Category: Tech news

Editor’s note: John Greathouse is a general partner at Rincon Venture Partners and has held a number of senior executive positions with successful startups during the past fifteen years, including Computer Motion, Citrix Online and CallWave which collectively created in excess of $350M in shareholder value. You can follow him @johngreathouse. You can also check his blog for emerging entrepreneurs here.

Successful Olympic athletes share a number of common qualities with entrepreneurs; including boundless energy, uncompromising tenacity and a willingness to innovate. Such innovations include new training routines, inventive diets and novel, gameplay tactics. Entrepreneurs are well served to pay particular attention to two of the most innovative Olympic athletes: Dick Fosbury and David Berkoff, the former of which I discuss in the following 2-minute video.

Not All Flops Are Failures

Dick Fosbury began experimenting with unconventional methods of high jumping as a high school sophomore. Rejecting the straddling approach, which had been the standard for the prior forty years, Dick tweaked the old-fashioned scissor kick, eventually morphing it into a new and unique approach. His controversial technique was eventually dubbed the “Fosbury Flop.”

The track and field community initially scorned Mr. Fosbury’s approach, labeling it “unsafe” and “too unorthodox” for the average athlete to master. However, after Fosbury set an Olympic record at the 1968 Mexico City games, jumping 7 feet 4.25 inches, track athletes the world over began to co-opt his approach.

The adoption of the Fosbury Flop was rapid. The last high jumper to set a world record using the straddling approach was Vladimir Yashchenko in 1977. As shown in the chart below The Fosbury Flop had become the international standard by the 1980 Olympics.

Inventive Innovations

Inventors generally rely on new solutions, while innovators prefer modifying existing solutions. However, at most startups, competitive advantages are derived from a combination of invention and innovation, as described more fully in Inventor Or Innovator – Which Are You?

Harvard Professor Michael Porter notes in, “What Is Strategy?”, that entrepreneurs should strive to create a sustainable competitive advantage by “…performing different activities from rivals’ or performing similar activities in different ways” (italics from original text). This is in contrast to the approach taken by most big companies, which often focuses on outperforming the same activities conducted by their rivals. Such innovations represent an opportunity to create a sustainable advantage, at least in the near-term, by changing the rules of the game and executing a pre-existing activity in a new way.

Startups often out-maneuver their larger rivals by changing thekey parameters upon which competition has historically been based. Rather than trying to do the same things better than their competitors, savvy entrepreneurs identify new ways to create and deliver value to their customers, which often result in sustainable competitive advantages.

The Berkoff Blastoff

Fosbury is not alone in his role as an innovative Olympian. Although less renowned than Mr. Fosbury, David Berkoff revolutionized the world of swimming by refining a technique whose origins date back to the 1920s – the dolphin kick.

In the late 1980s, Mr. Berkoff began consistently winning races by dolphin-kicking underwater at the start of each race and after each flip turn, for as much as 35 meters at a time. He quickly went from being a mediocre collegiate swimmer to a world-class champion, winning four Olympic medals in 1988. Not surprisingly, given the media’s love of alliteration, his technique was termed the “Berkoff Blastoff.”

Looking back on his swimming legacy, Mr. Berkoff confessed, “I probably wouldn’t have made the Olympic team [without the Blastoff]. I probably would have been a good backstroker but not a great one. It was something that really kind of changed the way backstroke was swum.”

Berkoff’s initial impact was limited to his specialty, the backstroke. However, other competitors soon began utilizing his technique, which caused the International Amateur Swimming Federation to institute a rule precluding underwater swimming beyond 10-meters from the pool walls (later relaxed to 15-meters). The official reason given for this rule change was, “the safety of the athletes.”

However, most fans of competitive swimming agree that the real reason for the ruling was the officials’ concern that extensive use of the dolphin kick would migrate from backstroke races to breast and butterfly events. Thus, an otherwise non-competitive swimmer could conceivably defeat world-class champions by dolphin kicking the majority of the pool’s length. They also feared that competitive swimming would largely become an underwater affair, which would diminish the sport’s appeal to mainstream, television audiences.

The controversy surrounding Berkoff’s approach has not abated. Earlier this week, South African swimmer Cameron van der Burgh bragged about using the stroke to win a gold medal. Cameron rationalized his illicit use of the kick to the Sydney Morning Herald, stating, “Everybody does it—well, if not everybody, 99 percent of them. If you’re not doing it, you are falling behind and giving yourself a disadvantage.”

