According to two new surveys, not quite. Americans may be far less optimistic than they were in other, cheerier historical periods, but this recent evidence suggests they are starting to cope with the challenges.

Adecco recently polled 1,014 Americans for its annual Workplace Insights survey, asking them for their outlook on everything from their jobs to the coming presidential election. The results show a shift in U.S. workers’ views on career instability in general and temporary and contract work in particular. Adecco reports:

• Temporary jobs are more favorably viewed today than in the past. Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of Americans say they view temporary jobs more positively than they did last year. That might be a result of a huge majority (86 percent) of Americans believing a temporary job is a good career option for people looking to gain valuable work experience.
• Americans are also more likely to work in different fields than they were in 2011. Sixty-eight percent of Americans would be more willing to take a job in a field outside of their degree or study today than they would have been last year.
• Women may be more flexible when it comes to finding a job than men. Seventy-two percent of women would be more willing today to take a job outside of their field of study compared to 64 percent of men.

Of course, these results are hardly proof of some definitive move towards contentment with gig-based careers. As Consumerist points out, it’s not that respondents are happy with a future of piecemeal work; it’s that they’re hoping (perhaps out of desperation) these sorts of jobs will  lead to an old-style full-time position:

Americans are growing more amenable to taking temporary employment, changing their viewpoint from the glass-half-empty opinion of ‘it’s a job without permanence’ to ‘it’s a job that may lead to something permanent one day.’

But even if workers aren’t thrilled with bouncing between jobs, there’s other evidence they’re starting to come to terms with a less stable future of work. The American Psychological Association regularly asks Americans if they’re feeling stressed, and perhaps surprisingly given the lack of cheerful news, they’re increasingly answering no. The Financial Times reports:

Although 22 per cent of Americans described themselves as “very stressed”, this figure was slightly down on the previous year, when it was 24 per cent – and well below 2007, when it was 32 per cent. Indeed, the measured levels of stress have been dropping steadily over the past five years since the APA started its survey. In 2007, for example, the mean stress level was 6.2 per cent, whereas this year it was “only” 5.2 per cent.

“After five long years of financial turmoil, Americans might – just possibly – be getting used to shocks,” speculates the paper, continuing, “five years of watching ‘black swan’ type events, bad government policies and bizarre economic twists might have made shocks less unsettling. People are slowly adapting to a more unstable world.”

While these are only crumbs of data that certainly do not prove Americans have completely and happily adjusted to new career and economic realities, they do suggest we can’t and won’t look backward forever. Among the understandable fear of change and pining for more stable times, it’s easy to imagine we’ll never get our heads around new realities. These studies at least suggest it’s possible.

Do you think Americans are starting to give up the dream of returning to older realities and starting to figure out how to deal with the future of work?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Juan M. Gatica.

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• Working out loud: how work media and social cognition are altering business

To find out, Forrester Research recently polled 4,985 U.S. information workers about their use of enterprise social for The Enterprise 2.0 User Profile: 2011, which was released last week. The results: 28 percent of workers use social software at least monthly.

That’s not a terribly low figure for a relatively new technology, but Forrester further profiled that 28 percent and found they belong to a very narrow subset of the workforce.

• They’re earlier adopters. “They have positive attitudes about the role of technology in their lives — more than two-thirds are technology optimists,” says the Forrester report.
• They’re well paid. More than half make $60,000 a year or more.
• They’re highly educated. “23 percent hold advanced degrees, and 49 percent are in management,” reports Forrester.
• They’re pressed for time. “Software users work, on average, 2.41 hours longer than other employees during the workweek. They also spend 1.95 more hours, on average, working outside business hours than the rest of the workforce.”
• They’re not all Gen Y. While a slightly more than a quarter (26 percent) are supposedly social-mad Gen Y, a larger percentage (35 percent) of users are from Gen X.

While there’s nothing shocking in this profile of the average enterprise social software user (in fact it sounds a lot like the average telecommuter), this stereotypical portrait of the connected, elite professional reveals that these technologies have a long way to go before they’re accepted more broadly in the workplace. This confirms earlier Forrester research showing just one in six Gen Yers use social tools.

The numbers also show that while the high-powered and over-scheduled really like their enterprise social tools, they don’t view them as essential. “Just 22 percent of social software users tell us the technologies are vital to their jobs,” according to Forrester, who says these tools “remain on the periphery of an information worker’s workflow.”

Will enterprise social tools ever be an everyday component of work for a wide swath of the workforce?

Image courtesy of Flickr user luca.sartoni.

