Leadership Defined

Positional Leadership: 

Positional leadership is ‘leadership by default’, where the holder, regardless of their actual “authority”, has been placed in a position to  influence others by the rank held over them. The main motivation of followers is fear. Fear of sanctions if they do not follow the direction of the leader. Further, this type of leadership position needs no ‘natural born leadership’ qualities, as the person was chosen, often, by outside factors.

Situational Leadership:

Drastically different from Positional Leadership, Situational Leadership leaders derives their authority from their followers - followers who want to be led. The leader’s most powerful tool is their natural leadership style, which allows them to get others to participate willingly and eagerly. There are little or no threats of sanctions and is considered the truest form of leadership styles.

John Maxwell said, “leadership is the ability to obtain followers”. In an organization, often the wrong individuals are promoted to positions of power. Because of this positional leadership, their followers grow to resent them and diminish productivity. In many cases, individuals are promoted because they excelled at a certain task - often nothing to do with leadership itself. For example, at a software firm, a programmer who completes his projects on time, sticks to a budget, arrives on time, and follows the rules, may be picked to lead the group. However, this programer, whose passion is coding software, not leading a group.

In a recent study, 80% of corporate leaders said they do not feel their skills are being used efficiently. Why is that? It is because our culture attempts to force-feed leadership qualities into individuals who have no desire to be leaders. A “promotion” is a good thing, and one would be out of their mind to decline, right? But what if that promotion came with tasks and responsibilities that made you hate your job? What if you dreaded going to work each day because you didn’t feel that you were equipped to do it properly?

A colleague, owner of a high-end fabric/textile importing shop, was sharing part of his life story. He had it made. He was making six- to seven-figures a year, had a nice house, nice car, travelled the world, met with royalty to purchase his textiles - yet he was unhappy. Every day.

Unhappiness among corporate leaders is a poison that drips from the top down. His unhappiness was reflected in the employees of his business. No longer were they happy to be at work. Like their boss, they dreaded going to work each day. Finally, it occurred to him that he got into the business because of his love for people and fabric. He did not want to lead the company, he wanted to be with the employees each day, working along side them. What did he do? He demoted himself. He hired someone else - who had natural leadership skills and the desire to lead a team. A company full of positional leaders is destined for trouble.

Rather than force-feeding skills that impact the company directly, why not focus on an employee’s strengths? Why not encourage employees to seek out training that they find interesting? Identify employee’s weaknesses and avoid putting them in a position where they will be forced to use them.

Happy employees lead to a more efficient company. Period. 

Next: Modeling The Way as a Situational Leader

rev o lu tion

rev-uh-loo-sh-uh-n

• a sudden, complete or marked change in something
• a change in direction
• a change of thinking, mindset

Some events have transpired over the last few days that has caused me to seriously reevaluate my business. It has come to my attention that staff members were making inappropriate posts to my blog, which has damaged my reputation.

Effective immediately, JacobMadison.com, Never Mind Marketing, and Market Me 2.0, will be undergoing some serious and drastic changes.

This is an excellent time to refocus my energies on my passion for business, marketing, and leadership development. Just as I have preached to hundreds of business owners, change happens from the top. This is me making a change at the top.

Certain employees, and their false moral philosophies, are no longer employed by my organization.

I am drafting a new mission statement and set of CORE Values that I will share publicly. Only then will there be transparency and accountability within my organization.

Stay tuned for much more.
-Jacob

Never Mind Marketing summary [Draft]
Jacob Madison is a business marketing expert specializing in organic marketing, specifically using today’s social networking technology to impact the exposure to your business.

Further, Jacob presents a connection between effective leadership development and successful marketing tactics. His blog, and up-coming book, “Never Mind Marketing” suggests that business owners are the ones screwing up their company’s success.

“Too many business owners are looking at the equation backwards, and can’t figure out what is wrong.” He says, “they need to stop looking in a crystal ball and start looking in a mirror.”

Jacob Madison has spoken with hundreds of business owners around the world who have captured his ideas and now share success stories.

Terms, themes, and ideas:
- Social networking marketing
- business leadership
- entrepreneur’s resource
- organic marketing

What if you could peer into the thoughts of millions of people as they were thinking those thoughts or shortly thereafter? And what if all of these thoughts were immediately available in a database that could be mined easily to tell you what people both individually and in aggregate are thinking right nowabout any imaginable subject or event? Well, then you’d have a different kind of search engine altogether. A real-time search engine. A what’s-happening-right-now search engine.

