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To prove their scrappiness (and ghetto-fabulousness), Batch 6 put together their own version of Macklemore’s Thrift Shop, “Thrifty Startup.” We have it on good authority that Batch 6 may have been kicked out of more than one Goodwill store during the making of this video. That’s straight-up gangsta, yo.

Check out all the companies below or on AngelList, and look at their 3-slide pitches on SlideShare. Welcome to the #500Strong family, Batch 6!

AppSocially
Make your app’s Viral Loop awesome with an API that lets you track activity and conversion – allowing you to take action using customer data.

AngelList: https://angel.co/appsocially
Founders: Dr. Yusuke Takahashi
From: Tokyo, Japan
Fun Fact: Team members previously growth-hacked apps for Japan’s huge public companies.

Binpress
We increase adoption of open-source in SMBs and Enterprises.

AngelList: https://angel.co/binpress
Founders: Adam Benayoun, Eran Galperin
From: Israel
Fun fact: Profitable *before* joining 500startups.

BoxC
We make buying directly from sellers in China as fast and safe as buying from Amazon.

AngelList: https://angel.co/boxc
Founders: David Kanel, Ravi Kotichintala, Nicholas Ni
From: Los Angeles and Shangh

Credii
We arm businesses with all the intelligence they need to make smart software and service choices.

AngelList: https://angel.co/credii
Founders: Vamshi Mokshagundam, Ayan Barua
From: Bangalore, India

Dakwak
Effortless website translation technology.

AngelList: https://angel.co/dakwak
Founders: Waheed Barghouthi
From: Amman, Jordan
Fun Fact: We have the most f’n awesome culture a startup could have. And our founder is unbeatable in arm wrestling.

Dropifi
An intelligent replacement for mail-tos and dumb contact forms. It makes customer support more effective, increases lead generation and generates valuable business insights.

AngelList: https://angel.co/dropifi
Founders: David Osei, Effah Philips Mensah, Kamil Nabong
From: Accra, Ghana
Fun Fact: 5,000 users in over 29 countries in less than 6 months without any marketing.

Feast
The online cooking school for the common man. It offers simple cooking guides that teach impressive techniques and recipes with an online community where you can ask questions and get feedback as you cook.

AngelList: https://angel.co/feast
Founders: David Spinks, Nadia Eghbal
From: San Francisco

Floqq
Makes it easy for anyone anywhere to learn the skills they need.

AngelList: https://angel.co/floqq
Founders: Carlos González de Villaumbrosia, Álvaro Sanmartín, Álvaro Zamácola
From: Spain
Fun Fact: Team possesses a native know-how of the Spanish-speaking market, with offices in both Spain and Chile.

Flyer
We empower commercial real estate agencies to create beautiful property flyers online.

AngelList: https://angel.co/flyer
Founders: Isaac Herrera
From: San Francisco

Geekatoo
We offer local and onsite tech support at a great value. Customers receive competing bids on tech support needs from verified providers.

AngelList: https://angel.co/geekatoo
Founders: Kevin Davis, Christian Shelton
From: San Francisco
Fun Fact: Our 3,000 providers save customers up to 75% compared to Geek Squad.

GreenGar
Seamless real-time collaboration on mobile devices. We’re building a platform that enables apps to intuitively connect people together.

AngelList: https://angel.co/greengar
Founders: Elliot Lee, Thuy Truong
From: Ho Chi Minh City, Los Angeles
Fun Fact: Over 14 million downloads with all-star developers from Vietnam.

InstaGIS
Geographic information system that allows retail stores to target their audiences.

AngelList: https://angel.co/instagis-1
Founders: Fernando Ovalle, Ignacio Canals, Julian Garcia
From: Chile

KiteReaders
Publishing platform for publishers & authors to create, distribute, and market their children’s picture books for iBooks, Kindle, and Nook.

AngelList: https://angel.co/kitereaders-1
Founders: Chintu and Aarti Parikh
From: Santa Clara, CA
Fun Fact: KiteReaders platform has produced more chart toppers and received more design accolades than anyone else in the children’s picture e-book market.

