The legislation would also create an entrepreneur’s visa to allow people who start new businesses and create jobs to remain in the country.

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Six years ago this month, I revealed in Businessweek that Apple had incorporated in Nevada where the corporate tax rate is zero. So I found the Times’ account — written by Charles Duhigg and David Kocieniewski, about the many financial tricks that Apple employs to minimize its tax exposure — to contain a lot of old news, but also some new, fascinating details. Who couldn’t love a phrase like “Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich” to describe arcane accounting and legal tricks?

But the implication the story leaves a reader with — that Apple is somehow doing society a disservice by not paying its fair share of corporate taxes — is simply wrong on many levels. The most dubious of the lines that the Times attempts to draw is between Apple and the budget crisis at De Anza College, a Cupertino community college where Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was once a student. The college is facing a “death spiral” because of a decline in funding from the state. This funding, the reader is led to conclude, would be more plentiful if corporations like Apple were to step up and pay, and not escape the tax bill by setting up an office in neighboring Nevada.

What the Times fails to make clear is how community colleges are funded in California. The picture is much more complicated. California community colleges draw the majority of their funding from the state’s general fund — which is drawn directly from the state’s personal and corporate income taxes — and from local property taxes collected by counties. As of the 2009-2010 budget cycle, these two buckets made up about 88 percent of the system’s funding. State lottery funds, federal funds and student fees made up the remainder.

Tax policy wonks — which I’m not — will remember that California was the birthplace of the property tax revolt movement in the 1970s. In 1978, California voters overwhelmingly approved a measure that limits the amount by which property taxes can increase each year. Since then, at least one estimate pegs the amount that the state’s taxpayers have avoided paying at north of half a trillion dollars as of 2009. In February, the property tax shortfall facing the state community-college system was $41 million. Conclusion: If there is to be blame for the shortage of taxpayer funding at De Anza College, a healthy portion of it should be laid at the door of California’s own voters and taxpayers, who in 1978 thought that property-tax limitations were a good idea.

I had a few other problems with the story. Take sales taxes. When you buy a Mac in New York, you pay a sales tax of 8.875 percent. For a base-level iMac, priced at $1,199, that works out to more than $106 in taxes. While some states charge no sales tax — Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon — the average sales tax in the U.S. works out to 9.6 percent.

Putting aside the fact that the average sales tax in Canada is higher, let’s assume that Apple’s North American sales of $38.3 billion in its fiscal 2011 were taxed at that rate, and do the math: We get $3.7 billion in sales taxes paid into the coffers of states and municipalities, except in those five states that have no such tax. That amounts to more than 1.5 times the $2.4 billion the Times says Apple would have owed the federal government. Factor in VAT and other similar taxes in the U.K. and throughout Europe, and you get the idea that Apple is generating tax revenue aplenty on the sale of its goods. Yes, those taxes are passed on to customers. But isn’t that the case with every tax a corporation making consumer products pays?

Finally, you may remember that earlier this year Apple released an extensive report on the number of jobs it had created and supported both through direct employment and in the orbit of the products it creates. It seemed an odd thing for Apple to release at the time, and now we know why: It reads almost like it was prepared by Apple in advance, knowing this story was in the pipeline at the Times. The final number, by its reckoning: 514,000 U.S. jobs are created by the Apple universe, including 47,000 employees; 210,000 jobs were created as part of the app economy, which didn’t even exist until 2008.

Assuming that each of those jobs pays a salary north of $35,350 a year, taxes collected on that income could range anywhere from 25 percent to 35 percent, depending on the income bracket. And that’s before accounting for any stock-based compensation.

At this point, the discussion turns to a deeper question: Is it better for society to have a company pay more in taxes, or to create more jobs? You can argue that had Apple not taken advantage of the various strategies it employed to pay less taxes, it might not have flourished as well as it has, and thus created fewer jobs. But people smarter than I will likely hash out the finer points of this argument in the coming days.

(Image is a screen grab from this silly Beatles cartoon built around the group’s song “Taxman.”)

The cuts could run through the two fiscal years until March 2014, although the final timing has not been settled, the people said.

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The Cupertino, Calif., company said it will add 3,600 jobs in the next 10 years to its existing work force of 3,500 employees there. Apple said the move is part of a rapid expansion from 1,000 employees in 2004.