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While a healthy 37 and 35 percent of respondents fulfilled Staples’ dreams and suggested better office technology and furniture would brighten up life at the office, an even larger percentage (41 percent) thought the best improvement that could be made was not seeing the office at all. That’s the percentage that cited allowing or encouraging telecommuting as likely to improve American offices.

The only modification that won more support was eliminating office politics at 44 percent. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that adding telecommuting and removing office politics took the top slots, as research has shown previously that one of the most undersung benefits of remote work is how it reduces perceptions of and participation in office politics. Distance, in the case of colleagues, does seem to make the heart grow fonder.

Is the best improvement to the office getting rid of the need to be there?

Image courtesy of Flickr user kevinspencer.

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Feldman is based in New York City, but his company designs and builds its products in tiny Aurora, New York, where the closest population center is Ithaca, 40 minutes away. So what are the benefits and challenges of this rural location? How does city dwelling Feldman make sure things are going smoothly up on the farm in Aurora? And does remote work hold out the possibility of bringing more jobs to other tucked away communities?

Talent

MacKenzie-Childs may have grown into a fairly large enterprise with international distribution, but Feldman is keen to keep the company agile and aggressive, and he hires with that – and the company’s remote set-up — in mind.

“We’ve grown into a pretty good-sized company but we still try to have an entrepreneurial kind of startup culture in terms of how aggressive we are and innovative and flexible. I think when you have a dispersed organization and you have a lot of people out there doing things independently, you need to hire a certain type of person,” he says. Maturity, independence and drive top the list of qualities Feldman most desires for his executives.

Feldman doesn’t use any flash techniques for getting at whether a potential new hire will fit in with the company’s independent spirit, recommending simple dialogue to get an a candidate’s work style, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t extremely careful about selecting new team members with remote work in mind.

“You are careful, because it’s not a company where people are going to be telling you what to do and when to do it all the time, and some people need that and they prefer that. We’re very careful not to hire that type of person,” he says.

Tools

Feldman calls his team “a pretty plugged-in group” and describes them as walking around each armed with a PC, iPad and smartphone. But with today’s tech, he doesn’t feel like keeping in touch across vast distances is a Herculean task.

“Not that any of this is rocket science or anything,” he says. “Most companies are doing something like this.” A Monday morning conference call with his team of five top executives and the occasional Skype video conference with agents or suppliers in distant locales are all Feldman relies on to keep his business running smoothly.

Tips

The company’s location at a former dairy farm in upstate New York is key to the brand’s identity and development, according to Feldman. “Our brand is very much about that place,” he says. “We have a group of artisans there that have come together that are absolutely critical to business and core to the brand. We’re based on a beautiful 65-acre former dairy farm with a beautiful show farmhouse. We get over 60,000 visitors a year, so the brand is very much about this place.”

The brand may have grown up in a small town over three decades, but current remote working tech has allowed it to expand its reach and for the company to expand it’s workforce. “We’ve grown our workforce by 50 percent since the beginning of 2010, so we’ve added a lot of jobs,” says Feldman, who believes that a more flexible, connected style of work may bring more opportunities to rural communities. “People don’t need to report to a skyscraper in the middle of New York every day for a lot of jobs now because of technology,” he says.

The result for MacKenzie-Childs is a fertile, tech-enabled loop – country sensibility enlivens a company and the company in turn enlivens the country with an influx of income and job opportunities.

Image courtesy Flickr user VanDammeMaarten.be

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It’s an idea we’ve covered before, noting the trend of “rural sourcing,” which offers the dual benefits of lower wages to companies and economic development to out-of-the-way places (also, plenty of workers simply prefer the lifestyle – and lower property prices – of more rural area). But it’s not just corporate remote employees that are bringing big city work into small towns; co-working spaces are hoping to achieve the same thing for freelancers, startups and small businesses.

At least that’s what local Kentucky-focused site KYForward recently suggested. Reporting for the site, Mark W. Kidd outlines the efforts of economic development non-profit Virginia Economic Bridge to bring coworking to central Appalachia with the opening of a space in Radford this fall. According to Kidd, the organization sees several reasons coworking might be a good fit for rural communities:

Coworking is flexible enough to accommodate for-profit, non-profit, or agency ownership, making the model adaptable to local economic and funding realities. Underutilized commercial space is common in many rural communities, and coworking’s flexible, do-it-yourself ethos is particularly suited to adaptations of existing space. This approach also offers resilience, because earned income through membership fees should cover the operational costs of a coworking space, regardless of whether the group seeks added grant or investment funding to procure special equipment or other shared resources….