Koemei
Algorithmic transcription of videos for search and accessibility, helping education and large enterprises gain value from their video investments.

AngelList: https://angel.co/koemei
Founders: Temitope Ola, John Dines
From: Martigny, Switzerland, San Francisco, CA
Fun Fact: Unique proprietary speech recognition algorithm for multi-party conversational transcription; spun out of Europe’s MIT (Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland); patent pending and strong domain expertise.

Mayvenn
Empowers the 95% of African American salons that do not retail products. Our mobile commerce solution eliminates a salons inventory cost and opens a new revenue stream for their business.

AngelList: https://angel.co/mayvenn
Founders: Diishan Imira, Taylor Wang
From: Oakland, CA
Fun Fact: We are increasing stylists income per client by 42%.

PinMyPet
Social-based software for monitoring and improving the experience between pets and owners. It works with powerful, small and low-cost hardware for real-time health and location detection.

AngelList: https://angel.co/pinmypet
Founders: Marcos Buson, Bruno Kenj, Bruno Souza, Ednaldo Souza
From: Brasilia and Florianópolis, Brazil
Fun Fact: A complete multidisciplinary team with expertise in programming, product design, biz dev, and mobile app development.

POPAPP
App to fast sketch app prototypes.

AngelList: https://angel.co/popapp
Founders: Ben Lin, Shao Lee, Leo Lin
From: Taipei, Taiwan
Fun Fact: Reached 65k user generated prototypes in 5 months.

PriceBaba
PriceBaba is a product (re)search engine that lets you shop in your vicinity

AngelList: http://angel.co/pricebaba
Founders: Annkur P Agarwal, Tirthesh Ganatra
From: Mumbai, India
Fun Fact: Started company with selling tea during a long distance train journey – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq6h6hFFN9k

Reesio
Turns the real estate transaction process into one beautiful flow for agents, clients, and third parties.

AngelList: https://angel.co/reesio
Founders: Mark Thomas, Uyen Tran, Jonathan Mui
From: San Francisco, CA
Fun Fact: The team boasts a combined 20 years of real estate experience plus 2 rockstar engineers: a CS Berkeley grad who is our CTO, and an engineer from OpenTable who is our VP of Engineering/UI Designer.

School Admissions
Making school admissions and education tension-free. Disrupting the process of choosing the right school for your child and parents.

AngelList: https://angel.co/schooladmissions
Founders: Puja and Rajan Arora
From: Delhi, India
Fun Fact: Founded by a couple with 2 children.

Seat 14A
A complete and affordable ensemble for the discerning man every week.

AngelList: https://angel.co/seat-14a
Founders: Jas Banwait, Adi Sahay, Nav Chatterji, Tarun Arora
From: Delhi, India
Fun Fact: Global team with experience from Delhi, Toronto, and Dallas.

SeMeAntoja
We empower restaurants to accept orders online.

AngelList: https://angel.co/semeantoja
Founders: Tavo Zambrano, Harish Malik, Olga Zambrano, Armando Gonzalez
From: Monterrey, Mexico
Fun Fact: We are not an extra distribution channel for restaurants. We are their distribution channel and have processed $400,000 in food orders.

Sverve
Sverve is a self-service influencer marketing platform for small businesses. We connect small businesses with female social media influencers to promote their products and services on the social web.

AngelList: https://angel.co/sverve
Founders: Rohit Vashisht, Vikas Gupta
From: New York
Fun Fact: There are more than 3500 female bloggers and 125 small businesses on Sverve, and both of these numbers are growing rapidly.

Tamatem
Tamatem is a mobile gaming development studio and publisher focused on creating culturally relevant games for the huge unaddressed Arabic gaming market.

AngelList: https://angel.co/tamatem
Founders: Hussam Hammo, Sohaib Thiab
From: Amman, Jordan
Fun Fact: Founding team has 5+ years of experience in the gaming field.

TRDATA
We are the Bloomberg for Emerging Markets. We collect accurate real-time market information from remote places from scattered and illiquid markets.