In fact, the crude beginnings of this “now” search engine already exists. It is called Twitter, and it is a big reason why new investors poured another $35 million into the two-year-old startup on Friday. Twitter is not the only company trying to solve this problem. Facebook, FriendFeed, and even Google are trying to crack it, but Twitter has a decided advantage in that it is capturing the vast majority of the real-time thought stream on the Web (because more people enter their thoughts directly into Twitter’s database than any other, and are doing so at an increasing rate).

What makes Google and other search engines so valuable is that they capture people’s intent—what they are looking for, what they desire, what they want to learn about. But they don’t do a great job at capturing what people are doing or what they are thinking about. For thoughts and events that are happening right now, searching Twitter increasingly brings up better results than searching Google.

Whether you want to know how people are mentally gearing up for this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona or what they are thinking about today’s Ireland vs. Italy rugby match, searching Twitter will give you a pretty good smattering of sentiment and opinion. It is also a lot faster at getting out the essential details about breaking news, such as the Mumbai attacks or the plane that landed on the Hudson.

Twitter’s search engine is powered by Summize, a startup it acquired last July. But it also developed a feature called Track, currently disabled but coming back soon, that allowed people to follow the mention of specified keywords. John Borthwick, an investor in Summize (and thus now an investor in Twitter), explained in a blog post earlier this month ago why he thinks that “Twitter search changes everything.” Excerpt:

Imagine you are in line waiting for coffee and you hear people chattering about a plane landing on the Hudson. You go back to your desk and search Google for plane on the Hudson — today — weeks after the event, Google is replete with results — but the DAY of the incident there was nothing on the topic to be found on Google. Yet at http://search.twitter.com the conversations are right there in front of you. The same holds for any topical issues — lipstick on pig? — for real time questions, real time branding analysis, tracking a new product launch — on pretty much any subject if you want to know whats happening now, search.twitter.com will come up with a superior result set.

. . . How is real time search different? History isn’t that relevant — relevancy is driven mostly by time. . . . This reformulation of search as navigation is, I think, a step into a very new and different future. Google.com has suddenly become the source for pages — not conversations, not the real time web. What comes next? I think context is the next hurdle. Social context and page based context. . . . Twitter search today is crude — but so was Google.com once upon a not so long time ago.

Twitter may just be a collection of inane thoughts, but in aggregate that is a valuable thing. In aggregate, what you get is a direct view into consumer sentiment, political sentiment, any kind of sentiment. For companies trying to figure out what people are thinking about their brands, searching Twitter is a good place to start. To get a sense of what I’m talking about, try searching for “iPhone,” “Zune,” or “Volvo wagon”.

Why can’t Google simply index Twitter? It does, but its search results give more weight to links than to time. It could create a new search product along the lines of Blog Search or News search that is geared more towards Micro-messaging services such as Twitter, FriendFeed, and the rest. But what it really needs to go beyond simply indexing Twitter after the fact. IVP partner, and Twitter investor, Todd Chaffee, suggests:

If they were really smart they could partner with Twitter and make Twitter their real-time feed.

Doing that would require Google to “affirm Twitter’s dominance in this category and the importance of the Twitter data stream,” contends Borthwick. But so far, Google has pretty much flubbed this opportunity to open up real-time search. It bought Twitter competitor Jaiku, only to shut it down. And now it is hoping to create a counterweight to Twitter’s growing strength in real-time data by open-sourcing Jaiku. Good luck with that one.

Listening to Twitter’s investors gives a good sense of how they think Twitter can become a game-changer in real-time search. While it is instructive, it is also important to note that much of this vision has yet to materialize. Twitter’s current search is extremely crude, as Borthwick readily admits. It simply brings up the most recent Tweets with the keyword you are looking for. There is no ranking or clustering beyond that.

An undifferentiated thought stream of the masses at some point becomes unwieldy. In order to truly mine that data, Twitter needs to figure out how to extract the common sentiments from the noise (something which Summize was originally designed to do, by the way, but it was putting the cart before the horse—you need to be able to do simple searches before you start looking for patterns). But what is the best way to rank real-time search results—by number of followers, retweets, some other variable? It is not exactly clear. But if Twitter doesn’t solve this problem, someone else will and they will make a lot of money if they do it right.