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Nobody at Apple is running for U.S. president at the moment, but that doesn’t mean the company can’t brag about how many American jobs it has created. In addition to 47,000 jobs at Apple, the largest portion of that figure is an estimated 257,000 jobs supported by Apple at companies like Corning and FedEx. That includes the people who deliver and build Apple products and components, professional and technical services, and healthcare. The estimate comes from a standardized “employment multiplier” applied to Apple’s spending by an outside firm called Analysis Group.

And then added to that, Apple said 210,000 iOS-related jobs have been created since 2007, funded by $4 billion in royalties paid to date. The iOS number piggybacks on recent research by TechNet.

For comparison — sort of, given that it was a totally different study sponsored by Facebook — last September, the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business found that Facebook’s own app economy had created 182,000 new U.S. jobs in the previous year.

As for Apple’s workforce, of the company’s 47,000 jobs in the U.S., 19,500 were added since 2008, the company said. Apple noted that its call centers are in the U.S., and its retail employees are mostly full-time.

The first was last year in Hillsboro, Oregon, and during the visit, Intel CEO Paul Otellini announced that the new chip plant, or “fab” as they’re usually called, would be built in Arizona.

The main reason that Obama loves Intel is that it’s an example of the kind of manufacturing work that he’d like to see more of in America. As such, the sight of Intel spending $5 billion to build a new plant and adding 4,000 jobs is the sort of thing that any president would like to stand close to, especially at the onset of what looks to be a tough re-election campaign. It’s also one of those rare companies that’s riding high despite an uncertain global economy.

One thing Obama certainly didn’t mention was that Intel added plants in Israel and China in the last year as well. He’s also in no hurry to remind the audience that the chips that Intel makes will be shipped to China and inserted into computers and servers, many of which will be shipped into the United States.

We also learned this week from the New York Times, Obama seemed vaguely baffled by the notion that Apple’s iPhone is manufactured in China, and in a meeting in Silicon Valley last year asked Apple CEO Steve Jobs why they couldn’t be made in the U.S. Jobs’s answer, which is correct: Those jobs aren’t coming back. David Ricardo’s law of Comparative Advantage strikes again.

Anyway, the only video of the full speech that I’ve found came from the local TV station, ABC15, and thankfully they have made it embeddable.

In his remarks, the president is impressed both with the grand scale of things involved in building chips — he remembers seeing an electron microscope at Intel’s plant in Oregon that was powerful enough to display atoms, which is certainly impressive. In Chandler he’s impressed with what he says is the world’s largest land-based crane, which is being used in the construction effort. Enjoy the speech.

(Image is a screen grab from earlier in the video.)

And yet we use them all the time — in our LinkedIn profiles, at least.

The social-networking-for-job-searching company analyzed 135 million professional profiles on its Web site and came up with a list of the Top 10 buzzwords used in LinkedIn profiles across the U.S.

The No. 1 word used: “creative” (which sort of reminds me of this smartphone video ad).

Other words on the LinkedIn list, which can be found here, include “effective,” “motivated” and “dynamic.”

Outside of the U.S., those located north of the equator were likely to use (or overuse) “creative”; people in the Southern Hemisphere were “multinational” and focused on “problem-solving” and their “track record.”

Many of the same buzzwords appeared on last year’s list, which LinkedIn says was one of its most popular analyses of the year. 2010 was the year we were all touting our “extensive experience,” which came in at No. 1.

Oh, and we’ve all gotten a little slower, too, or maybe our work environments have: “Fast-paced,” which ranked No. 8 in last year’s most-overused list, doesn’t appear on the 2011 list.

Let’s dial it back a little bit on buzzwords, though, as they’re not all fun and semantics: Some recruiters and consultants say buzzwords in resumes are too vague, or worse yet, just plain annoying, while others suggest they could actually lose companies money.

But if you’re still looking to facilitate or ramp up your buzzword usage in the new year, you may want to try this buzzword generator, courtesy of Robie the Robot.

Image via of Roman Schvets/Flickr

Nokia Siemens, a joint venture between Finland’s Nokia Corp. and Germany’s Siemens AG, had 74,000 employees on Nov. 1.

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Oracle instead used foreign profits it brought back to the U.S. at a lower tax rate to acquire two companies and halve the work force at one of those firms, Mr. Levin told reporters Tuesday, one day after the Democratic staff of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a critical investigation of the 2004 repatriation tax holiday. Mr. Levin is the chairman of the subcommittee.

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Arriving at Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum, in the heart of the tech industry, with the leader of the free world talking jobs and digital, you might expect fantastic wireless access.