AngelList: https://angel.co/trdata
Founders: Anton Pasechnikov
From: Ukraine

Tushky
Self-service online platform to monetize free time by offering interesting activities.

AngelList: https://angel.co/tushky-com
Founders: Talvinder Singh, Kranti Agarwal
From: Mumbai, India
Fun Fact: $100k+ revenue in 9 months with 70 sellers in Mumbai only. Now gearing to target 300 million middle-class Indians and 6 million inbound international tourists.

WHILL
Next generation of personal mobility for wheelchair users and the elderly.

AngelList: https://angel.co/whill-1
Founders: Satoshi Sugie, Junpei Naito, Muneaki Fukuoka, Naoto Sakakibara
From: Tokyo
Fun Fact: Team comprised of ex-Sony, Nissan, and Olympus engineers and designers.

I went to a tech networking event.

While there are many people out there – especially in Silicon Valley – who live for building their network, it’s not something I spend a lot of time doing or particularly enjoy. I know a lot of people feel the same way I do, especially since it can get pretty awkward if you don’t do it right.

But even if you despise the word “networking,” it’s an extremely important skill to have – especially if you’re working at a startup. If you’re a founder, your startup will die – or have a very, very tough time – if you don’t develop this skill early on. It’s critical to build relationships with potential investors, partners, customers, employees, and so on. Everyone in the startup community is connected to everyone else, so you’d be surprised what opportunities will pop up simply by knowing someone. It’s an oft-repeated platitude, but many times it all comes down to who you know.

Now, I’m by no means an expert at this, but thought I’d share some common-sense tips based on my recent experience.

Be Humble

This one’s obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people forget that simply being a nice person will open up many doors. Don’t go into an event acting like you’re the shit because you work for a well-known company, or because your small startup just raised  ton of money from a well known VC. Be confident about what you do, but don’t be annoying about it.

Heck, maybe you’re awesome or infamous enough that people already know who you are – congrats. You should still introduce yourself like a normal person. It’s fairly obvious, but bears repeating: people will be way more likely to help you out later – be it with an intro, job offer, referral or something else – if they remember that you were a nice person. Most people don’t want to help someone who turns any get-together into a 2-hour #humblebrag.

Don’t Make it all about You

When you see an investor you want to meet, don’t corner them and give them a 15-minute pitch about your company. If you talk  for 5 minutes straight without coming up for breath, that’s NOT effective networking.

#Protip: if the person you’re talking to whips out their phone and starts refreshing their Twitter feed or awkwardly checking for new texts, you’ve lost them. At that point, it’s best to just give them your business card and move on to the next person you want to meet. Remember that other people are there to network too, so don’t suck up all their time.

Don’t Be Creepy

It’s great to go up to someone and say you know each other through a mutual friend. It’s also great to tell them how great their app/startup/Twitter feed is. What isn’t great is reciting your 10 favorite tweets from their feed, or recalling creepily specific details about their Facebook photos.

Do your research, but don’t make it sound like you’ve been studying their online presence for hours on end. At the event I attended, I made this mistake after meeting someone whose work I’ve admired for a long time; seeing his facial expression change from “that’s neat” to “you’re f’in creepy” was pretty much the worst thing ever. If he remembers me, it’ll probably be because I was the “weird guy who stalks people online.”

Be Ready

Have enough business cards. Duh. Besides the obvious, scan the list of attendees (if it’s public) and make a note of who you want to meet and why. It’s much better going into a networking event with a plan of attack than walking around idly while trying to make eye contact.

Also, be ready to talk about yourself and what your startup does –  in detail. Don’t just say that you’re  doing “awesome stuff” at your company when someone asks; have interesting details to talk about and share your accomplishments (ESPECIALLY metrics) – without bragging too much, of course.

Don’t be afraid of telling people about some of the interesting challenges you’re dealing with. Running or working at a startup isn’t easy, so don’t pretend you have everything figured out. Sharing the stuff you’re grappling with will make for good conversation, and you may find someone who’s willing offer advice or even meet later to help.