Coworking bypasses logistical barriers like access to secure, broadband-ready space, features that can be especially vexing for innovators in small communities…. Existing organizations with community facilities – like craft centers, libraries, community colleges, and churches – could be excellent partners for establishing a coworking space.

Besides these advantages, there’s also the money remote workers utilizing the coworking space put back into the local community. Out in California, NextSpace used an economic development model to sell the idea of a coworking to the local authorities, noting that while it might be hard to attract a big employer to airport-less Santa Cruz, there was little stopping individual remote workers from basing themselves there.

“We realized after chasing a lot of companies that instead of attracting one 200-person business, we should attract 200 one-person businesses. The economic impact is bigger, and some of those businesses will grow,” the mayor explained.

A similar argument should apply to Kentucky, though the experiences of other coworking spaces in less urban areas suggest that overcoming lack of awareness about the movement will likely be a significant problem. Luckily, crafty coworking spaces are already coming up with creative ideas to raise awareness.

Is coworking a good way to bring city-sized paychecks to more remote communities?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Base Camp Baker.

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But despite a lot of talk in support of new ways of working to help knowledge workers keep their sanity and their families intact, there’s plenty of evidence that some managers are merely paying lip service to the idea.

Recently, HR consultancy WorldatWork decided to take a closer look at managers’ true attitudes towards flexible working, polling 2,312 employees in six countries (Brazil, China, India, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States) in late 2010. The results out now show a chasm between rhetoric and reality when it comes to flexible working:

While, 80 percent of respondents claimed to support family-friendly workplaces and arrangements such as remote work, more often than not their behavior didn’t match their beliefs:

• More than half the surveyed managers think the ideal employee is one that is available to meet business needs regardless of business hours
• 40 percent believe the most productive employees are those without a lot of personal commitments
• Nearly one in three think that employees who use flexible work arrangements will not advance very far in their organization

“The good news is that 80 percent of employers around the globe avow support for family-friendly workplaces,” said Kathie Lingle, executive director of WorldatWork’s Alliance for Work-Life Progress. “The bad news is they are simultaneously penalizing those who actively strive to integrate work with their lives.”

The WSJ’s The Juggle blog points out that the WorldatWork findings are consistent with other earlier surveys, including one done by Bain & Co last year that found while flex work programs were widely available, they were very little used.

This gap between what management says and what it does can can result in employees who “go underground, resorting to ‘stealth maneuvers’ for managing their personal responsibilities,” according to Lingle. On the flip side, actually implementing flexible working is tied to lower turnover, among other benefits.

Does flex work rhetoric match reality at your employer?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Philo Nordlund, CC 2.0.

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But some financial industry experts say the current market volatility doesn’t necessarily mean the IPO window is closed for prospective newcomers such as Zynga. Here are a few main takeaways from conversations I’ve had with senior bankers about the current financial environment:

• Look around; It could be worse. Although the market for publicly traded U.S. tech stocks may be battered, many still believe that the sector is likely to fare better than most others in the long-term. That’s why a lot of money managers — the big investors in today’s stock market — will continue to invest in technology, and have an appetite for more tech IPOs. “If you’re an asset manager, you have to put the money to work somewhere. You can’t put it in the mattress,” Paul Deninger, a senior managing director of investment bank Evercore Partners said. “Whether the market is good or bad, many investors are going to be looking at stocks relative to their other opportunities. And on a relative basis, the growth potential of these [technology company] IPOs is still extraordinary.”

• Delays may not indicate fear. “This environment is really only a couple of weeks old, and the IPO process takes a while,” Morgan Keegan managing director Peter Falvey said. “Even in more normal times, it is very, very difficult to price IPOs.” And while some companies may be waiting on the sidelines a bit longer before going public, it may not be because of a lack of appetite for their stock: They could just be waiting for another lull in the financial news cycle. “Companies going public also want to make it a marketing event,” Falvey pointed out. “Right now, people are only talking about the general volatility in the markets.”

• For new tech stocks, it’s a correction, not a crash. Though the recent downward impact to newly public Internet companies has been especially severe, that doesn’t have to mean that all web companies will suffer a similar fate in the future. Newly public companies such as LinkedIn debuted at such sky-high stock prices that they may have been destined to come down at some point or another. “The hit that LinkedIn took could just be an example of the market taking the air out of the stock,” Deninger said. That means that future IPOs don’t have to be delayed — but that they must be priced more carefully to avoid a similar fate. “In the tech sector there’s been some criticism over the pricing of some of these companies,” Falvey said. “It’s exacerbating what is already a difficult problem.”

