The dustup between the Demo conference and the TechCrunch 50 conference has spilled over to the NY Times today with some of the press-friendly accusations coming to the forefront:

To Michael Arrington, the elbow-throwing, supercilious founder of the popular Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch, Demo’s business model amounts to “payola.”

This coming on the heals of the accusation by someone loosely associated with the Demo conference writing to Alex Muse accusing Jason Calacanis of plagiarism. I happened to think that Calacanis’s demo tips for a startup were incredibly valuable, and I’m enjoying his conversion from blogger to emailer as a whole. The startup tips rang true for me, because a couple weeks ago we demoed our pitch for the TC50 to Heather Harde.

Well, the news is, out of the 1038 startups that applied, we didn’t get to the final round of 50 that will demo on stage, but we did get invited to participate in the “Demo Pit.” In the demo pit we’ll get to showcase the new Flatsourcing Dashboard to all conference attendees, and we’ll be vying with a bunch of other startups trying to do the same thing. It’ll be chaotic, fun, exhilarating, and a great launch pad for the Flatsourcing Dashboard.

So, what is the Flatsourcing Dashboard? We’ll I could tell you, but then I’d be violating our pledge to the TC50 conference. So for now we must keep it under wraps, although we may offer a few sneak peaks as things get closer.

What I can tell you is we plan to shake up the collaboration space by offering a tool that truly provides “Outsourcing Insight”.

We are thrilled to be DEMO-ing at TC50! Follow Will & me on Twitter for updates. And if you will be in San Fran Sept 8-10, we want to meet up with you. Drop us a line.

Stay tuned!