Don’t Go Alone

Going to networking events alone – especially if you’re not an extrovert –  is pretty much like trying to do expert mode. Don’t do it unless you’re confident you won’t end up wandering around being awkward. It’s way easier to approach someone if a friend is already chatting them up, and if you take someone else with you, you’ll probably end up making 2x as many friends/contacts.

If you’re not technical, it’s good to bring someone from your team who is – they’ll be able to explain to the coding geeks why what you’re doing is cool. This is a must if one of your networking goals is to recruit developers. Someone who does marketing usually isn’t great at explaining the interesting technical challenges of your startup.

Above all, remember to have fun. Most of these events have free alcohol (and snacks if you’re lucky), so make use of that and loosen up a bit. Even for hermits, meeting new people  – especially people who might help your startup – can be surprisingly refreshing and invigorating.

Though many of these tips seem like “common sense,” you’d be surprised how many people don’t follow them. Just remember: be nice, be interesting, and don’t be awkward.

Storytelling Class with Marie Perruchet

Stories have a unique power to persuade and motivate, because they appeal to our emotions and have the ability to shape beliefs and change minds. No decisions are made, no products sold, and no partnerships forged, are launched based on a slide show with dry numbers. In this hour talk, Marie teach you which narrative communication techniques work best for effective speaking, and how to incorporate these techniques into your upcoming Demo Day pitch.

We will go through interactive exercises to:

- know how to use your personal story to inspire other people
- develop a comfortable and effective style for pitching
- know how to incorporate body language that commands attention and respect

Watch it Tuesday, 5/14 at 12:00pm PST

Behavior By Design with Nir Eyal

Nir Eyal founded and sold two tech companies since 2003 teaches the “Behavior by Design” class at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Nir’s last company, AdNectar, received venture funding from Kleiner Perkins and was sold in 2011. He is also an advisor, consultant, and investor in several Bay Area companies and is a contributing writer for TechCrunch and Forbes. Nir blogs about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at www.NirAndFar.com.

Watch it Tuesday, 5/15 at 3:00pm PST

You can find the first 5 episodes below, featuring the kickass founders from PayByGroup, Markerly, Vidcaster, KeenIO and Chewse. Give them a listen, and stay tuned for a new episode every Friday! You can get automatic updates of our podcast by subscribing on iTunes and Stitcher Radio. Don’t forget to leave us a good review, too.

Episode 1 (Camilo Acosta, CEO and co-founder of PayByGroup)

Episode 2 (Tracy Lawrence, CEO and co-founder of Chewse)

Episode 3 (Kierar Farr, CEO and co-founder of Vidcaster)

Episode 4 (Sarah Ware, CEO and co-founder of Markerly)

Episode 5 (Kyle Wild, CEO and founder of KeenIO)

If you have feedback about the show, have questions you’d like to ask our founders, or would like to suggest a guest, send me a Twitter reply @markjsaldana. Here’s to many more episodes!

Dave states that “with the exception of a handful of other investors, nobody makes more than 50 investments in a year. We are applying a different philosophy and model from most other funds.”

The interview also covers 500′s interest in international companies, and why Dave thinks there’s more interesting growth happening in India and Asia than Europe. He states, “India is one of the biggest markets for us primarily because of the advantages: it is English-speaking, has a lot of connections with the US, and is backed by strong talent and cooperation between the two countries.”

Dave also covers why 500′s so interested in food tech, and why food-focused startups “aren’t going away anytime soon.” Check out the full interview here.

A/B Testing with Mike Greenfield

Mike Greenfield, entrepreneur and  analytics expert, will join 500 for a talk on everything you need to know about A/B testing.

Watch it Wednesday, May 8th at 12:00 pm, PST.

How to Build a Killer Brand

Learn from the branding pros who created SendGrid (Jesse McCabe), FoodSpotting (Fiona Tang), .CO (Lori Anne Wardi), and  Love with Food (Aihui Ong). They’ll share stories about what  branding/marketing strategies have worked – and failed – so you know what NOT to do. They’ll also cove tips for strategic partnerships and targeted community outreach, along with smart strategies for launching, building, developing, and managing a strong brand.