You might, but not so much if you are a “local” reporter and can’t jack into the extra-secret-special wireless link the national White House press corps apparently has reserved for itself. (They also get a lovely noshing buffet, whilst we tech reporters have been instructed not to touch the pineapple and scones or else!)

Famished for coffee and carbs, we’re left with glomming onto the museum’s slowish wireless service — there are lotsa geeks here today jamming up the lines — and every now and then getting some juice from Google. The search giant blankets the Mountain View, Calif. area near its HQ with free Wi-Fi, but it fades in and out.

I am now reconsidering the antitrust investigations that the Obama administration is conducting against Google, as long as its signal is good enough to check Twitter.

So this liveblog of President Barack Obama’s LinkedIn Town Hall — which will center on jobs and is titled, “Putting America Back to Work” — could be glacial with not much news, much like what I am expecting from the event itself.

I’d certainly like to work, as long as the wireless does! (Plus, limited power outlets in the room, so it’s every reporter for herself!)

But bygones, while we await the Prez!

10:18 am: One thing that made me flee Washington, D.C., when I worked for the Washington Post, was all the rigmarole that surrounded the appearance of and access to politicians.

I get it, the security and all, and am all for it on a general safety level. But, no matter how you slice it, it hinders any kind of movement or genuine interaction, like being stuck at a really dull opera. All the world’s a stage and we are all merely waiting in traffic.

In contrast, and one of the joys of Silicon Valley, is that anyone can get up right up into the grill of the various billionaire potentates littering the landscape, engage in a debate and get a possibly real answer.

Thus, I am hoping for a lot here from LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who is going to moderate the hour-long session with the President.

By the way, while he is busy running the business-focused social networking site, Weiner is looking good in a fancy suit, almost as if he could be Secretary of the Internet. I’d vote for him.

10:28 am: Some painless but hip music is playing now, as we wait, wait, wait for Obama, who is set to begin in 30 minutes.

I wonder if the President is ever early. Wouldn’t that freak the peeps out?

(Obviously, I am bored, so I shall now go monitor Twitter to catch up on the latest in the new bad-marriage-or-not cat fight between Brad Pitt and his ex, Jennifer Aniston — as if we need him to tell us Angelina Jolie is more interesting. Frankly, Angie’s midday snack is more interesting than Jen.)

There is now what appears to be a Secret Service dude next to me, giving me a hairy eyeball. If I am jailed over my wireless protest, please give generously to my defense fund.

Free the Internet! Free the Internet!

10:35 am: Finally, the production guy is up giving out the rules. Turn off the cellphones, no making noise.

The head Secret Service guy then takes the stage. No getting out of your seat. No sudden movements. And no crossing the blue line in the front row.

“All joking aside,” he says, he will take you down. He also notes that if the President moves toward you to shake your hand, “do not move toward him.”

I love Secret Service agents — especially when played by Clint Eastwood — and wish I had one to give a few people in tech a little smackadoo on my behalf. And not only if they moved toward me!

10:47 am: This little frisson of excitement is followed by more waiting, as the final seats are filled up in the room, which is an unusually (and welcome) multi-racial and gender-balanced crowd for Silicon Valley.

Various White House aides skitter back and forth like nervous ground squirrels — I would imagine their life is one big effort to avoid any gaffe — so the Prez must be near.

I am actually looking forward to seeing him, as I never have in person and am looking forward to seeing the famous Obama charm and techie cred.

Indeed, he is probably the most fast-forward tech president there has ever been. That said, buffeted by more serious issues facing the nation, his administration has delivered on few — by which I mean none — of its promises around the digitization of the U.S.

Our high-speed broadband, for example, is still woefully slow, inordinately expensive and not easily available nationwide.

And I will not even go into the need for increased focus on math and science education or the importance of our broken visa policies.

But the topic today is jobs, which is an arena where Silicon Valley and tech shines in the U.S., even as manufacturing of it has mostly moved overseas. How tech can help improve in the creation of jobs will be issue No. 1 here.

10:55 am: Total silence with five minutes to go. I need the President around to quiet my kids.

Now, LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman comes in, so the event is probably about to begin.

And, indeed, Weiner emerges to cheers, to give a little speech on “changing the way we work … and connecting talent to opportunity.”

11:01 am: Then, the session starts right on time with President Obama.

He begins with a rote speech on jobs, which is nonetheless the most important issue he faces going into next year’s election.