(Photo by Patrick Boury).

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

How much do you love me? Enough to send a few Valentine’s gifts and greetings on Facebook? That’s good enough for me. Even though Facebook is heavily promoting its own gifting options for sending Valentine’s Day greetings to friends, there are a lot of other applications on Facebook’s platform that will let you in on some holiday fun. In case you’re among the last minute lovers, here are the top apps (based on daily growth) for Valentine’s Day.

Send Cool Hearts

The Send Cool Hearts application is all about hearts. All the gifts available to send to friends are heart-related, from heart charm necklaces to images of burning hearts. The more gifts you send, the more gifts that are unlocked for you to then send on to more friends. You can send gifts to up to 25 friends at once, making this an easy-to-spread application that may feel a bit spammy to the recipients. But hopefully the friends you send cool hearts to will also be in the Valentine’s Day spirit.

My Valentines

The My Valentines My Valentines application is a lot like (*) Send Cool Hearts (*) but there are several more gifting options. Heart candy, a blinged out necklace, massage oil and chocolates, this app mimics the real gifting ideas associated with Valentine’s Day. Some of the gifts are locked, so you’ll need to delve into some app activity in order to earn points required for unlocking gifts. Now you can afford to send that pair of edible undies.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

The Happy Valentine’s Day! application is yet another powered by the Gift Creator. It offers a wealth of gifts to be sent to your Facebook friends. As with most gifting applications, you’ll need to send gifts in order to unlock the good stuff. So far, the Happy Valentine’s Day! app has the most animated Valentine’s Day gifts I’ve seen so far, so if you’re into bouncing, dancing hearts, this is the app for you.

Valentine’s Cards

This Valentine’s Cards application allows you to do just that–send Valentine’s Day cards. Even though this app is set up as a gifting application, the gifts are in fact card greetings. Unfortunately there’s not much variety for the cards available in this app just yet. There are four cards to start out with, and another eight that area accessible once you’ve earned enough points to unlock them. Hopefully we’ll see some additional options this time next year.

Valentine’s Gifts

Pretty self-explanatory, but this Valentine’s Gifts application is not powered by Gift Creator and appears to have a few better looking gift options. The variety is quite slim, until you earn some points an unlock more gifting options. What’s frustrating about the lack of gift options is that the activity required to unlock more gifts is reliant on a short holiday window given the fact that this is Valentine’s Day–not Christmas. The developers behind Valentine’s Gifts, however, have another application that’s not holiday specific, so I imagine that launching smaller holiday apps are good ways to redirect some traffic to other apps and push out ads as well.

Love Explosions

This Love Explosions application is a branded app launched by Lacoste. To promote a new scent called The Love of Pink, Lacoste’s application isn’t necessarily Valentine’s Day specific, but this holiday is a great opportunity to push the app across Facebook users. You can send various types of love “explosions” which are actions or items related to love. Tattoos, kisses, and fireworks are just some of the options for Love Explosions, all of which will eventually invite the sender and the recipient to try out a free sample of Lacoste’s scent.

Valentine Candy

Everyone loves candy. The Valentine Candy application lets you send the virtual version to your Facebook friends when you can’t send the real thing. Valentine Candy covers the basics, from candy hearts to jelly beans and chocolates. Too bad this app doesn’t have an option to send real gifts to real people. A girl can always dream…

Valentine Kiss

What’s better than candy on Valentine’s Day? A kiss. Pucker up with the Valentine Kiss gifting application. There’s the Brad Pitt kiss, the emo kiss, the fairy tale kiss, and even one specific to the holiday at hand. Even if it’s not Valentine’s Day, you may want to keep this application in mind the next time you’re thinking of that someone special.

Old School Valentines

Yes, yet another gifting application powered by Gift Creator, but the Old School Valentines app is still a pretty cute application if you’re at all nostalgic for the days of swapping Valentine’s Day cards in elementary school. These super cute greetings are sure to get your friends’ hearts beating with excitement, and they’re fun and different enough to stand out from the crowd.

Send Flowers

While not designated just for Valentine’s Day, this Send Flowers app is seeing a boost in traffic thanks to the romantic nature of the holiday. The price of real flowers is going up in most places around the world, as the flower importing industry is in a slump. So sending a virtual version of a bouquet may be your best bet this year. When will that smell-o-rameter become available?