Watch it Thursday, May 9th at 12:00 pm, PST.

As the CMO of GE, what is your social media marketing strategy?

First, our social media strategy is one part of a larger digital ecosystem we’ve been building—you could call it a digital content factory. This approach recognizes the convergence of many types of media, with both brands and customers publishing their own content. The days when we had separate swimlanes are over. So it’s not just Facebook or Twitter—though both are big parts of our social presence—it’s different types of compelling content we tailor for those specific and other channels. We’re sharing on Google+, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube, in addition to creating daily, original content on our own owned channels like GE Reports and Txchnologist (which then gets distributed socially and on third party blogs and news sites)

Second, business is social.  While social is essential to reaching consumers and for staying relevant as a brand, it’s also key to business and reaching our customers. New social media tools and platforms allow us to connect directly with our customers, from product ratings to reviews to customer communities where real time collaborating and innovating is happening. I’m also excited to see where opening up and social innovation takes us—we just announced an exciting partnership with Quirky, for example, a startup that hosts an online community of inventors who collaborate on designing and making consumer products and then bring them to market quickly. GE is sharing hundreds of our most promising patents and seeing what the Quirky inventors can do with them. That’s social at the next level.

Can you share a social media marketing campaign that you are particularly proud of?

GE Flyovers is one of my favorites. It was a three-week, behind-the-scenes experience at GE factories, where we captured aerial footage from the factory floor and let people vote on what they wanted to see and learn more about. People voted across all of the channels in our digital ecosystem: GE.com, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Buzzfeed. At the end of it, the four videos earned over 500,000 total views. The lesson here is that people enjoy and engage with the world more when they can be an active party of the storytelling process, and this is one of the best examples of collaborative storytelling with our audiences.

I think it’s also important to remember the value of content. For GE Reports, we did a video interview with Nick Holonyak, who invented the technology that made the LED light possible, back in the 1950s when he was working at GE. Nick’s funny, inspirational a great storyteller. With smart distribution and sharing, the video took on a life of its own, peaking at the number 23 overall story on Reddit and getting over 100,000 views on YouTube in less than 24 hours. Viewers left over 100 comments on YouTube as well during that first day, celebrating a titan of 20th century science. People want to be informed and entertained, and we’re able to do that as a brand directly now.

As the leader of GE’s venture arm, what are some of the key things you look for when considering partnering with or investing in startups?

My job as a marketer at GE is to act as a translator of sorts. I need to connect the dots between the different parts of our company and connect GE to trends and new markets in the world. So I’m looking for promising new technology or applications that fit with our many areas of expertise.

GE has scale, vast resources and knowledge. Startups have great ideas and work and iterate fast, so whenever there is an opportunity to marry that speed and scale, we’re looking to seize it. Take Oblong Industries, an LA-based startup that makes multi-touch interfaces (think Minority Report). Oblong attracted our attention during an open innovation challenge related to the smart grid. The company had never worked in energy, but we felt they could help us visualize the smart grid. That’s when we were able to fund a proof of concept pilot and go from there to a more formal partnership.

What advice would you give bootstrapped entrepreneurs?

It’s important for entrepreneurs and innovators to remember why and how people USE technology. Does it make their lives better or worse? What big problem does it solve? Sometimes I think we can get too bogged down in the tech itself, even tech for tech’s sake. Always think about the user and what the tech will do for them.

Finally, we’re all data scientists now. We think the next big wave of innovation is going to happen as the world’s millions of machines continue to come online. People call this the “Internet of Things;” We call it the “Industrial Internet.” What can we learn from the flood of data generated when jet engines, medical devices and gas turbines get connected? How can we visualize it and then harness it to make things run more efficiently, save money, reduce emissions, you name it? We need more entrepreneurs who are answering these questions.

Platform Power: Harnessing Google Apps for Massive Distribution

Want to supercharge your apps with tips & tricks from Google? Join us for a lunch session as Joe Marini (Google Chrome Store) and Fred Sauer (Google App Engine) share key strategies and tactics for massive distribution. You’ll learn the DOs and DON’Ts of creating an app, how to increase your installation stats, and how to best leverage Google’s platforms.

