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!

But the label waffled a little:

At the same time Century Media also believes that Spotify is a great tool to discover new music and is in the process of reintroducing their bands to Spotify by way of putting up samplers of the artists. This way, fans can still discover the great music released by the label.

Physical sales are dropping drastically in all countries where Spotify is active. Artists are depending on their income from selling music and it is our job to support them to do so. Since the artists need to sell their music to continue their creativity, Spotify is a problem for them. This is about survival, nothing less and it is time that fans and consumers realize that for artists it is essential to sell music to keep their heads above water.

Obviously it is ultimately up to the music fan and consumer, how they access their music, whether it is buying, streaming or stealing. There needs to be awareness though, that how you will consume your music has direct consequences for the artists, who we are all trying to support.

OH SNAP. New York-based Facebook game-maker Snap Interactive is proud of its quarterly results, announcing revenues of more than $4.82 million. "This represents nine consecutive quarters of revenue growth for the NYC-based start-up, with a stock price that has gone up more than 600 percent in the past 12 months."

START-UP MEETUP FUN TIMES. "Me and a coworker are beginning to organize a techie basketball meetup," writes Zeve Salman, the organizer of NY Tech Ballers, which already has 53 ballers. "The goal is to eventually have enough people from different startups to have it be a company league kind of thing (such as Foursquare .vs. Meetup). For those who are the only players from a specific company, we will mesh them on a team together. It'll be a great networking opportunity, and a awesome way to stay in shape and not get fat."

SUPPORT GROUPS. A free social network specifically for people suffering with cancer called IHadCancer built specifically for those suffering with the disease, either directly or indirectly, has launched. The founder's story is here.

MINUS IS PLUS A MIL. "File sharing tech startup Minus announced it has raised $1 million in investment capital from IDG Capital Partners, allowing the company to continue to grow its easy to use, universal file sharing platform."

TOUT. Behind on Gmail integration. But announcing iPhone app. (Sorry kids, it's not free.) Local record-keeping-for-networking start-up Hashable should have bought Tout when it had the chance.

LOCAL RESPONSE, POST-PIVOT, EATS A START-UP. The check-in aggregating advertising platform LocalResponse, formerly Buzzd, has made an acquisition: DFJ Gotham-backed Philo, working in a tangent space: TV check-ins. We like it.

OBLIGATORY HACKATHON. Startup Weekend, at General Assembly, is this weekend.

MARKETS. SecondMarket is looking for SysOps engineer.

Mr. Swartz. (Photo: Facebook)

AARON SWARTZ ARRESTED. "Shocking news: Moments ago former Demand Progress Executive Director Aaron Swartz was indicted by the US government," Demand Progress's David Segal said in an email blast yesterday. "As best as we can tell, he is being charged with allegedly downloading too many journal articles from the Web. The government contends that downloading so many journal articles constitutes felony computer hacking and should be punished with time in prison." Mr. Swartz helped create RSS and whose company was once bought by Reddit. He faces up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines and pleaded not guilty. Eeepo. Why he wanted 4.8 million journal articles is beyond us. There is a petition for signing and you can donate here.

GROUPME ON THAT PHONE 7. Last week GroupMe released a preview--"meaning only a few features are available with more to come"--of its Windows Phone 7 app. "You may not hear a lot about the whole WP7 platform compared to others BUT fascinatingly it has become the second most common request to have from GroupMe users," a PR rep writes. We were just talking to someone about how WP7 is kind of indie-cool now.

FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF DAILY DEAL INNOVATIONS. Everyone and their mom has a start-up and Juice in the City, the "Groupon for moms," just launched the $3 million Groupmom Fund. WTF is that, you say. Crowdsourced merchant deal-making, that's what. Instead of employing a salesforce, JITC is recruiting "a workforce of moms distributed across the country" that will "visit and sample the products and services of local merchants and then sets up deals with the businesses based on a positive experience."

TOUT SNUGGLES UP TO LINKEDIN. Folks have been saying LinkedIn should buy this little New York start-up launched by Tawheed Kader. That hasn't happened yet, but Tout just announced LinkedIn integration that "not only will allow you to access your LinkedIn connections from within Tout, but will also let you send personalized/templated messages to your LinkedIn connections right from Tout."