Conclusion

There are plenty of Valentine’s gifting applications out there for you to select them. Interestingly enough most of them are powered by Gift Creator. Regardless of what types of applications are available, there are enough valentines going around on Facebook that you’re sure to get plenty of love on the site this year.

Times are hard. Sister breast feeding homeless guy. I am so outta here.

If you had to guess which classic novel that describes, Twitter-style, what would you bet on? (*Scroll to the bottom of the page for answer.)

Let's invade France and marry their women! And you thought Cliffs Notes were fast…

Some of us procrastinators here at CNET News (I’m talking to you, Jim Kerstetter) are having great fun with NPR host Peter Sagal’s idea of coming up with Twitter versions of classic novels, like the summation above, which Sagal wrote.

Sagal, head funnyman on the weekly news quiz Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me! went on his Twitter page and challenged others to come up with their own literary summations in 140 characters or less.

None are quite as good as Sagal’s–or as Jim’s. Kerstetter managed to come up with, like a dozen, in two minutes. He even threw in a few plays and a short story:

• I became famous to impress a chick and some old crook helped me. (Great Expectations)

• My no-good daughters are making me crazy! (King Lear)

• Lemme tell ya about the big one that got away. (The Old Man and The Sea)

• Let’s invade France and marry their women! (Henry V )

• Cold-blooded murderers are people, too! (In Cold Blood)

• I wish I brought a Band-Aid. (The Snows of Kilimanjaro)

OK readers, got anything for us?

*Answer: The Grapes of Wrath.

The economy is in trouble and we’re all cutting back on spending, unsure of what the future might hold. We’re also starting to realize that maybe doing things ourselves instead of hiring outside help is a great idea.

But if you’re someone like me, building a deck in the back yard or, heck, painting vaulted ceilings, just isn’t something you’re proficient at. But luckily for us, there are a slew of sites across the Web that provide articles and videos that can help us complete any project.

5min.com

I like 5min because I can learn about almost anything in, well, 5 minutes or less.

5min features videos from users who are experts on a particular subject. Sometimes, their expertise is buying an electric shaver. Other times, it’s installing weatherstripping. Either way, you can find anything from the simple to the complex on 5min.

Although the videos are great, my favorite feature on 5min is the company’s video player. Unlike some players that only let you play, stop, rewind, and fast-forward a clip, 5min’s video player lets you zoom in, proceed frame-by-frame, and run the video in slow motion so you don’t miss any steps. That feature comes in especially handy when you watch a video on a complex topic and the expert is moving too fast in their instruction.

eHow

eHow is a fantastic how-to site that includes both videos and articles. And although there aren’t nearly as many videos on the site as other services like 5min, eHow still provides a fine alternative for learning how to get things done.

eHow enlists the help of professionals to create the more than 300,000 articles on the site. From learning how to tie a tie, to how to caulk, the site has it all. That said, if you’re looking for video, you’re not going to find much on eHow–it’s designed to provide step-by-step text instructions. Sometimes, especially when I need to figure out how to build something like a deck, that’s ideal. But for simple topics like learning how to throw a baseball, a video works much better. In those cases, I tend to use sites like 5min or Expert Village instead.

You will be forced to sit through commercials on the company’s videos, but that’s not a big deal–they’re only 15 seconds long and run before the clip. I should also note that the site’s video player doesn’t offer all the extras like those that you’ll find with 5min, so you’ll probably find yourself moving the slider back quite often to figure out how to do something.

But video isn’t what eHow is all about. The site is ideal when you want to bring instructions with you wherever you need to complete a task. Unlike 5min or Expert Village, I don’t need to sit in front of my computer to see how to sand wood flooring when I use eHow; I can print out the instructions and read them. And on complex projects, having that option is ideal.

Expert Village

Expert Village is a little different from a service like 5min, which allows users to upload videos to display their expertise. Expert Village employs experts who work in fields ranging from music to home improvement who research particular topics and create short videos–usually no longer than five minutes–detailing how to perform a particular task.

The value of Expert Village’s use of experts is seen almost immediately. Sure, you can find a really informative video on 5min and it might provide the same quality as something on Expert Village, but generally, that’s the exception, not the norm.

According to Expert Village’s internal figures, the site features over 131,000 videos that have been viewed more than 292 million times. And given the wide range of topics those videos cover, Expert Village is an ideal source for help.