Immersion Leads To Innovation

An entrepreneur’s ability to devise innovations increases exponentially once they enter the market and are forced to fight for their venture’s survival. Both Fosbury and Berkoff devised their innovations while immersed in their sport. They did not study the art of jumping or swimming in an attempt to create ideal methodologies. Rather, they activity experimented, with a singular focus on creating new techniques within their mature sports.

According to Mr. Fosbury, “It was not by design at all. It was just simply intuition. It was not based on science or analysis or thought or design. It was all by instinct. It happened one day at a competition. My mind was driving my body to work out the best way to get over the bar.”

As Mr. Berkoff later noted, “It seemed pretty obvious to me that kicking underwater seemed to be a lot faster than swimming on the surface.” It may have seemed obvious in retrospect, but it is worthwhile to note that Mr. Berkoff leveraged the undulating dolphin kick, despite the fact that it had been previously attempted and subsequently abandoned by competitive swimmers nearly 90-years earlier.

Four and two decades later, respectively, the Fosbury Flop and the Berkoff Blastoff are universally accepted as standard methodologies. However, standards never last forever. Even as you read this, there are innovative athletes and entrepreneurs who are devising competitive advantages that will change the rules of the game.

Less than a month after taking over Yahoo, Marissa Mayer is already sending strong signals of leadership to investors. Yet, the announcement of a new financial strategy led to a 5.37 percent downturn of YHOO today as the company played down dividend expectations.

Yahoo filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the strategy review “may lead to a re-evaluation of, or changes to, our current plans.”

In particular, following the announcement in May that Yahoo would sell half of its 40 percent stake in the Chinese company Alibaba for $7.1 billion, investors believed that the after-tax cash proceeds — $4.2 billion — would go back to investors in the form of dividends.

Shareholders rejoiced, but with another CEO came another plan. Mayer has just scrapped the plan of distributing dividends in order to “enhance long-term shareholder value” as she wrote in the SEC filing. According to Reuters, the board of directors still backs Mayer’s long-term plans.

In addition to the new dividend plan, the French news agency AFP reported that the business review could lead to “revaluating or rethinking our current plans, including our company reorganization and our share buyback program”.

Once again, Mayer is borrowing some ideas from Google, her previous company. Google is known for not issuing dividends to its shareholders. By doing that, she gives the impression that she is in charge of Yahoo and ready to take bold decisions. But investors seem to value short-term returns over a long-term vision.

Now, we are left wondering what Yahoo will do with this cash on hand. It could acquire some companies, invest it or keep it for a while.

InsideSales.com has raised $4 million from Hummer Winblad in a Series A Round that the
company will use to grow its big data analytics sales force automation (SFO) technology. Joining in the round were Josh James, co-founder and former CEO of Omniture.

Mark Gorenberg, managing director, Hummer Winblad, said before the funding, the company was profitable and had not taken any investment. He said the company reminds him of Omniture, which the firm funded under similar circumstances. Omniture was also profitable when it accepted its investment. Omniture was acquired for $1.8 billion in 2009 by Adobe Systems.

InsideSales serves small and medium sized companies. It uses predictive analytics to help serve inside sales professionals. Its algorithms are designed to tell the sales professional who to contact, when to contact and how to tailor the message for the sales target.

The company has increased its employees from 65 to 140 people. In the past several months the company has increased from 600 to 900 customers. It has recently started expanding into the enterprise market by adding customers such as Dell and ADP.

InsideSales is one of a growing number of startups to come out of Utah. The company is based in Provo, also where Qualtrics, the online marketing intelligence company is located. Qualtrics raised $70 million in capital earlier this year from Accel Partners and Seqouia Capital. Omniture was originally from Orem, Utah.

Competitors to InsideSales include Leads360 and Five9.

It’s a strange thing to hear from the co-founder and CEO of a photo startup, but DMD Panorama‘s Elie-Gregoire Khoury tells me that panoramic photos will become “a commodity at the end of the day.” That doesn’t mean it’s time to get out of the photo business — instead, Khoury wants to see panoramas become a standard feature in a wide range of websites and apps, the way that regular photos are now.

And if Khoury has his way, that will all happen through DMD’s new API.

