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More often than not these days, I find myself clicking Google's Show options link when looking at a page of search results. As you probably know, doing so reveals a handy sidebar with filters like Recent results and Timeline. The thing is, I want that sidebar to appear by default, on every search, so I don't have to click the link every time. If you're a Firefox user like I am, you're in luck: there's an add-on for that. It's called, fittingly enough, Google Always Show Search Options Sidebar/Menu. Actually, it's not a typical Firefox add-on, but rather a simple script file that works with the popular Greasemonkey extension (which you'll need to install first if you don't already have it). After installing the script (by clicking the Install button on the creator's site), just run a Google search like you typically would. Presto: the options sidebar should appear automatically.

As promised, the Google Chrome for Mac beta has just made it in under the wire for a 2009 release. Of course, it's still just a beta, not a first release--and, as we know, it's missing some features--but it's a step beyond what we've seen so far. Available for Windows for more than a year, Chrome's stated purpose is to provide a slim, fast, secure browser. Developer builds of Chrome first appeared for OS X last June, though they were plagued with bugs and missing features. Based on WebKit, the same technology that underlies Safari, Chrome boasts a sandboxed security mode that aims to mean the crash of one tab won't take down the entire browser. There's also a location field that doubles as a search box and an incognito mode for when you don't want your browsing history retained. The 17.6MB download requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later and an Intel processor, and while it might lack features from its Windows counterpart such as a Bookmark Manager, support for Google Gears, and a full...

Mashable is proud to present the Zappos.com Sharing Happiness Giveaway Contest! To get into the spirit of the holiday season, we’re asking the question, “How do you use the web to improve your life and/or make people happy?”. One lucky recipient will receive a $3,000 shopping spree at Zappos.com. To enter: 1. Leave your answer in the comments section below and/or, 2. Tweet out your answer with the hashtag “#SharingHappiness” (Be sure to leave the URL of your Twitter comment in your comment on this post.) Mashable will highlight some of our favorites on Friday and we’ll announce a winner on Wednesday, December 16th. Contest Rules and Restrictions: You must be 18+ years of age and currently reside in one of the 50 US States. If you would like to participate but are not of valid age/residence, please note “not eligible” in your comment below. By submitting, you are agreeing to the full rules and restrictions. Final entries are due on this post by Wednesday, December 15th at 11:59 PM PT....

Here at Mashable, we’re big fans of Internet radio provider Pandora. Lots of us enjoy it on our laptops, on our mobile phones and even in the car — using various adaptors. Plugging your iPod touch or iPhone (or Droid, if you will) into your car stereo isn’t the most safety conscious activity, but it’s the only way most of us can access our streaming Internet radio favorites while on the go. That might be changing. As GigaOm reports, Pandora is preparing to aggressively target the automotive space. According to GigaOm, Pandora CTO Tom Conrad says half of the Internet radio’s mobile users listen to Pandora in the car (like us, they just connect their phones to their stereos). Conrad says Pandora is working with car manufacturers to support Pandora via in-dash controls. This means that instead of fumbling with your iPhone or Droid and potentially getting in an accident, you could change the station or go to a different saved playlist from your dashboard. This would work using a...

Microsoft Corp.'s attempts to ensure better application compatibility for Windows 7 than its immediate predecessor, Windows Vista, had at launch appear to have borne fruit. While app compatibility remains top of mind for many potential Windows 7 upgraders, Microsoft is trumpeting statistics showing impressive numbers of applications that run without hiccup on Windows 7. And analysts agree that the problems with Vista -- partly or entirely-non-running device drivers and apps -- that burned many users and contributed to Vista's poor adoption haven't cropped up. "I haven't run into any corporations who said, 'Gee, because of application Y, we can't deploy Windows 7,'" said Michael Cherry, an analyst with the independent firm, Directions on Microsoft. He gives Microsoft credit for "working hard -- very, very hard" to ensure that application and device compatibility wouldn't be an issue. Last week, Microsoft released its most up-to-date spreadsheet for IT professionals ( download here)...