11:14 am: Ah, wireless glitch! Back!

President Obama is inexplicably in the middle of a Medicare question, which gives him an opportunity to talk about the need for the rich to pay more taxes.

And pass his American Jobs Act, of course.

11:17 am: More on proposing legislation for retraining workers, such as the questioner’s mom.

Now to a group of email questions. The first is about when small businesses are going to get a break from onerous regulations and taxes.

President Obama says since he has been in office, he has cut taxes 16 times for those who create a business.

But he is not going to apologize for some regulations, such as those for the financial industry over the mortgage crisis.

“There are some regulations that have outlived their usefulness,” he says, but others not so much.

11:24 am: The next question is from a Chicago IT employee. Except she is not employed.

She is asking a question about keeping her skills up and what programs are needed.

“The best thing we can do for you is that the unemployment rate goes down,” said President Obama, but also adds that making it easy to go to school while waiting on a job is also important.

“Just looking at you, I can tell you are going to do great,” he tells her in an awkward effort at reassurance.

Thanks, Barack, but she needs a job!

11:28 am: A veteran is asking a question about transitioning out of the military.

Obama launches into a story of a medical technician who faced all kinds of experiences, but had to start over again with new classes when out of the military. He suggests some level of credentialing based on experience.

11:33 am: Obama gets to pick out someone from the crowd and manages to pick out a dude who is a former Googler — although he only says that he works down the street — and is out of work by choice.

He asks: “Will you please raise my taxes?

A plant? I wish!

President Obama asks the name of the start-up. “A search engine,” says the ex-Googler-in-disguise, who is Doug Edwards, an early marketing exec there who actually wrote a book on being an ex-Googler.

“That worked out well for you,” kids President Obama.

Everyone likes a rich-guy joke!

He is soon onto the idea that we’re all dang lucky and declares he does not want it to turn the debate over taxes into a rich-poor war.

Bottom line, he notes that we have to raise taxes on the very wealthy. Frankly, if we raised taxes on a bunch of folks in this room, it would help a lot.

11:42 am: A teach-training question, especially math and science teachers.

President Obama is all for it.

He is meaning well here, but all he seems to offer is a lot of bromides about the importance of education and errant related anecdotes.

Like one from IBM, where the company hires the kids in the program at the end.

President Obama wants students to see a direct connection between learning and jobs.

Then, he kind of says it again. Gosh, he can talk. How does the well-fed and wirelessly connected White House press corp take it? Lotsa donuts, I would imagine.

President Obama also wants us to turn off the electronics and video games for kids, too, thereby instantly losing the votes of my two sons!

Another laid-off guy is up at the mic. He had 22 years in IT management and is disheartened.

He wants a statement of encouragement from the CEO of America.

President Obama assures him that his track record of success gives him a leg up, but that the problem is the economy and the global meltdown, too.

It’s systemic, apparently.

“The problem is not you, the problem is the economy as a whole,” says President Obama.

That was the last question. Weiner, who has been sitting quietly (I know it was hard, Jeff, but good job), thanks the President and tells him that this is a big issue.

President does his thanks, too, for being able to speak, although not really that much was actually said.

And then a genuine moment, finally, of clarity.

“Look, we’re going through a very tough time, but we have gone through tougher times before,” he says. “But the trajectory we are going on is one that is more open, more linked …”

He talks about the need for being ready to take advantage of that opportunity.

“Things have gotten so ideologically driven, putting party above country,” he adds, that nothing is getting done. That’s why the people, the voters, have to demand leadership from their elected officials.

Or, presumably, fire them and let them try to find another job, too.

It might turn out to be the best idea yet, if these pols don’t agree on something and quick.

The bill pushes back by a year the time when Amazon and other Internet retailers would have to start collecting sales tax in California. It now says they have to start collecting the tax in the state by September 2012, but only if Congress fails to act on a federal online sales-tax measure. In exchange, Amazon has agreed to create at least 10,000 full-time jobs in the state and hire 25,000 seasonal employees by the end of 2015.

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Well, Mr. and Ms. Entrepreneur, your friends at IBM are thinking of you today. Big Blue will today announce the availability of $1 billion in new financing options specifically aimed at small and medium businesses to pay for purchases of new tech hardware, software and services.

