberg that 12,000 startups have applied since he launched in February, 2010, including 68 just yesterday. But perhaps the better question might be whether a standardized online platform can compete with the proliferating stream of hackathons, incubators, and accelerators that help expose investors to startups and vice versa. At least according to Compete's numbers, traffic for AngelList appears to be down significantly from last July.

The re-up is a vote of confidence that the company is headed in the right direction, although the diminished size of the round speaks to the challenges Altruik faced. Sources say that it was having trouble delivering on the technology it promised, a service that integrates with any CMS and allows for simple automated fixes that improve SEO and remain compliant with the big search engine's best practices.

Since the A round in 2009 founder Tom Kwon left the company and CEO Eric Gertler is more firmly at the reigns. "I founded the company from boot strap to series A round and due to professional and personal differences with Eric Gertler, the CEO I hired, I am no longer associated with the company," Kwon told Betabeat by email.

Gertler, a publishing vet who ran U.S. News and World Report, Fast Company and Atlantic Monthly, sees an opportunity to aggressively pitch Altruik's technology. “This additional funding enables us to invest in sales and marketing," he said.

Altruik has some massive customers like Home Depot on the retail side who want to maximize their sites potential but don't have the editorial muscle to get down into the nitty gritty of SEO. As social media becomes the increasingly dominant force driving traffic and sales online, an automated SEO platform is going to seem like a very attractive way to set and forget.

The Altruik Team

Adam Neary's tell-all blog post about Profitably's exhausting quest for funding made a big splash this week in the normally hypersensitive climate of the New York start-up scene. Founders and VCs have been muttering, speculating to Betabeat that the post was unwisely frank, especially in its discussion of the institutional New York Angels. Will our hero suffer a backlash?

Zach Greenberger, the New York developer behind the fastest-growing Facebook application in January, Profile Banner, was recently the victim of a Hong Kong-based Facebook app syndicate.Profile Banner had more than a million users 12 days after launch when Facebook inexplicably shut it down. The black hat MiniMax swept in with an application of the same exact name and content scraped from the original Profile Banner. "It sounds like they often copy successful applications and take their names," Mr. Greenberger told Betabeat. "It was suggested that they might have been responsible for getting me shut down by filing fake complaints against me. But I have no proof of that. And the more distance I get from the incident, I'm more inclined to believe it was bad luck. I've heard from other sources that Facebook has automated systems in place to detect applications that are growing 'too fast.'" But the story has a happy ending. Facebook tossed the imposters and Mr. Greenberger is back on top with more than three million users and a new app, Top Friend Photos.

Blind item!: We're hearing that a certain media start-up is in talks to buy Know Your Meme. "I haven't heard the price, but whatever it is, I'm sure it's lower than those guys are worth," a source told Betabeat. "I know that everyone's happy to see them break free of Andrew Baron."

What a tease!: Now that they've got the cash money, Forrst is announcing something big next week! "We're about to do something pretty awesome but that's all I can say," Kyle Bragger said when Betabeat harassed him about it. Mr. Bragger did not give in to the temptation to squeal, but was too excited to keep totally mum--he sent these three images from Google as hints. "But it's not what you think!" he said. Okay, so it's not a daily deal site for drug lords? We're stumped!

Obtuse item!: It's rumored that the titillating slogan "money, power and the city" may soon be up for grabs, if any start-ups out there are scouting for a tagline. (Business Insider? Hashable?)