Five technologies, including the trendy cloud computing and old workhorse open-source software, will see huge adoption increases in the U.S. government over the next five years, largely driven by efforts to contain costs, according to an analyst firm. In addition to cloud computing and open-source software, other technologies that will be hot in the U.S. government through 2014 include virtualization, service-oriented architecture and geospatial technologies, said Input, an analysis and consulting firm focused on government contracting. Input expects the U.S. government's technology spending to grow at about 3.5 percent a year from 2009 to 2014, said Deniece Peterson, manager of marketing analysis at Input. However, cloud computing spending is expected to grow by 27 percent a year, from $370 million in 2009 to $1.2 billion in 2014, Input said. Virtualization spending will grow by 12 percent a year, from $800 million to $1.4 billion, and open-source software will grow by 8 percent a...

On Monday, Google announced, along with its new real-time search feature , a photo-based search it is calling Google Goggles (which is hard to say without -- sorry -- giggling). Goggles lets you send photos of a business card, book cover or even bar code from your Android-based smartphone to Google for quick identification and data manipulation. What does it do? Once installed, the process is pretty simple: You snap a photo by centering your image in the Goggles screen and pressing a small camera icon at the bottom of the screen. Goggles then scans the image, analyzes it and identifies it. If the image is of a business card, Goggles separates the information into fields and lets you put it into your Google Contacts database. If it's a book, the app offers to let you purchase or research it. If it's a store or a landmark, Goggles fetches Google search info about the location. (Objects such as cars, animals or people aren't, according to the instructions, really identifiable yet.)...

Pacific WebWorks has had a very profitable year despite a raft of complaints from its customers, a class action suit filed against it in Illinois and now a civil suit from Google filed on Monday. In a year where tech companies have taken a battering due to poor economic conditions, Pacific WebWorks has said its growth has come from Web hosting, an Internet payment system and by software tools for creating and maintaining Web sites, called ""Visual WebTools". It's a crowded field where major Internet companies such as Yahoo, Google and Microsoft give away adequate Web site management tools for free. For nine months through Sept. 30, the company reported $21.4 million in gross profit, up from $7.1 million for the first nine months of 2008, according to a 10-Q filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. "We enjoyed dramatic growth during 2009," the filing read. "We expect revenue growth in the future to be approximately 10 percent to 20 percent per annum rather than the...

An over-the-air software update to the Droid smartphone started yesterday, but it wasn't clear whether the 14 enhancements address a voice echo problem that hundreds of users complained about in online forums. The much-anticipated update went to a "small percentage of handsets" yesterday and the update, identified as ESD56, will be phased in over the next week or so, a Verizon Wireless spokeswoman confirmed early today via e-mail. The enhancements come from Verizon Wireless, Motorola and Google, which is behind the Android operating system that runs on the Motorola Droid. An update to the Droid Eris smartphone from HTC is "planned but a date has not yet been confirmed," the spokeswoman added. The Motorola Droid update is based on Google's release of a software developer kit for Android 2.0.2 on Dec. 6. The most noticeable modifications improve the Droid's camera autofocus capability and the phone's voice reception, the spokeswoman added. However, it remains unclear whether the list of...

As the year draws to a close, we thought about the memorable quotes related to IT and offer, in no particular order, 15 that stuck with us. Hey! You! Get off of my cloud! "If there's no hardware or software in the cloud we are so screwed. But it's not water vapor, all it is is a computer attached to a network. What are you talking about? I mean, what do you think Google runs on? Do you think they run on water vapor? I mean, cloud? It's databases and it's operating systems and its memory and microprocessors and the Internet. But all of a sudden, no it's none of that, it's the cloud! What are you talking about?" -- Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison in an on-stage interview with former Sun and Motorola executive Ed Zander at a September event. Spin this "The U.S. government cleared this, we think the Europeans are going to clear this. We are not going to spin anything off." -- Ellison when Zander pushed him on Oracle's plans for Sun products. Time for a little Putt-Putt Sun Chairman...