At the same time, it can’t be stressed enough that it’s still too early to know exactly how this will all play out for the Internet industry and the economy at large. But for people who work in technology and new media, it may be good to hear that the industry’s recent wave of good fortune may not be crashing down just yet.

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1. Microsoft Office 2004

Let’s face it, Microsoft Office isn’t cheap, and Office 2008 wasn’t that great. Some features in 2004 weren’t in 2008 (though many were reintroduced in 2011), and when 2008 included the new .docx format, 2004 users didn’t want to move to a new format that could cause problems. Because of these issues, it’s not unusual to find users two versions behind. Alternatives: Office 2011, iWork, Google Docs.

2. Appleworks

Appleworks, why can’t we quit you? I’ve been a fan of Appleworks since the Apple II days. You worked equally well on Mac and PC, and included a database that’s easier to use and understand that those used by either Filemaker or Access. In fact, Apple was still selling Appleworks until 2007. Fortunately, iWork will open most files in Appleworks format and Apple has a full transition guide about moving Appleworks files over to iWork. Database users will either need to export the file to spreadsheet format or move up to Filemaker. Alternatives: iWork, Filemaker, Bento.

3. Freehand

Die-hard Freehand users refuse to use Illustrator. Freehand MX was the last version released before the purchase and discontinuation of the product by Adobe. Freehand holdouts might balk at the cost of Illustrator, or at having to relearn using new software, but it’s time to move on, or Lion won’t be able to open your files. Alternatives: Illustrator (this guide will help).

4. Eudora

Eudora was an outstanding cross-platform email program and a longtime Mac standard. It easily imported into Apple Mail, Thunderbird, or Microsoft’s Entourage, but some of us, myself included, were lazy and didn’t import old emails. Instead, if I needed an ancient email, I just opened Eudora. Now’s the time to import those emails before you run into problems with Lion. And if Eudora is still your primary email program, it’s definitely time to move onto something else. Alternatives: Penelope/Eudora Open Source, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Outlook.

5. Quicken 2007

Although Intel Macs have been out since 2006, Quicken still hasn’t updated the program. And Quicken 2007 is still being sold, because Intuit’s new product, Quicken Essentials, is a scaled-down version of its 2007 predecessor. Essentials lacks features such as bill pay and sophisticated stock tracking. Intuit generally keeps their Mac products somewhat behind the PC versions. Intuit’s suggestions for what to do with the end of Rosetta are laughable. Fortunately, a wide variety of alternatives exist for these users, but be sure to research these carefully, and import your data into a new program before you make the move to Lion. Alternatives: iBank, Moneydance.

What still-in-use programs will you have to say goodbye to when you make the leap to Lion?

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The new features allow for the creation of “companies,” based on email domain names, which give users the ability to share presentations and meeting recordings with individuals and groups with the company for evaluation and training purposes. Meeting recordings include both notes taken during the meeting and audio; these recording are synchronized with the presentation during playback. Video recordings are planned for a future version.

The app also now provides administrators with more sophisticated tools to review, analyze and manage how presentations are used. There is also a completely new system to search and filter content by customer or employee, with more filters are being developed in response to the feedback of beta users. These new features will allow organizations to evaluate in detail how effective presentations — and even specific slides — are. They can also be used to set up A/B testing to compare presentations.

CrunchConnect is currently in private beta, but invitations are available to WebWorkerDaily readers here. The service is free for now; after the beta period has ended, users will be able to choose from free and paid plans.

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While those in traditional fields may pursue study and qualifications in order to advance their careers and earning potential, and see PD as both a reward and a motivator, for those in working in technology and innovation, the pathways for — and value of — professional development aren’t so clear-cut.

And for team leaders seeking to attract and motivate truly innovative staff, the role of PD in employee motivation and satisfaction can be very fuzzy.

In a recent interview, I asked a mobile developer how he keeps his skills at the top of his field. He laughed and said, “Coming to work is a good start!” In this industry, at least, the progress is being made — and knowledge is most quickly gained — in startups and innovative businesses, not in universities.

That explains why younger players entering the industry today face such fierce competition. There are plenty of people already working in innovative technology roles on the strength of experience and talent, rather than qualifications. As the technology sector gains maturity, employers now have the luxury of valuing people with proven experience (with or without formal qualifications) over fresh graduates. And few employers will bother speaking to a candidate who hasn’t learned or created anything new since they finished formal study.