One especially nice offering that shouldn’t be overlooked is Expert Village’s series. Unlike 5min or even eHow, some Expert Village experts stay on one topic and create a series of videos to walk you through a process.

For instance, one expert is teaching Chinese etiquette. Obviously, teaching how to behave in China won’t work in one video, so he broke his instruction down into multiple videos and created a complete guide to behaving the right way in the country. It may take more time to learn with multiple shows rather than one five-minute video giving an overview of Chinese etiquette, but in the end, it provides much more value. And that’s something that should always be kept in mind when you want to decide between Expert Village and another video how-to site: will the alternative provide as much information and insight as Expert Village? Based on my testing, I doubt it.

Howcast

Much like 5min, Howcast brings how-to videos to you through the help of user-generated content in a professional setting. In other words, Howcast allows users to upload video, but it doesn’t want it to be done with a Webcam in low-quality. Instead, the company provides users with an opportunity to create professional-grade how-to videos, and in turn, receive a portion of the advertising revenue that might be generated from those videos.

Most of the clips on Howcast are informative, but you’ll notice on many of the site’s videos that they use actors and more entertainment to try to teach you something. Sometimes, I found that appealing–especially on simple topics–but on those topics that are more complicated, like learning how to work on projects around the house, it tends to be a distraction.

Howcast also features a “Wiki Guides” section, which contains how-to articles that can be modified by its users. As much as I like how-to articles, I’m not convinced that the site’s Wiki Guides are that valuable, since anyone can change anything at any time. I can’t help but question their accuracy because of that.

Howcast’s video player is second to none. The player features chapters so you can quickly find step-by-step instructions on each video and much like 5min, you can zoom into the video or slow it down to a crawl so you see every detail.

Instructables

Instructables rebuffs the videos you’d find on other prominent how-to sites and sticks to the basics: text and photos. It may sound simplistic and you might prefer video, but for me, Instructables’ simplicity is welcome on a complicated project.

Instructables enlists the help of the community to provide its content. Users share everything from instructions on how to make white bread to building a garbage composter. The site has it all.

One of the best sections of Instructables is its forums page. There, users can ask questions, request help, or have a conversation on topics ranging from video games to home and garden. More often than not, if I can’t find something in the main section of the site, Instructables’ forums will answer a question I might have.

Instructables isn’t for everyone, though. It won’t offer the entertainment Howcast does and you’re relying on the expertise of users who may or may not work in a particular field. But if you can get past that, I think you’ll find that Instructables offers a wealth of knowledge that shouldn’t be overlooked when you’re learning how to complete obscure or complicated projects.

Facebook has just updated their statistics page which now reports they have 175 million users. This means Facebook has increased its new user acquisition rate from 450,000 users a day to over 480,000 users a day. As Facebook expands, it continues to increase its growth rate suggesting that the company will easily surpass 300 million by the end of the year if everything goes well.

Facebook’s growth rate has been increasing domestically as well as abroad. While some countries have experienced slower growth then others, it’s impressive to see the company continuing to perform so well as the largest global social network. Twitter in contrast, which has been receiving a ton of buzz today from their new $30 million financing round, is growing at a rapid rate but has less than 10 million users.

Facebook has been able to reach extremely high saturation levels in their top countries like Iceland where over 41 percent of the country’s population is now on Facebook. The United States in contrast has has a market saturation of around 14 percent suggesting a huge opportunity for domestic growth.
We will continue to track the growth of Facebook via this blog, and you can also keep tabs on their growth as well through our Facebook demographics tool.

Have you been receiving a lot more friend requests lately? Do you think the “25 things about me” thread on Facebook has helped push the company’s growth rate higher?

Until now Facebook’s Pages product had not been affected by the profile redesign. Apparently that all is about to change. According to a few brand managers that I’ve spoken to, Facebook is working on converting the fan page design to mimic the the new profile design. What’s the result? Most significantly is that applications have now been relegated to a “Boxes” tab or a custom tab.

There is also a publisher just like on existing profiles except that there is no down arrow for publisher attachments (as pictured above). There has been an ongoing discussion about fan pages versus groups. For brands, fan pages often make a lot more sense for a couple reasons, one of which is the robust customization opportunities with integrated applications, and the second is that they tie directly into Facebook’s social ads.