Since launching in June 2011 on the iPhone, DMD Panorama has been downloaded 4.5 million times, Khoury says. His aim was to build the fastest, easiest way to take panoramic photos, and he may have succeeded — this Wall Street Journal article, for example, describes the app as “the easiest-to-use panoramic picture app on the iPhone.”

I was definitely impressed when I tried the app out for myself. To take a panoramic picture, you just activate the camera and move the phone sideways, bringing together the yin and yang signs on your screen. The process is only slightly more complicated and time-consuming than taking a normal photo.

DMD Panorama was built by a five-person team in Lebanon. Khoury says the country’s infrastructure presented a few challenges — like only six hours of electricity per day and a 2 gigabyte monthly download cap on the office Internet connection — but the company succeeded in making hit app, and itrased raised angel funding from investors including early Googler Georges Harik and the Berytech Fund.

Now Khoury is hoping to enlist app developers to use DMD’s free API. Ultimately, Khoury wants DMD to power the photo-taking experience in any app where panoramic photos might be useful — for example, Khoury suggests that DMD could bring panoramic photos into a postcard app, or it could help people take panoramic pictures to show off their homes in rental apps like Airbnb.

Users will need to have DMD Panorama installed in order to take advantage of the integration, but once they do, the goal is to create a seamless experience between DMD and integrated apps. So when using another app, users could hit a “panorama” button (or whatever) at the appropriate moment, which would either open DMD Panorama or prompt them to install it. They take the photo in DMD, then they’re returned to the original app.

Khoury says he’s testing the API out with a few partners before opening it up more broadly, so interested developers should email api (at) DerManDar (dot) com.

I need to lighten things up a bit with all this Oracle brouhaha.

Oracle acquired Xsigo recently. I wrote about the acquisition and how Oracle will lose as IT gets virtualized. Oracle’s Bob Evans came back with his own special brand of attack. Yesterday I responded with my post: Open? Yeah, Sure. Sorry Oracle, You’re Still Full Of It.

Good times!

Last night, Michael Krigsman said in the comments to my post something I take to heart. Here’s what he said:

These kind of backs and forths are a bit silly, but of course there are multiple perspectives here. Still, I like the human drama because that’s what makes enterprise software interesting and accessible to a broader audience. For many people, this stuff is highly arcane, so the human dimension is beneficial even if the substance is a bit… well, like catcalling.

Despite the differences in position, I urge the parties to remain friendly and not resort to personal attacks and innuendo of any kind.

Right on, Mike!

But oh my word, we need some more of this excitement in the enterprise world. And so for that, I thank Bob for busting things out a bit. He said I made baseless claims about the Oracle cloud. I called him the king’s blogger. But Oracle is not the only one doing things that I question. Yes, they’re the worst of the crowd but not the only ones who do things that have me thinking WTF?

The big enterprise guys need more accountability. It is my job to call things out. So, with that in mind, here we go –  The Friday WTF Awards:

1. SAP – can you please make HANA something the makers of the world can use? You’re a contender to be one of the enterprise giants that leap frogs over the rest. Let’s see some something beautiful that any maker can create with all that data.
2. OpenStack — let’s be real. You’re an industry coalition. You have lots of developers and they make lots of contributions. They need a bigger voice. Transparency is an issue. We need more light into the workings of the organization.
3. Stop the madness, IBM. Your PureSystems technology is not a platform as a service. Focus on the real issues your tech solves. Cloudwashing doesn’t look good.
4. Citrix — where is Cloudstack? Hello? Anyone home?
5. Amazon Web Services — when will you start talking with the community about your APIs? You could release them under Creative Commons. That would allow for standardization. You blessed Eucalyptus because it is only enterprise focussed but not CloudStack. How come? Is it because they also support service providers who could be AWS competitors?
6. VMware — lots of rhetoric about the Amazon cloud. No more FUD, please.
7. EMC — building out a data center with your big storage machines is not cloud. Call it hybrid, label it private – all that is fine. But in the end — you’re selling your customers new storage systems. They’re not elastic. They’re not multi-tenant. It’s just shiny new hardware for the data center.
8. Microsoft  and the curious case of Office 365. Why not open more APIs?
9. CA — their FUD about the cloud is deafening.
10. Infosys – Charges of visa abuse? What’s up with that?
11. In the spirit of Spinal Tap, this list goes to 11. Cloud Analysts: we need more analysis, not marketing. Let’s see it.