The freshly released Startup Genome Project report corroborates the value of non-school learning. The research found “Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth” than those that don’t. No mention is made of the value of formal qualifications as a basis for startup success.

Your potential team members don’t want to see professional development listed as an employment benefit in their contracts; they choose jobs on the basis of how much the roles themselves will let them learn. The risky thrill of experimenting to create world-first products and take them successfully to market is a core appeal for those who work in innovative technology.

For this reason, proven expertise is usually more respected than qualifications by peers and colleagues. In innovative development, team members expect their peers to be able to walk the talk — for the good of the team, the project itself, and the individual’s own on-the-job PD. That motivates team members to seek productive, challenging, high-profile projects with great teams that they can learn from, rather than formal qualifications. Similarly, successful team leaders know that the bottom line depends entirely on whether team members can deliver, so rewards and respect naturally flow from successful experimentation, not traditional education.

Not surprisingly, the terms on which these types of team members are engaged aren’t those that appeal to those opting to work in more staid, traditional fields. The innovators thrive on possibility, the thrill of pushing boundaries, and the chance to have an impact. Offer to foot the bill for an MBA, and you’ll likely get a lot of blank stares. Employers may expect staff to walk the talk, but team members, too, judge employer credibility in terms of on-the-job projects, tasks, and teams. They want:

• roles that effectively amount to paid experimentation, perhaps through the opportunity to participate in rapid prototyping projects where team members can focus on mastering a new skill or its application in a certain environment
• to attend industry events that combine seminars with networking events — providing access to the “thought leadership” and “mentoring” mentioned in the Startup Genome report
• the ability to contact and engage with other specialists outside the organization, on the organization’s time and, potentially, money.

Rather than being an after-hours, formal, institutionalized proposition, successful PD in innovative teams is holistic and always-on. Instead of tracking the team member’s achievement on the basis of grades, leaders are more likely to assess the ROI on what may be a guesstimated investment in PD by looking at individuals’ influences on company revenues and profits. And team leaders who understand these motivations can consistently attract and manage good innovators.

Image courtesy stock.xchng user madame_min.

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Tallhamn said in the blog post that the company failed to draw a lead investor “willing to commit enough capital to fill out the round with follow on investors.” His insights are an indicator of the struggles for the entire energy management sector, including potential competitors that Tallhamn used in a slide from the Cleantech Open including Ecofactor, EnergyHub, AlertMe, and Control4.

The investment community’s perspective on this space had become significantly more critical since we got started, and probably for good reasons. A lot of capital has been destroyed in Series A-Z rounds of funding by our competitors, and most investors made it clear that they’d want to see massive traction before committing capital. They were taking a “wait and see” approach.

The business of helping consumers reduce and manage energy consumption in homes and across appliances and devices is such a small market right now, there can’t be too many players going after basically non-existent revenue. OPower, which provides data analytics and software for utilities for energy bills, is one of the few companies in energy management that I know of that is doing well.

Many of the revenues right now depend on scoring utility deals, which can take months and years to implement. Though, there has also been recent attention from the telcos and consumer electronics companies in the energy management space. But as we’ve mentioned pure play energy management gadgets probably won’t be that interesting to consumers — the gadgets will have to do something else, too, like manage your media or run a home security system. Tallhamn said in his blog post: “On a micro level, the average household’s energy costs are so small ($4k on average across electricity and fuel) that any direct to consumer product aiming to reduce them needs to deliver something beyond just savings.”

Hug was taking a free approach, and looking to mine energy information, with Scoble calling Hug the “Mint of your energy bill.” The company had launched a downloadable energy management application for computers that compiled how many minutes your computer slept and basically called your attention to how much energy you were saving. That app was only a “trojan horse” into a plan to grab a greater piece of the energy management sector, and the company’s idea was to start building a user base before the smart energy devices hit the market, “so that we’d be in a great position for becoming the leading supplier of analytics and control software once they had arrived,” writes Tallhamn.

But alas, you can’t build a product without funding. Tallhamn writes:

Knowing when to push through and when to call it quits is probably one of the hardest things for an entrepreneur, and while I’ll never know for sure, I feel quite confident that this was the right decision for everyone involved.

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CumuLogic was co-founded by Sun Cloud and Startup Essentials vets Rajesh Ramchandani and Laura Ventura, and touts Java creator James Gosling and former Sun CIO Bill Vass as the leaders of its technical advisory board. According to Ramchandani, he and Ventura were inspired to create a Java PaaS after they left Oracle and started thinking about how Sun could might have expanded its cloud computing efforts into the PaaS space had Oracle not killed Sun’s cloud project upon its acquisition of the company. We’ll never know how close CumuLogic is to what Sun might have done, but the company does appear to have embraced Sun’s legacy of giving users plenty of choice and control.