MEDIA MEAT MARKET! VC and start-up scene personality Charlie O'Donnell is hosting a "Media Meet Startups" event "where we just put 50-100 companies in a room and threw about 50 reporters in the mix." Companies participating include... Fab.com! Birchbox! GroupMe! FanBridge! Sonar.me! SinglePlatform! Fancy Hands! Gamechanger.io! At the Frying Pan on 26th St. for happy hour on Wednesday next week.

INSIDE BASEBALL. Also, Charlie O'Donnell, Josh Kushner, and Fred Wilson invested in a batch of tickets to Citifield to see the Mets play the San Diego Padres on August 9 and invited everyone! Tickets went fast and are now sold out. No doubt there will be plenty of pitching, har har.

Also, DEVS WANTED. Voxy and Whuffie continue to scout for hacker talent; The New York Observer is also seeking a full-time developer among other positions. SNAKES ON A BAR. Python in a Pub is tonight, in Brooklyn. IPAD? IPAD. The New Yorker starts offering the tablet edition to its subscribers as Conde Nast experiences technical difficulties.

Post-funding grin?

If Betabeat just closed a $350,000 round of funding from folks like Dave McClure, Eric Ries and Esther Dyson, we're pretty sure we'd spend the next day hungover trying to form our piles of cash into a Scrooge McDuck-like money pool.

Not so Tout founder Tawheed "TK" Kader, whose app attempts to solve the problem of repetitive email. "Its that magical moment right? Its what you’d been waiting for right? The press starts writing about you, the congratulations come flying in. You’ve made it. Right? Wrong."

On his Tumblr, at 2am, TK sketched a rough outline of what the-day-after actually looks liked, including terribly glamorous tasks like answering 52 customer service emails, posting job listings, making sure your iPhone developer has his priorities straight, crossing your T's on Apple's enrollment process, and fretting over your backlog of work.

What’s the point? The point is that the day after you get funded is like any other day that you are running your business. Getting funded is not some magical event where all your worries go away. It is not some big party to pop the champagne over. Its the time where you buckle down even more so that you can make it rain.

The day after you get funded, you still have to deal with the real fundamentals of your business. You still have to build your actual business, and you have to actually plan and execute so that you can actually deliver all those things you promised your Investors when you took their money.

Somebody bring this man a 16-olive martini. It sounds he'll be at the office for awhile.

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."

VISITING DIGNITARIES. Actor Kal Penn, liaison to the young people on behalf of the White House, is doing an "entrepreneur round table" tonight at General Assembly! Hope some residents were thoughtful enough to pick up some White Castle.

VISITING MOGULS. Matt Mullenweg, one of PC World's Top 50 People on the Web, Inc.com's 30 under 30, and Business Week's 25 Most Influential People on the Web, and oh yeah, a founder of Automattic and Audrey Capital, is in New York and will be attending the launch party for Dan Abram's new influencer gossip site Mogulite tonight at The Townhouse.

BLIND PERSONNEL ISSUES. A big New York online advertising firm has lost basically its entire engineering team, save some additions in India, due to a dysfunctional culture clash between tech and marketing, a source says. "A number of staffers were seen pitching ideas [for their next moves] around the TechStars Demo Day."

THE PHANTOM DIRECTORY. Tumblr is soliciting bios for a new directory that isn't live yet, a source tells us, presumably an update to the directory the company launched months ago and then pulled after selling listings in too few categories for just $5. Betabeat rumor-reported Tumblr was planning a comeback for the directory with more sophisticated pricing, and that may happen soon, as some authors are being asked to "write as much as you want. The more the better" about their blogs, we're told.