Have a good weekend, folks.

(Image courtesy of WTF with Marc Maron)

BranchOut is known as one of the bigger success stories for startups building on top of Facebook. The company, which makes a professional social network that runs on Facebook, has raised nearly $50 million in venture capital and attracted 30 million users since it was founded back in July 2010. So it was great to have the chance to pull aside BranchOut CEO Rick Marini at the Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp TechCrunch hosted last Friday to hear about the “dos and don’ts” he’s learned along the way.

Watch the video above to see our full interview, and below I’ve excerpted a couple of his insights:

Growth Is Sexy, But Product Is What Counts

One of the major things Marini said he’s learned in building BranchOut is that while the kind of blockbuster growth that Facebook can enable is tempting to constantly position your app to attract new users, it’s important to make sure that your actual product is compelling enough to foster loyalty and a returning audience.

“I think often people think there’s a silver bullet to getting traffic and getting viral. I think what we’ve learned is that there are times when you can get some spike of virality, but if you really want that long-term major user growth its got to start with a good product. So, something that we have at BranchOut [which has grown] from nothing to 30 million users in less than two years, which is great, but then we realized OK, now it’s time not only to get the user acquisition but we’ve got to really enhance the product and get users back every day. Don’t be an episodic utility, be a community. And now we’ve got to make that shift.

I think that it sounds really sexy from the outside when you see our numbers or, you know, companies like us that take off, and people get excited. But if you’re building for the long term, like we are, you’ve gotta have a great product.”

Facebook Isn’t Bedrock — It’s ‘Shifting Sands’

Another lesson the folks at BranchOut have learned is when you build your company on top of Facebook, you have to think about it in a completely different way than you would for a more independently-based company — flexibility is key.

“Facebook innovates so quickly that for my growth team that I have in place [which] focuses on user acquisition and also now more on retention, it’s a different puzzle every day. So think of it, and this is what I tell my guys, think of it when you come in that you’ve got a different puzzle that you need to put together. And all these pieces change every day. And don’t get frustrated by it, look at it as an opportunity and a challenge. Beause most companies aren’t dedicated resources to growth and these analytics and solving this puzzle every day. The ones that do, the ones that can solve that puzzle, those are the ones that we’ve really seen excel.

… I think a lot of off-Facebook properties can build more on bedrock. And I think we are building more on shifting sands. But they’re really lucrative sands if you do well. And you know, for a company like us, for BranchOut, there’s no way we could have signed up 30 million users in two years outside of Facebook. so in spite of the shifting sands and the risks of building on someone else’s platform, the benefits for us are so big.”

A little over a year ago, cloud communications company Twilio launched Short Codes, dedicated 5 or 6 digit numbers for sending and receiving text messages at volume. Since then, Twilio has become the fastest-growing short code provider and has found surprisingly differing uses for its product.

“People have started using our Short Code product in ways we didn’t ever expect,” Patrick Malatack, the product manager in charge of Short Codes, tells me.

Malatack says they have seen “dramatic adoption” of the product, as hundreds of Short Codes have been registered in the past year. While hundreds of phone numbers in a year would not be a significant sum, Malatack explains that most companies only have one short code, so the number represents their number of clients. Twilio would not release exact numbers, but said that only a few thousand Short Codes exist, so hundreds is a significant chunk of the market.

Twilio clients include WalMart, which offers special daily discounts to customers vai text messages that they can redeem for a limited time, and the City of Philadelphia, where the police use Short Codes to enable residents to send crime tips vai SMS. Twilio says that since its launch in April, Philadelphians have made texting with Twilio the fastest growing avenue for crime tips.

While mobile short codes have been around for almost a decade, there are only a few thousand in the US. Twilio’s main competitor, mBlox, has been in the space for a while, but Malatack says Twilio differentiates itself by trying to “democratize communication” and make Short Codes available to everyone from major corporations to “two guys in a garage” startups.

Members of Malatack’s team thought they would see Short Codes used more for coupons and marketing when they launched, but they’ve seen it adopted much more widely by enterprise (for things like two factor authentication) than they expected.

Malatack says the company is now focused on expanding internationally, as many startups have international customers from day one. He adds that the company thinks it should be as easy to send a text message or make a phone call from country to country as it is to send an international email.

