When sitting at your computer, you can probably check the time by glancing at your taskbar, your watch, or your cell phone; gaining one more option won’t exactly be a revolutionary experience.  This option’s provided by Google, however, and the feature can determine the time in many different places.

Popular searches for consumer electronics, medical information, and NFL players now generate Yahoo Shortcuts in the search engine’s results pages.

Health-related information from Healthline populates the Smart Answers field in Ask’s search results as an enhancement to the search engine’s ability to handle health queries.

Advertising that presents the most relevant ad to an individual viewing web content represents a way for Yahoo to improve its ad performance.

Yahoo has a shortcut to its lyrics search, while Ask has a Smart Answer for the master Jedi among other May birthday celebs. Google puts everyone back to work with an updated AdWords Editor.

After an extended period of time during which I simply couldn’t trust Gmail’s spam filter to Do The Right Thing, I’m happy to report that for the last few weeks it has been performing exceptionally well.

There are lots of bloggers talking about Google’s launch of their Pay-Per-Action (beta) program which is really just adding CPA ad units to Adsense with a name to not associate it with CPA directly.

1) Smart Use of Flickr # 273 Core 77

Architecture for Humanity held its logo design competition on Flickr and received entries from across the globe. This is a really smart use of Flickr, but an even smarter non-profit using social media to get international graphic design consultation for free.

In a great post over at PSFK – Piers publishes the content of a conversation he had with Julie Cordua, the VP of Marketing for the often talked about Product (RED) social marketing campaign.  

Sometimes you just have to put aside the world of search engines and ad campaigns to read, or write, something a little more fulfilling.

If you’re a hardcore hardware geek, then the work compiled in the 13-page paper by some Google engineers on the failure patterns of disk drives will be like a belated Valentine from the little red-headed girl.

I have noted a couple of times before that Nokia sent out phones and internet tablets in the past to some bloggers.

SmartMetric, Inc a developer and manufacturer of advanced secure identity and transaction solutions has developed software that works with its biometric fingerprint card that allows a person to send money over the Internet from one card to another.

President and CEO of SmartMetric, Colin Hendrick said the peer-to-peer funds transfer or card-to-card money exchange will change the way money is handled. He went on to say that the fingerprint-activated card has the potential to revolutionize the way money is transmitted.

Ask.com has added something new to their Smart Answer collection by making the International Children’s Digital Library available as a top-of-page resource for children’s literature-related queries.

Seattle was hit bad by violent winds and power outages over the weekend, and Microsoft’s employees blogged their experiences (in many cases only after days of waiting for the power to return). Todd Bishop has a rundown.

There are a number of Mac OS maintenance applications that promise to help you with various tasks. We’ll take a quick look at a few of them here.

Thank god for Microsoft

I’m about half way through “Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking,” by Andy Sernovitz. I’m not ready to post a review just yet, look to Chris Thilk for that.

The Smart Answers team at the Ask search engine have put together some helpful sections for voters seeking more information about the US elections taking place today.

As part of their drive to rollout new features beyond the United States as quickly as possible, Ask.com has placed RSS Smart Answers on its European sites.

NBC is making the most of consumer generated media, blogs and chat. Smart moves, NBC!

Ask.com has provided some updates to its Smart Answer service, making some additions to deliver information about hurricanes and tropical storms to users of the search engine.