Republicans are denying healthcare to out of work and poor people, in an attempt to physically eliminate them. that is medical fascism. - Petr Buben from Bookmarklet

New York, here we come! This is just the latest in bunch of stops we’re making to major entrepreneur cities, on the prowl for the most promising technology products we can find to showcase at the upcoming DEMO conference in Palm Springs, Calif. On Thursday, we’ll be at New York’s 3 Ten Lounge. The first hundred people to show up will receive a free drink. Join me, local entrepreneurs, investors, startup professionals, and DEMO alumni companies for cocktails and conversation. Sign up here. We’re starting at 5pm, and will go to 7pm. We’ll then take the party elsewhere, down the road. Last month, we hit London and Boston, and last week we were in San Francisco and Seattle, where we had several hundred people show up. We’ll be going to Austin and Seattle next week. In New York, I’ll also be taking meetings with companies on Friday. As executive producer of DEMO, I’m conversing with entrepreneurs about how DEMO works, and what it takes for a company to launch to the market in a world of...

A key part of Google's promise for the Gmail Web application--the ability to read and compose messages while offline--becomes a standard feature. Originally posted at Deep Tech

We introduce you to a free Firefox extension that records your movements and replays them at your whim, and another add-on that can customize your tabs' behavior in dozens of ways.

Mobile phone operator Orange plans to open Life Is Better On, its take on mobile social networking, on Wednesday. With the service, called On for short, Orange aims to simplify the management of messages and presence information, allowing users to signal to whom they are available, and publish status updates to particular groups of contacts. "We're not so arrogant as to compete with Facebook directly," said Jean-Louis Constanza, CEO of Orange Vallée, the mobile operator's startup incubator, at a recent presentation of the project in Paris. Instead, On will communicate with other social networks and messaging systems, including Facebook, Twitter, Google's GTalk and Microsoft's Live Messenger, and will work whether or not contacts are also On users, said Giles Corbett, project manager for On at Orange Vallée. The spirit of cooperation means the service will even be accessible to customers of other mobile phone networks -- although whoever their operator is, users will have to pay for...

New York, here we come! This is just the latest in bunch of stops we’re making to major entrepreneur cities, on the prowl for the most promising technology products we can find to showcase at the upcoming DEMO conference in Palm Springs, Calif. On Thursday, we’ll be at New York’s 3 Ten Lounge. The first hundred people to show up will receive a free drink. Join me, local entrepreneurs, investors, startup professionals, and DEMO alumni companies for cocktails and conversation. Sign up here. We’re starting at 5pm, and will go to 7pm. We’ll then take the party elsewhere, down the road. Last month, we hit London and Boston, and last week we were in San Francisco and Seattle, where we had several hundred people show up. We’ll be going to Austin and Seattle next week. In New York, I’ll also be taking meetings with companies on Friday. As executive producer of DEMO, I’m conversing with entrepreneurs about how DEMO works, and what it takes for a company to launch to the market in a world of...

Amidst the slew of Google announcements yesterday, one that really made me sit up in my chair concerned a new mobile service called Google Goggles. Now, I don't have an Android phone and therefore have no easy way to try out this so-called "visual search" technology, but I know some people who have, and they have confirmed it works -- at least some of the time. While Google Goggles promises to bring convenience and coolness to owners of Android phones, I am convinced there will be a disruptive impact on certain types of businesses and organizations, especially as Google improves the recognition algorithms and ports the technology to other mobile platforms. This futuristic technology has really arrived, and IT and business managers need to start evaluating it now. First, a quick explanation of what Google Goggles does. The visual search concept (which Google also calls "computer vision" and "search by sight") is simple: Use a mobile phone with a camera to identify objects and match...