MEETUP, ON THE CHEAP. An entrepreneur in the tri-state area keeps soliciting via Craigslist for a developer to rig up a Meetup.com clone. "It must have all the social community features that meetup.com has, including the capability to add new groups, users events, polls, connect to other social communities, shopping cart, sponsors and sub sites," the ad says. The budget for such a site? "$500 TO $700 NO MORE." Then two days later, presumably the same person reposts in a different section and drops the price to "$300 to $600. no begininers." So what do clone artists think other New York start-ups' web sites are worth? The average bid for a Thrillist rip-off was $242 some years ago, and an entrepreneur currently seeks a GroupMe clone for $200 to $500.

WHO'S OUT WEST: Tout founder Tawheed Kader is settled into his Mountain View accelerator program, which we now know is Dave McClure's 500Startups. Cheryl Yeoh, Carter Cleveland, Scott Beale are also California dreaming this week.

Disclosure.

500 DISSES: Remember how Dave McClure's 500 Startups accelerator was going to have a demo day in New York? And it was supposed to be at General Assembly in mid-April? We heard a rumor that Mr. McClure had nxed it so we txted him. Turns out the 500-strong don't need New York's money. "To be honest, most of our start-ups already got funding," Mr. McClure (or whoever does his texting) wrote back. "We decided to hold off coming to NYC until later this year."

BLIND ACCELERATION: We hear Tawheed Kader, or T.K., creator of fancy email marketing app Tout and master of the Google search results for the word, is going, going, back, back, to Cali, Cali.  "I hear Tout might be spending the summer in California," a source told Betabeat. "My guess would be that it must have something to do with an accelerator program that runs through the summer." Tout is already pulling in cash from paying customers, but Mr. Kader is currently raising a $500,000 seed round. "It's an interesting move considering they just switched from a one-man show... to getting their CTO and close to getting their community manager," the source said. So who's the lucky start-up hatchery? All we know is, T.K. is not headed for YC.

ANNALS OF ANALOG: Donald Trump has an assistant who prints out the internet for him, and then scans it back in.

WE HAD A HUNCH: Betabeat featured Hunch's new social recommendations feed for Buy Local today, which inspired someone to send us a list of official Hunch accounts for TV shows, websites and companies, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO: America's Test Kitchen, Eater, Californication, Grooveshark, IGN, Racked, Spin, MOVIECLIPS.com, Weeds, Smule, Showtime and Shameless, Stylecaster and Threadless, most of which haven't recommended anything yet.

Tawheed Kader recently leaped into entrepreneurship.

Tout is a freemium web-based app (also available as a bookmarklet and Chrome extension) that lets you scrape email addresses from websites, make email templates on the fly, and track whether your emails get opened.

The free account lets you create three email templates, send up to 10 emails a day and view analytics for the last three emails you've seen. The most tricked-out version, at $199/mo., gives access to 25 people who can send unlimited emails per day, schedule emails, send attachments, manage multiple identities, share templates and see team-wide analytics.

Tout's users are in business development, sales, public relations and start-ups, in that order, says Tawheed Kader, creator of Tout.

Mr. Kader, or T.K., quit his job at a hedge fund last year to work full-time on his then-main start-up, Braintrust, a web app for email conversations. It wasn't going as smoothly as he'd hoped. "I kept struggling with Braintrust. It was a solution in search of a problem in an already crowded market," he wrote in a lookback post on his blog. He built Tout in a weekend, relying on cloud-based services to take care of much of the functionality, in order to promote Braintrust.

That's not exactly how things shook out. Tout now has more than 1,000 users. "I basically stumbled onto Tout. I went through a lot of explicit thought processes for my other experiments in 2010 (e.g. Braintrust and Main Street). Tout came naturally. I kind of just discovered it. And I kept going back to it. And the more I dug into it, the more I realized was there," he wrote.

Mr. Kader continues to roll out new features for the app. Last week, Mr. Kader released TwitMail, which automatically mediates the request for an email address using an @ reply to a Twitter ID. He also released the Chrome extension, which scans the page you're viewing and parses out all the e-mail addresses and Twitter IDs. "Our plan is to extend this into a Gmail plugin over the next few weeks," Mr. Kader said.

Planned features include e-mail distribution lists and dynamic templates, where users can add custom variables into templates. In another measure of success, the app recently secured the #2 spot in Google's results for the word "tout," just behind Dictionary.com.