RIM is about to lay off more employees in an ongoing effort to cut $1 billion by 2013. According to one report, as many as 3,000 RIM staffers could get the boot as soon as next week. However, RIM has not officially confirmed this as of yet.

RIM’s Global Corporate Communications Manager spoke to TechCrunch this afternoon and confirmed there are more layoffs on the horizon. She went on to explain that the company is “moving quickly for the impacted employees.” As RIM communicated earlier, the company plans to eliminate 5,000 positions within the current financial quarter. While RIM hasn’t pointed out affected departments and regions, it seems those working on BlackBerry 10 are safe — well, at least for now.

RIM is seemingly betting it all BlackBerry 10. RIM’s spokesperson indicated today several times that BB10 employees are safe from layoffs. The company already delayed its next-gen mobile platform from later this year to early 2013. The project likely needs all the help it can get.

Prior to cutting 2,000 people in July, RIM employed around 16,000 people worldwide. But now, after concluding this next round of layoffs, RIM will have just around 9,000 — a rather humble amount consider RIM once employed around 20,000 people.

As for IBM buying RIM’s enterprise division, a separate RIM spokesperson indicated that RIM will not comment on rumors and speculation.

If rumors hold true, Apple should be gearing up to unveil its latest iGadgets in just a few weeks, and it’s no surprise that all sorts of questionable leaks are now worming their way into daylight.

The latest of those purported leaks comes in the form of images obtained by the French site Nowherelse.fr that reportedly depict Apple’s tiny new dock connector next to a USB plug. Got your grains of salt ready?

Good, let’s go.

Right now there are so many numbers floating around that it’s hard to make sense of what’s actually happening. TechCrunch and Reuters independently confirmed that Apple’s new dock connector would have 19 pins, but persistent rumors (along with some snippets of code within iOS 6) point to the existence of a 9-pin connector. Still others have been reporting an 8-pin connection, much like the one seen in these pictures.

So what gives? Who’s right?

At this point, who knows. It’s possible that we’re only seeing one side of the connector, and that a handful of pins live on the other side — whomever took the pictures doesn’t seem to have photographed the opposite end of the connector. Well, that or both sides of the plug are identical. It’s also possible that, as MacRumors’ Arnold Kim puts it on Twitter, the metal edge of the connector could effectively serve as a grounding pin, which pushes the number to nine.

Or, if we start paring down possibilities with Occam’s razor, we could also draw the conclusion that the images are fake and that there are better ways to spend a Friday than wracking our brains over Apple minutiae. Either way, there’s no way to get a full sense of what’s going on here.

For what it’s worth, the design doesn’t actually look too bad — I could conceivably see Apple running with something like this, though I have to wonder how sturdy the inevitably big-to-small dock connector adapter is going to be. In any case, there’s no way in hell that these images aren’t going to be followed up by even more leaks and speculation, so hold on for the ride.

UPDATE: Nowherelse.fr has updated their original post with a bit more information about the mysterious connector. iDownloadBlog‘s Sebastien Page (who in addition to being a nice guy speaks fluent French) offers up the following translation:

“We have obtained new information about this connector. We have indeed learned that it is not equipped with 8 but 16 pins with distinct functions (8 pins on each side), noting that one side would currently have no specific function and might be saved for future use.”

It’s starting to seem like everyone who got their start in Silicon Valley is putting down an anchor in New York City. Earlier this year Facebook set up an engineering office in Manhattan, then this week Alexia Tsotsis made her move to the Big Apple (miss you!) Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?

The latest techie to head east is Polyvore, the website that lets people create collages of apparel and accessories using images from any online store. Polyvore today is announcing the opening of its first-ever New York office, in SoHo. The NYC office has a staff of eight to start, while Polyvore’s 40 other employees and its executive team headed up by CEO Jess Lee will remain headquartered in Mountain View, California.

NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg issued a personal welcome to Polvyore, which is pretty cool:

“By opening an office here, Polyvore is joining the growing group of tech companies who recognize that the benefits of being in New York City are irresistible, regardless of where a startup began.”

Polyvore’s setting up an office in Manhattan makes a ton of sense, since as hard as the San Francisco Bay Area may try, NYC is still the fashion headquarters of the United States (and arguably the world.) I know that Lee and one of her co-founders Pasha Sadri have found themselves spending more and more time in New York as Polyvore has grown, so now they will have somewhere to hang their hats when in town. In a statement, Sadri said: “We’ve come a long way since Polyvore was five people in my living room. Polyvore has always been at the intersection of technology and style, so being in close proximity to the fashion powerhouses of New York was a natural next step.”