CEO Sandip Gupta told me that CumuLogic is focused on legacy Java applications, of which companies have written countless numbers over the years. Instead of rewriting applications to fit new platforms and, essentially, giving up application components on which companies might have standardized over the years, CumuLogic wants to give them the flexibility to keep using those components, from application platforms to databases. Further, CumuLogic wants to give customers choice of where to host their PaaS environment by providing a software product that can be installed locally or atop an IaaS cloud. Makara, the cloud software recently acquired by Red Hat, offers the same functionality with regard to deployment, but the companies differ in terms of scope.

CumuLogic also is trying to set itself apart by retaining a degree of IT control over the environment. Gupta explained that CumuLogic gives IT administrators the ability to do things like determine application lifecycles, establish permissions and transition environments from dev-test to production — all while giving end users the self-service, automated experience they expect from a PaaS offering.

As anyone following cloud computing over the past several weeks has noticed, however, options for Java PaaS are proliferating fast.  Among the offerings now supporting Java applications are Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk, Google App Engine, VMforce, CloudBees, Makara and Windows Azure. But each product differs in terms of where they’re hosted, what frameworks and stacks they support, and whether they also support additional programming languages. Gupta thinks CumuLogic can carve out a niche serving the likely sizable population of companies, service providers and ISVs that want to support legacy Java applications in the cloud, which probably is true for the time being until customers start writing new applications in today’s popular web languages such as Ruby and PHP. If that time comes, he added, CumuLogic is willing to look at expanding its scope.

Java image courtesy of Flickr user Dominic’s pics.

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Two recent studies illustrate the issue, which to be fair, is complicated not just by handset manufacturers but by the carriers too, who have to test them, integrate their own services, then push them out to handsets. Having said that, all handset makers have to deal with the carriers, and several manufacturers are far faster than Samsung.

Take this Computerworld research from last week, for example. Motorola’s Android phones have waited 54.5 days on average for an upgrade to Android 2.2, or Froyo. HTC handsets fare just slightly worse at a wait of 56 days. And then there are Samsung phones, which on average, wait 159 days. And some are still waiting, even as Gingerbread, or Android 2.3 has launched: Samsung’s Galaxy S devices have faced a “coming next month” upgrade path each month since September of last year.

If statistical analysis of the calendar doesn’t sway you, perhaps some basic facts will. Yesterday, PC Magazine created a chart of the top Android phones, what version of Android they shipped with, and what version of Android they currently run. It’s easy to spot which handset manufacturer is behind the others: Samsung’s entire line of Galaxy S devices is behind the curve and in a big way. The jump from Android 2.1 to 2.2 is far more significant than the next jump after that; I’m running Gingerbread (2.3) currently, and aside from a little more polish and shine, most users won’t see a difference from the prior version until developers take advantage of new under-the-hood features.

Back to T-Mobile and the new Galaxy S 4G then: If the slow Android update cycle for Samsung devices is recognized by consumers, will that play a part in the success of T-Mobile’s newest handset? I posed that question to my Twitter followers this afternoon, and here are some of the responses:

@KevinCTofel For the average consumer doubtful, for android fans no doubt about it. Same way I feel about Dell.—
Sloan Bowman (@sloanb) January 20, 2011

@KevinCTofel The two things I constantly read about Samsung – cheap plastic feel & slow-to-no updates = no Samsung for me!—
bubbatex (@TheBubbaTex) January 20, 2011

@KevinCTofel It has scared me away from replacing my Nexus One with anything from Samsung.—
Sean Brady (@seanabrady) January 20, 2011

@KevinCTofel normals don't care. It will sell because of the 4g branding.—
Jason Smith (@ohpleaseno) January 20, 2011

There were other insightful tweets, but rather than list them all, here’s a summary for you: Early adopters and power users are leery of Samsung’s track record, but purchase decisions by newer smartphone owners won’t likely be impacted, which would be good news for T-Mobile by attracting more consumers to its fast HSPA+ network.

That’s a fair answer to the question, which may even be helped by T-Mobile announcing Thursday that its current Samsung Galaxy S phone, the Vibrant, will finally begin to see the Android 2.2 update starting tomorrow. Such news follows recent reports that Samsung was holding back the upgrade to gain more support dollars from U.S. carriers. Not so, said T-Mobile today to PC Mag, indicating that Samsung provided the update back in late November. It’s just taken until now for the operator to test and get its carrier-branded bits in the update.