Now before you roll your eyes, harrumph, and restrain yourself from saying “Who cares about small and medium businesses anyway?” allow me to answer: You do. In the U.S., small businesses account for a huge swath of the economy, accounting for about two-thirds of new jobs created over the last 15 years, and they hired 40 percent of high-tech workers. They also employ roughly 90 percent of the workforce of the entire world.

And get this: According to IBM, the total amount spent on technology each year by small and medium businesses — IBM defines them as having fewer than 1,000 employees — amounts to a quarter of a trillion dollars.

Compared to that, well, a billion is a little slice. But when credit is hard to get from ever-more-cautious banks in a tough economy, CIOs will see it as a welcome move. Half of small businesses crash and burn within five years because they can’t get access to capital.

Not only is IBM making the cash available but it is making it easy to get. Most of IBM’s small and medium business customers interact with Big Blue not directly, but through business partners — third parties like CDW and Ingram Micro — who sell IBM gear and do the heavy lifting associated with getting different bits of hardware and software working right. They also tend not to have huge IT departments as larger companies do, says Andy Monshaw, the general manager of IBM Midmarket Business. “It’s a really fragmented market with literally thousands of local players,” he says. “It’s a market based on long-term local relationships.”

Entrepreneurs are running up against expectations of the so-called “consumerization of IT.” They have easy-to-use technology at home, but the stuff at the office is older and not cutting it. One big thing these companies are looking at is cloud computing. An IBM survey found that 60 percent of them are shopping around for cloud services. That got the attention of IBM’s Global Financing unit, which helps customers pay for new gear and services in much the same way that car dealers help people buy cars — by providing attractive financing packages.

On top of that, IBM has come up with a long list of products and services that are priced in ways that make sense to smaller companies — stuff that gets charged on a per-user or consumption basis. IBM has hacked together a list of products and services to fit with the effort, including cloud services, analytics and security, as well as products from recent acquisitions like Netezza, Cognos and Cast Iron.

Certainly there’s a lot of hand-wringing going on, especially in the U.S., about what it will take to get the economy creating jobs again. In fact, the president of the United States is going to talk about that very subject in an address to Congress and the nation tonight. And a survey done by Pepperdine University and Dun & Bradstreet found that 35 percent of small business owners say their biggest impediment to hiring more workers is access to capital.

The carrier also said it will promise that no U.S. call center jobs will be lost when the deal closes. The company didn’t say where the new jobs will be based.

“At a time when many Americans are struggling and our economy faces significant challenges, we’re pleased that the T-Mobile merger allows us to bring 5,000 jobs back to the United States and significantly increase our investment here,” AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said in a statement.

Of course, critics are sure to note that there’s nothing stopping AT&T from bringing back jobs without buying T-Mobile.

The deal, which is being opposed by Sprint and a number of consumer groups, requires approval from the Federal Communications Commission and Department of Justice.

Facebook’s use as a job-recruitment tool remains small, but its appeal may be growing. Some recruiters say they have all but eliminated their spending on job boards, which can charge a few hundred dollars per job posting, depending on volume. Others note that while LinkedIn contains a more comprehensive résumé database, candidates tend to value referrals from their connections on Facebook more.

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Pretty much like the market for smartphones themselves.

A new survey from Freelancer.com, culled from data on more than 100,000 jobs placed on the outsourcing marketplace in the second quarter, reveals the market for smartphone development jobs to be as robust as you’d imagine. It grew 12 percent from the first quarter of 2011 to the second, driven by a surge in Android- and iPhone-related employment opportunities.

iPhone dev jobs rose nine percent to 2985 from 2739 in the same period; iPad-related jobs saw an 11 percent increase, climbing to 1305 from 1174. Meanwhile, jobs for Android developers spiked 20 percent, rising to 1702 jobs in the second quarter from 1419 in the first. If that growth rate persists, says Freelancer.com CEO Matt Barrie, Android job opportunities could soon surpass those of the iPhone. “If this continues, Android will overtake the iPhone by the end of 2012,” he told AllThingsD. “Of course, with Apple imminently releasing the iPhone 5, Apple app development might pick up in the near future.”

Sadly for Research In Motion, BlackBerry development jobs didn’t see anywhere near the growth enjoyed by its rivals. In fact, it declined seven percent, falling to 497 from 526. Surprising, considering the launch of the PlayBook tablet occurred in the same quarter. No wonder there’s such a paucity of apps in the BlackBerry App World. If the PlayBook has juiced developer interest in BlackBerry apps, it’s certainly not evident in these metrics.