And speaking of Polyvore’s growth, the company is also announcing today that it has hit 17 million unique visitors per month. That’s a nice bump up from the last time we checked in with the company in May, when it had 15 million uniques. Here is a video interview from then, in which Lee and Sadri discuss how embracing “the Pinterest effect” has helped them grow the business:

Photo credit of Polyvore NYC office: Patrick Butler

Disrupt SF is right around the corner and is shaping up to be one of the biggest events of the year. We have already announced many speakers which include our very own TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Marissa Mayer, The Honest Company’s Jessica Alba and Brian Lee, super angel Ron Conway, Vinod Khosla, Marc Benioff, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, Path’s Dave Morin, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Kevin Rose, and many others.

Here is another chance for one lucky reader to win a chance to come join us! Not only will the winner receive a free ticket (valued at around $1,995*), but we are also going to give you a free Phosphor watch of your choice. Check them out. The winner can choose any watch on that site. The most expensive is valued at around $250.

So, here we go. If you want a shot at winning, all you have to do is follow the steps below.

1) Become a fan of our TechCrunch Facebook Page:

2) Then do one of the following:
– Retweet this post (making sure to include the #TCDisrupt hashtag)
– Or leave us a comment below telling us what your favorite summer song is

The contest will start now and end August 13th at 7:30pm PT. Please only tweet or comment once, or you will be disqualified. We will make sure you follow the steps above and choose our winner once the giveaway is over. Please note the free Disrupt ticket is for one ticket only and does not include airfare or hotel.

*Ticket prices increase to $2,995 on 8/24. More information here.

Google may be taking the ill-conceived Nexus Q back to the drawing board, but the Nexus 7 tablet has been quite a hit since it went on sale a few weeks ago. Since then, though, Google has faced a number of supply issues and the company even suspended sales of the 16GB for a few days to catch up with demand. The latest data from ad network Chitika shows how those supply issues have stalled the growth of Google’s first tablet – at least when measured by web traffic from Nexus 7 owners.

Just a few weeks ago, Chitika reported that the Nexus tablet was on its way to surpass the Kindle Fire in its traffic rankings. By now, the company predicted, the Google tablet was supposed to be ahead of the Fire. Instead, its latest data shows that it’s still trailing Amazon’s tablet by quite a bit. While traffic from the Nexus 7 to Chitika’s network of member sites grew rapidly during the first few weeks after it went on sale, growth stalled over the last three weeks. Chitika reports its tablet data relative to the iPad and the Nexus 7 currently accounts for 0.35 impressions per 100 iPad impressions. That’s virtually unchanged from the 0.3 impressions it reported three weeks ago.

With only a few new Nexus 7 owners surfing the web due to Google’s supply issues, the company’s numbers probably reflect the usage of existing users. ”While the Nexus 7 experienced a huge initial surge in both sales and Web traffic, users don’t seem to be surfing as much as one might expect them to.” As the novelty of the device wears off and as the honeymoon phase comes to an end, people simply don’t use it as much as they used to. Now that the Nexus 7 is back on sale, it will be interesting to see if the growth rate picks up again.

Google just announced that, starting next week, its search algorithm will start taking a new signal into account: the number of valid copyright removal notices it receives for a given site. According to Google, “this ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily.” The idea here is obviously to punish pirate sites by pushing links to them down on Google’s search results pages and to appease copyright holders who often claim that Google doesn’t do enough to remove links to copyrighted material.

Since it started giving rights owners the ability to report potential copyright infringement in 2009, Google says, it’s been getting “much more data by copyright owners about infringing content online.” Just over the last 30 days, for example, it received copyright removal notices for more than 4.3 million URLs. That’s more than in all of 2009 together. Most of these notices in the last 30 days concerned content owned by RIAA members, followed by Microsoft, a group called Froytal Services Ltd. and NBC Universal.

In its announcement today, Google notes that users can always file “counter notices” when they believe their content was wrongly removed from its index. Google stresses that it won’t actually remove any pages from its search results unless it receives a valid copyright removal notice from the rights owner. Still, chances are that this update will push legitimate links to sites like filestube.com, downloads.nl and isohunt.com to the bottom of Google’s search results pages.