Does Samsung’s history with Android updates have any impact on your decision to buy a Samsung smartphone on Google’s platform, or do you simply hope they’ll come through in the future?

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For those keeping track at home, that kind of revenue growth is pretty fantastic, but not terribly surprising. After all, YouTube serves more than 2 billion videos a day, including more than 100 million a day on mobile devices. And the site has very aggressively ramped up advertising over the past year, placing more ads against partner videos and those that run on mobile devices.

Pichette didn’t state revenue numbers, but doubling growth is not totally out of line with previous analyst projections. Barclay’s Capital analyst Doug Anmuth estimated that YouTube pulled in $450 million in revenues during 2009. While Anmuth’s forecast last January called for 55 percent growth, others were less conservative. Last March, Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney estimated that YouTube would generate nearly $1 billion in sales for the full year.

While doubling revenue is a plus, it’s important to note that Pichette said nothing about YouTube’s profitability. The question of when the online video site would finally turn a profit has been much debated over the past several years. Despite forecasts early last year that YouTube could become profitable in 2010, it seems that the unit — which Google paid $1.65 billion for back in 2006 — still isn’t in the black.

Coincidentally, the Google call was hosted on YouTube and suffered from some pretty dramatic stuttering and lag, which is surprising in part because it was audio-only.

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Coskata has gotten a letter of intent from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a $250 million loan guarantee to build a plant to make ethanol from woody biomass. The plant will have the capacity to make 55 million gallons per year. Coskata’s plant plans seriously stalled during the recession, and Coskata has been waiting for this loan guarantee to come through. The company is well-known for touting a $1 per gallon production price and its backers including Khosla Ventures, General Motors, and Advanced Technology Ventures.

The USDA also awarded Enerkem a conditional commitment for an $80 million loan guarantee to build a 10 million-gallon-per-year refinery for making ethanol out of municipal solid waste. Enerkem, which uses a thermochemical trash-to-syngas process, was already awarded a $50 million Department of Energy grant, and also raised funding from trash giant Waste Management, Cycle Capital, Rho Ventures, Braemar Energy Ventures and BDR Capital.

At the same time, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is awarding a $241 million loan guarantee — its first for a biofuel plant — to Diamond Green Diesel. The guarantee will help Valero build a plant in Louisiana that will make 137 million gallons of biofuel per year primarily from animal fats and used cooking oil.

The USDA said it’s not done doling out financial help to biofuel producers. It plans to announce new rules “soon” that will make more money available from the loan guarantee program, which originated from a 2008 Farm Bill.

Lining up money to build refineries has been a huge hurdle for a slew of biofuel companies in the past two years. The recession is only partly to blame. Many of these companies have encountered technical problems for converting plants and wastes into fuel. Investors once flocked to these startup companies, especially when the federal government announced goals to gradually increase the nation’s supply of renewable fuel until it hits 36 billion in 2022.

Well, hitting the goals has proven a lot more difficult. Congress initially set 100 million gallons as the 2010 target for cellulosic biofuel, but the Environmental Protection Agency cut that to 6.5 million gallons. It appears the industry might have produced less than 1 million gallons last year, reported ClimateWire, citing an estimate by a government analyst.

Just last week, reports emerged that Range Fuels, backed by venture capital firms such as Khosla Ventures, was laying off workers and shutting down its refinery in Georgia in order to tackle technical problems and raise more money. Colorado-based Range Fuels received an $80 million loan guarantee from the USDA to help fund its refinery, which began production by making methanol instead of ethanol last year.

Perhaps the USDA will see quicker success from its latest bets. Aside from Coskata and Enerkem, the agency also touted a loan guarantee conditional commitment for a $75 million loan guarantee to INEOS Bio and its partner New Planet Energy, which it first announced a few weeks ago.

INEOS Bio (which is the biofuel arm of petrochemical giant INEOS) and developer New Planet Energy say they will use the loan guarantee to build the “INEOS BioEnergy Center,” near Vero Beach, Florida, that will produce 8 million gallons of advanced biofuels and 6 MW of biomass power from plant waste and trash per year. The companies say the center will begin producing biofuels and bioenergy in 2012, and will create 175 jobs during the construction process and 50 jobs when the center is completed.