“The mobile space has become a two-horse race between Apple and Google,” Barrie said. “No other vendor is in the race. BlackBerry’s days are over, dropping six percent to 497, in the face of releasing the Playbook.”

And the Nokia-Microsoft alliance? What about that?

Barely a blip on Freelancer.com’s radar. Evidently job figures there are so low, they’re hardly worth mentioning. Said Barrie, “Nokia’s Symbian and Windows mobile continue to slide into oblivion, dropping to double-digit projects at double-digit rates. From our data, it seems that the Microsoft/Nokia partnership will be a disaster — we note that development for all Microsoft products (desktop, server, etc.) is dropping rapidly. Microsoft jumped the shark some time ago, and Nokia is a shipwreck.”

Freelancer.com’s Fast 50 data in full, below (click to enlarge):

The online retailing giant said last week that it would close its center in Irving due to a dispute with the state comptroller, who is demanding that Amazon pay $269 million in sales taxes it should have collected on goods sold to Texas residents.

Comptroller Susan Combs, a Republican, said she was disappointed to see the facility’s 119 jobs go, but her duty was to collect.

That position had caused discomfort for Gov. Rick Perry, who promotes his policies as job-creating. In a rare public disagreement with a fellow Republican, he said Ms. Combs made the wrong call.

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Those are hard questions to answer, especially online. The best LinkedIn has to offer are résumés and recommendations, usually written at the request of the user. But a new company called Mixtent, built on top of LinkedIn, aims to solicit simple feedback about people to understand how they fit into the network of potential employees.

Mixtent brings up two people in a user’s LinkedIn network and asks a question–for instance, “Who is a better product manager?” It asks users to repeat these comparisons again and again in order to build leaderboards of talent in different categories. Mixtent CEO Jonathan Gheller calls this a “game-like approach to capturing data.”

That simple act of brutal comparison is familiar on the Web, dating at least back to the seminal product HotorNot (which showed pictures of two people and asked, “Who is hotter?”). The HotorNot model was also part of the genesis for Facebook, through an earlier Mark Zuckerberg project called Facemash (which compared the looks of Harvard students). More recently, another corporate/social start-up called Cubeduel launched a very similar site for users to rank their coworkers.

But what Mixtent wants to do is build these tiny acts of ranking–which in my experience feel somewhat mean, but Gheller promises are completely anonymized–into a collective intelligence network that can algorithmically compare people’s abilities. The company will then sell analytic products to companies so they can better understand their employees and potential hires.

There are a ton of start-ups tackling the social side of corporate recruiting and similar topics; call them the LinkedIn 2.0s.

Gheller says of the competition, “This is a big and obvious space to fix, but we’re trying to solve a narrow problem (how we qualify people) that we’re hoping will be big.”

Mixtent is only five months old, angel-funded and based in Redwood City, Calif. Gheller had previously built a start-up called FashMatch, a somewhat similar collective intelligence platform for creating clothing outfits. He sold FashMatch to Like.com, which was bought by Google last August for $100 million.

“We grew in a tough time and added people in a really challenging environment,” said Mike Klayko, Chief Executive of Brocade, which increased revenue seven percent to $2.1 billion in its fiscal year ended in late October. He added that Brocade currently has another 325 open jobs in Silicon Valley. “We’re interviewing all the time,” he said.

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One big surprise: The job market with the strongest growth in tech jobs–with a net gain of 900–was Oklahoma City. Don’t pack up the U-Haul just yet. Yes, it added the most technology jobs of the 60 cities in the survey, but it also had one of the smallest overall tech job pools, accounting for only 18,000 jobs, ranking 57th of the 60.

The New York statistical area, which includes New York City, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, had the largest pool of tech jobs at 317,000. It lost 8,700 jobs during the survey period, which as we all know was during the worst throes of the recession and the catastrophe that struck the data-driven financial industry. Fifty-three out of 60 cities saw job losses. Nationally, the group found that the tech industry lost about a quarter million jobs in 2009.

Statistically, the TechAmerica report considers San Francisco, Oakland and the San Jose areas as separate. But if you added them all together, tech jobs would outnumber New York at 394,000. San Jose led the nation in tech pay, at an average of $132,100 per year, and not surprisingly had the highest concentration of tech jobs as a percentage of the workforce: One job in three is tech-related.

The only markets to see job growth aside from Oklahoma City were places like Huntsville, Ala., and San Diego. You can take a look and see how different cities fared here.