Incentives are all the rage: employee bonus pay, app badges, student grades, and even lunch with President Obama. Despite their widespread use, most research finds that incentives are terrible at improving performance in the long-run on anything but mindless rote tasks, because the fixation on prizes clouds our creative thinking (video explanation below). However, a new Harvard study of teachers found that a novel approach to incentives could dramatically improve student performance: give teachers a reward upfront and threaten to take it away if performance doesn’t actually improve. Exploiting the so-called “loss-aversion” tendency could open the door to creative incentivizing for software designers and managers.

Harvard University’s Ronald Fryer and his colleagues explain that, in education, pay-for-performance has a dismal record of improving student outcomes. Teachers who were offered sizable bundles of cash (up to $15,000) didn’t fare any better at helping their students than teachers who worked simply out of the goodness of their impoverished hearts. In india, teachers show modest gains the first year incentives, but the effect largely drops off a cliff the next year.

However, humans process loss differently gain. For instance, one study showed that people will pay more than twice as much money to keep a coffee mug they were given beforehand then to acquire it in the first place. The idea behind the “endowment effect“, popularized by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, is that people become psychologically territorial about their own stuff, and begin imagining all the ways they’ll use their new treasure once it’s in their hands. The research has been widely replicated and applied, such as in a Chinese factory to improve worker productivity.

The Harvard school experiment applied the logic in pretty much the same way: teachers were randomly selected to receive a bonus either at the beginning or end of the year; those getting the check up front (the treatment group) had to give it back if student performance didn’t improve as expected. Teachers could earn up to $8,000, depending on the level of improvement. The experimental group was cut a check for the expected amount ($4,000) upfront and had to give back or add to that amount depending on the actual performance at the end of the year.

The results were impressive by education standards: up to 10 percentile points on average (that’s 0.33 standard deviation units, for you statistic nerds).

The research holds exciting possibilities for business. Why not hand out bonus pay at the beginning of the year? Or, maybe give out restaurant discounts for a month, and revoke it if users don’t check-in on Foursquare each time they come.

The possibilities are endless and we’d love to hear your ideas. How do you use incentives in your organization? How could someone use loss-aversion to change the way incentives are given?

Airbnb, the online marketplace for listing and booking short-term housing accommodations, has been on a roll lately: In June it hit 10 million nights booked, boasting hockey stick-like growth along the way. Well, it had a really big night last Saturday, hitting a new record with more than 60,000 guests booking lodgings through the service. Not only was that five times the number of guests it had a year prior, but a large number of those guests — 75 percent — were using the marketplace for the first time.

Airbnb is using the occasion to highlight the international community it has amassed, along with some of the unique lodgings that it boasts. It noted guests from 174 different countries around the world, including guests from far-off locales like Zimbabwe and Nepal.

Two-thirds of guests were from outside the United States, and speak more than 30 different languages, including Japanese, Arabic, Bengali, Punjabi, Tagalog, Finnish, and Sign Language. Of the international community, France had the most number of guests, with 6,800, as pretty much the entire country goes on vacation during August. Airbnb also saw 800 guests from Brazil and 120 from India.

Not surprisingly, there was a lot of activity in London due to the Summer Olympic Games. Airbnb prepped for this by acquiring UK-based Crashpadder earlier this spring, and had 3,400 guests in London that night. Altogether, Airbnb had guests staying in 500 different cities, including 1,900 in Los Angeles, 300 in Reykjavik, 250 in Rio de Janeiro, and 200 guests in Bali.

The demographics highlight that Airbnb is no longer just about post-grad backpackers using the service, as more than half of guests booking lodging last Saturday were over the age of 30. Almost ten percent (5,500) were over the age of 50, and it even counted 320 that were 70 or older.

That’s also demonstrated in the types of lodgings people are booking. Last Saturday, 1,200 guests stayed in villas, while 10 stayed in castles and eight booked private islands. There were also 120 guests staying in boats, 30 in treehouses, and 15 staying in (shudder) caves.

Airbnb’s record night came after the startup redesigned its website in June, so it looks like that’s going well and isn’t having any adverse effects on bookings. The startup, which is based in San Francisco, has raised about $120 million over the years, and has more than 500 employees worldwide.