Loan guarantees are important awards for companies looking to build plants for these next-gen biofuel projects. A loan guarantee essentially is a promise by the government to back a loan if the company can’t pay it, and it enables companies to finance projects with a better interest rate and at a lower cost.

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According to Engadget, iPhone user Antoni Nygaard managed to activate the hidden multi-touch gesture features on his device using the iOS 4.3 pre-release software (as well as options to change the function of the iPhone’s mute button to a rotation lock, another iPad import). BGR also has screenshots of the gestures in action and the relevant Settings screen from a separate source. Nygaard’s demonstration of the feature in action can be seen in the video below.

Apple dampened anticipation surrounding the new gestures for iPad when it noted, alongside the release of the second beta of iOS 4.3, that these would not be included in the pubic release of the update, and were intended for testing purposes only. The gestures are even less likely to make it into a public 4.3 release on the iPhone, since they aren’t an acknowledged feature of the beta.

So why is the feature there? There are those who argue that it’s because Apple is going to get rid of the home button (that adorable one with the white rounded rectangle) in future hardware iterations of the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. It’s true that the gestures replace navigation duties normally handled by the home button, making it possible to fully use the devices without ever touching such a button. But just because it can be done, does that mean it should?

The Case For

Gestures. The presence of the gestures themselves are probably the most convincing evidence in favor of a home buttonless future for iOS devices. Why else would Apple be testing not only app switching through swipes, but also the ability to bring up the multitasking tray and to return to the home screen, both of which taken together currently make up the bulk of the home button’s duties? Feature redundancy for its own sake isn’t one of Apple’s prevailing design principles. Ever look for the physical volume knob on a Mac?

Apple Hates Buttons. The latest iPod shuffle is a rare exception, but speaking generally, Apple has a tendency to do away with physical buttons if it can get away with it. The new nano is a prime example of the culmination of Apple’s design aesthetic: a touchscreen device with a thin bezel and no buttons on its face. Its simple swipe-back navigation works fine for the nano, but is obviously too limiting for an iPhone or iPod touch. Hence the introduction of more complex multi-touch gestures on devices that allow for them, like those mentioned above.

Smaller Devices With Bigger Screens. As Kevin pointed out, Apple may start thinking about equipping the iPhone with a larger display, and soon. Four-inch and larger screens have become de rigueur on many Android devices, and while the Retina Display still gives Apple a major advantage, a bigger Retina Display would provide a bigger advantage for video and gaming enjoyment. If Apple removes the home button, it can increase screen size without adding much or any bulk to the iPhone itself.

The Case Against

Usability. As you can see from the video above, things get pretty cramped when you’re trying to use four-finger gestures on the iPhone, assuming Apple doesn’t increase the overall size of the iPhone. Even putting that aside, gestures on both the iPad and the iPhone are far from intuitive (as Jon Gruber notes), unlike a big, obvious hardware button sitting all by its lonesome on the face of the device. It’s hard to imagine Apple implementing a control scheme that requires an introductory walk-through as the default mode of getting around its mobile OS, which is the benchmark of simplicity in most other regards.

Accessibility. The home button has a very key function that probably isn’t used by most, but is important nonetheless. It can be configured to enable various accessibility options, including toggling VoiceOver, white on black, zoom modes, and having your device prompt you for a command. These are things that can’t or shouldn’t be rerouted to gestures, and that might prove confusing and awkward (read: less accessible) if attached to volume or sleep buttons.

Keeping Button Roles Clearly Defined. Apple would also have to reassign things like taking screenshots (currently done by pressing the home and sleep buttons simultaneously) and performing a hard reset (holding the home and sleep buttons simultaneously). Redirecting these functions to some combination of volume and sleep buttons would be a confusing change.

The iPod Shuffle. As mentioned, Apple went back on its buttonless iPod shuffle design after users and reviewers complained. The shuffle is a safe playground for testing new features like a buttonless interface, since consumers aren’t investing much in it and in Apple’s larger revenue picture, it represents only a very small part. It’s hard to imagine Apple taking the same chance with either the iPhone or iPad, which are revenue stars for the company and much more likely to leave a lasting bad taste in the mouth of consumers.

Home Is Where the UX Is

While Apple testing gesture controls at this juncture might indicate that the company is considering taking away the home button in future iOS devices, I think rumors of a buttonless iPhone 5 or iPad 2 are extremely premature. There’s too much at stake, and not enough potential return to justify a change like that. The home button is, in fact, at the core of why iOS devices are so easy to just pick up and use. Apple’s not going to go messing with its biggest competitive advantage and make adoption harder.

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