Facebook will get $1.4 million in incentives from Rutherford County plus an economic development grant that could top out at $10 million if it meets certain goals. Construction will provide about 250 jobs for 18 months or so. Once up and running, the data center will employ 42 people.

Facebook’s is the latest of several high-profile data center efforts located in North Carolina. Google opened its data center in Lenoir back in 2008. And as I reported here last month, Apple is considering doubling the size of its Maiden data center operations.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Apple Owns Another 70 Acres Near NC Data Center
• Was Apple Planning on Doubling Its North Carolina Data Center All Along?
• Apple Reaching for the Cloud With MacBook Air and N.C. Data Center

Participation in the program is free and voluntary for companies, which would need to set up company profile pages and add products to be reviewed before users could leave a recommendation. The program has some 30 participating companies at launch, including JetBlue, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Microsoft Corp. and Harvard Business School Executive Education.

Participating companies will be able to review the recommendations, respond to them, and possibly delete frivolous ones, LinkedIn said.

The closely held company has in recent months been adding new functionality to its website to become a hub for the information that professionals need to do their jobs. “A big part of what we’re working to do is becoming the essential source of information for our membership,” said LinkedIn Chief Executive Officer Jeff Weiner.

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Sorry, prospective job seekers of America, but as it turns out there’s no use winging those resumes to Hangzhou. It appears that Wei actually meant that Alibaba.com believes its online trade platform–which links smaller manufacturers, usually in China, with interested buyers, usually abroad–will create 100,000 jobs indirectly through the commercial opportunities it creates as it expands. Alibaba.com isn’t planning to actually hire 100,000 U.S. workers, in California or any other state.

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HP today said it will reduce its employee roster by 3,000, or one percent of its workforce, over the next few years. Nine thousand workers will lose their jobs, with 6,000 new staff to be hired in the same period.

Evidently, the completion of HP’s integration with EDS, which it bought in 2008 for nearly $14 billion, has made the move necessary. And the continuing automation of the company’s computer services business has made it possible.

“We think the next 5 to 10 years will be all about automation,” Ann Livermore, Executive VP of HP’s enterprise business said during a conference call about the ugly news this morning. “These changes will allow HP to reinvest in further growth….We have a chance to further accelerate our competitive advantage. This is a substantial opportunity for us and something that we think is a good opportunity for our clients as well.”

HP expects to take a $1 billion charge for the cuts and says it anticipates they will will ultimately generate the same amount in annual savings.

Kara started off the week by dispatching yours truly to join Robert Scoble in the overnight line outside the Palo Alto Apple (AAPL) store. There were a couple dozen padinistas who braved the cold to get theirs first, and we put together some videos of all the fanboy nerdery. Kara then jetted off for a couple of her signature high-profile interviews and reported back to all of us at AllThingsD. She confirmed suspicion that Yahoo (YHOO) CTO Ari Balogh will be leaving for family reasons and dropped names of possible successors. She rounded out her road trip with a Flip video of Kevin Johnson, CEO of Juniper Networks (JNPR). They talked about the iPad, as Johnson is a pretty good guy to comment on how it may affect things like, say, networks.

John took the week off, but Digital Daily was alive and kicking, at least during the Apple OS 4 event. We liveblogged all the action from Jobs, Forstall and Schiller, right from 1 Infinite Loop.

MediaMemo was abuzz with an exclusive from the West Coast early in the week. We ran into Chatroulette creator Andrey Ternovskiy in line while waiting for our iPad, and he gave MediaMemo a sneek peek of coming attractions for the Internet meem du jour. Peter then moved on to some good news about advertising, for a change. It seems that Internet ads are coming back, if not as fast as media types might hope. In the same vein, Peter posted a breakdown of Apple’s new iAd platform and what it may mean for the media industry, how it might make developers money and how it wont suck.

Walt devoted his column this week to an all-iPad followup. He answered some burning questions about the iPad and made clear some points that had even confused Weekend Update. Mossberg’s Mailbox was full of questions about steaming video, computers for school and running Windows on a Mac. Walt always gives the straight talk, and the questions answered this week were no exception. Katie also did the iPad shuffle this week, writing a review of some of the best apps currently offered for the new device. She broke them down well in writing and even threw in a little video for good measure. She never disappoints.

That’s all for now from Weekend Update. We’re going to go curl up with our iPad and Wi-Fi and not come out till June. Or at least until Kara makes us come back next week for another installment.