Watch it May 1st at 1pm, PST.

Robert Scoble Shares Key Strategies for an Effective Social Media Plan

Hear the king of social talk about startups, social media, and what it takes to get noticed in the tech community.

Watch it May 2nd at 1:30pm, PST.

We’ll keep you updated with a schedule of livestreamed talks each week during our Spring Accelerator, so keep checking back!

In a country of almost 1.3 billion people, mid-20th century infrastructure, rampant corruption, over 400 million people below the international poverty line, roughly another 400 million people that are considered middle class and one of the youngest populations on the planet – building the next Facebook is not exciting.

So what *is* exciting? Solving problems for over 800 million people who don’t have access to smartphones, tablets or computers. The real opportunities in India for smart, savvy entrepreneurs is to solve the problems plaguing them on a daily basis. And there really is no shortage of problems, big or small.

For example, A SMS based service that brings “mandi” (market) prices directly to a farmer and allows the farmer to know exactly how much his produce will get him at a market in Mumbai, Delhi, Indore, Kolkata, etc. In 2009, Thomson Reuters made over a million dollars a year by providing this service to farmers in only three states in India. In many cases, information about current market prices has helped farmers better negotiate fair prices with middlemen, sometimes tripling the amount of money the farmer receives.

Ever hear of “star dialing”? Chances are that if you live in the US, you haven’t. In India, on my mobile phone, I can dial *123# and my current balance will pop up on an iPhone just as easily as a Nokia 1100 feature phone. The best part is that “star dialing” doesn’t cost the caller anything – and no call ever gets terminated. Well, can you imagine building a banking solution on top of this for people who don’t have access to a bank? Eko Financial, based in New Delhi, has done exactly that. For the millions of people who don’t have access to a bank or the millions who need to send money back home to their family in a small village, can now do so quickly and easily by going to a local bodega (we call them “kirana” stores in India) and by giving cash to the store owner. The store owner simply enters a sequence of numbers to authenticate the service and transmits the cash to the destination account. All of this is done in minutes and payments can be tiny or relatively large.

Imagine you live in a rural area with no terrestrial Internet connection, no 3G, no 2G – nothing.  You have a mobile phone to communicate with the world via voice and SMS. Imagine if you could search the web simply by sending an SMS to 55444. Now you can find the Rotten Tomatoes ratings for a movie playing over the air, or you can join IRC style chat rooms simply by using SMS. Innozlet’s you do all of these things and a whole lot more. It’s bringing the power of the Web and applications to people who would never have had access to them. The reality is people living in remote, rural parts of India can now connect with people in cities over IRC style chat rooms, find out the seven day forecast, and even get the best price for a TV from eBay simply by sending a text message.

These are just a few examples of mobile applications that people have built in India over SMS. Add in smartphone apps that alert civic authorities to sewage problems, garbage piled up on the side of the road, illegal construction, unsafe working conditions, etc. and you have a tech savvy urban population that can use technology to improve their quality of life. The opportunity in India isn’t in building another social network or e-commerce site that sells printed kurtis online. The poor across India are hard-pressed to get access to basic resources. The middle class is very aspirational and though price sensitive, the household savings rate, as a percentage of GDP, fell to 7.8% – the lowest in 20 years, according to a report in Times of India. This means middle class Indians are spending and it’s been increasing.

Today, it’s possible to get a basic smartphone in India for INR 4,500 or less than USD 85. The Aakash tablet was an ambitious project to produce a basic Internet device that can be used anywhere a mobile phone can at a USD 50 (subsidized to USD 35). A good deal of controversy surrounded the Aakash tablet. However, the push from the Indian government as well as manufacturers towards more affordable smartphones and tablets will help to create massive opportunities for entrepreneurs. These saavy entrpreneurs will be able to provide solutions to every day problems including education, entertainment, sports, content, and other utilities all while serving hundreds of millions of people who are accessing technology for the first time.