While applications can still be implemented, it will no longer command the same type of presence that it previously could. To counter this, Facebook is telling developers that they can use a unique URL which directs users to the application tab within a fan page. The updated pages which will be rolled out at the end of the month will go live for all pages, not just those willing to pay the estimated $5 CPM on homepage engagement ads. With a minimum budget of $10,000 to $20,000, engagement ads are often times too expensive for most brands.

As such, many agencies have been suggesting to brands that they pay for the significantly reduced Facebook ads that are placed on the right hand side of all pages aside from a user’s homepage. For most companies I think traditional Facebook ads are a better deal but many large brands want to promote on the Facebook homepage, especially since it can instantly drive a lot of new fans.

More Virality

The updated pages will have more viral features then before. The primary source of promotion through the social graph will be through news feed stories. Previously, the only stories that were published were when users became new fans of a brand. Now, fan page activities including the creation of events and the publishing of discussion topics will be included in each user’s custom news feed algorithm.

So far it appears that Facebook will be reserving the publishing of status updates and feed stories to the primary news feed for those brands that choose to purchase engagement ads. This update appears to present a huge opportunity for premium fan pages in that they will be treated as a user’s friend when determining what feed stories to publish.

New Emphasis on Discussions

Facebook Pages previously included a discussion thread but in the redesign, they will have a greater presence including a “Discusisons” tab (as pictured above) and a link that says “Start New…” for creating a new discussion topic. Also interestingly, comments can be published by users on status updates and other posted items which means brands will most likely need someone to monitor comments.

Many brands previously requested that page mangers turn of page walls because they wanted to avoid spam comments or any sort of negative postings. As far as we know, brands don’t have the option to turn off comments currently. We’ll be sure to update this post if Facebook tells us something different.

Will Brands Be Caught Off Guard?

It sounds as though the change will happen without prior notification to many brands. The only participants in the alpha phase are those brands that have paid for engagements ads. Other brands will simply have an updated version of their page when it’s officially rolled out later this month. I would hope that Facebook would go through a beta phase during which brands can update their page as needed but as of now, it doesn’t appear that will be the case. We are currently trying to confirm this with Facebook and will report back any updates.

Do you think this updated pages product is a good thing? Do you like the existing features within Facebook pages? What would you like to see improved?

Google is coming a bit closer to releasing a working version of its Chrome browser for Mac.

Programmers for the company had been building an engine that could render Web pages, but it only ran within a simple framework called the test shell. Now they’ve begun hooking up the renderer to a full-fledged browser, which among other things can handle multiple tasks at the same time. That’s key for a real application, especially one such as Chrome that isolates each browser tab into its own computing process.

The result of the work: a screenshot of Chrome running on Mac OS X posted to the Chromium developer mailing list. “Now we can call it Chrome!” crowed programmer Avi Drissman wrote.

Granted, it’s a view of Chrome failing to properly show a Web page, but it’s a step in the functional direction. Google has set a deadline of shipping Chrome for the Mac and Linux by end of June.

It may not look good, but this screenshot actually marks progress in getting Chrome to run on the Mac. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Avi Drissman/Google)

Moving Chrome from its initial incarnation as a Windows application to Mac OS X and Linux hasn’t been easy. Ben Goodger, a Firefox programmer who now leads Chrome’s interface work, griped about the difficult balance between preserving Chrome software across multiple operating systems while coping with the different abilities of each.

Google chose to split some of the Chrome interface into a Mac OS X-specific incarnation, despite the maintenance difficulties that imposes, but the choice isn’t as easy when wrestling with Linux’s interface, he said in a January message.

Goodger said that after some teeth-gnashing, Google eventually decided to create the Linux version of Chrome using the GTK package of graphical interface components used with the GNOME user interface.

“My initial thought was that a Windows-clone would be acceptable on Linux provided the performance of the app itself was outstanding, given the general reluctance of some of the team working on Linux towards UI (user interface). But they stood up and made their case for a GTK UI,” Goodger said in a February 4 message, “and…that’s what we’ve decided to do.”

Last week’s update to the T-Mobile G1, which included the handy voice search among other things, apparently also laid the foundation for the real pay app push, which should be starting this coming week — perhaps to give a chance for developers to debut during the supreme madness of the Mobile World Congress season.

European Android-lovers will have to wait a little longer, however.