The day has finally come. As we were expecting, Google has just released Chrome for Mac, and can now be downloaded by Mac OS X 10.5 or later users. If you’re anything like us, you’ve been anxiously waiting the chance to get your hands on the new browser since last year’s release of the Windows version. Of course, Google Chrome for Mac is just a BETA release, and as we’ve previously reported, you won’t be able to use applications like Gmail that run on Google Gears, but you can take advantage of other Chrome improvements such as speed and Google search right from the address bar. After you first install Chrome on your Mac, you can optionally import your Safari or Firefox settings, which means your bookmarks and certain preferences can carry over from your existing favorite browser. Given that Google Chrome Extensions should launch any day, you might not even have to live without your favorite add-ons for very long. We’ve just installed it for ourselves and our taking it out for a test...

You would think that Web sites that simply aggregate tweets from lists of users would become somewhat irrelevant with the introduction of Twitter Lists. But apparently, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons doesn’t think so, as his Web site GlobalGrind has just acquired CelebrityTweet, a site that aggregates the tweets of famous people, both on the Web and via mobile applications. Here’s why Simmons says they’re doing the deal: “Twitter is the most dynamic way for celebrities to connect to their fans in real-time day & night. CelebrityTweet is the most authoritative destination in the space and we view it as having a natural synergy with Global Grind’s strength in providing exclusive content directly from celebrities.” CelebrityTweet will continue to operate as its own site, syndicating its content back to GlobalGrind. Terms aren’t being disclosed, but considering the site has rather modest traffic, you have to imagine this deal is more about “buy versus build” than a major financial...

Open source file system vendor Gluster released its Storage Platform, integrating a file system, an operating system and a management UI to create a cluster that can store petabytes of information and provide failover for virtual machines. Open source software ready for big business The platform is designed to run on commodity hardware just like GlusterFS file system, which is at the Storage Platform's heart. The operating system is a stripped down Linux kernel and the management interface was built from the ground up by Gluster, which was named last month by Network World as an open source company to watch. "Previously we had a command-line interface and a minimal GUI for management so we built a new tool," says Jack O'Brien, Gluster's senior vice president of marketing. GlusterFS is a clustered file system for storing unstructured data. It features a global namespace, but does not have a centralized meta-data server. Instead, GlusterFS uses an index to look up files, employing a...

There is an ever-increasing pressure for security executives to be a champion of compliance within their respective organizations. Given that there seem to be new or changing compliance requirements emerging on a fairly regular basis, this can be viewed as both a blessing and a curse. As our government acquires increasing financial interests in some private business sectors, this trend may continue to escalate. The blessing is that in some instances it gives the security function some additional leverage to drive results and deliver greater overall value. The curse is that the regulatory compliance requirements just add to the already voluminous amount of reactionary items that already exist on the security executive's plate. The security function is an area of responsibility that already has far too many variables that cause reactionary behavior if permitted. In some organizations this additional set of variables can be the straw that breaks the camel's back. One of the goals of any...

AVG Anti-Virus Free 9.0 works with Windows 7 to provide your PC with the best protection against web threats. Get your free download now at free.avg.com. The explosive growth of dynamic content makes the web a fertile attack vector for infiltrating PCs. Forums, social networking sites, and content delivered by advertising networks are prime targets for the delivery of malicious code. According to IDC, up to 30% of companies with over 500 employees have been infected through web surfing. That’s why over 2.4 million people download AVG Anti-Virus Free 9.0 every week. In fact, it’s the CNET Top Weekly Download for free anti-virus software. And this free download is not a light version of the software, or a limited time trial offer. AVG Anti-Virus Free 9.0 is a full-featured solution that’s free forever. So your PC will always have the best protection against web threats. But then that’s what you’d expect from a global security leader like AVG. Led by Chief Research Officer Roger...

Here’s an interesting little beta that could have a lot of viral traction. Postabon is a location-based service that allows people to tag and share deals around them. It marries two concepts that have caught the attention of venture capital firms in the last two years: marking-up the places around you through mobile apps and using the power of crowds to drive sales. Users upload and vote on the best in-store discounts. They load the Postabon iPhone app or go to the web site and enter info on the deal. It gets automatically geo-tagged and uploaded to the service. Postabon incorporates some gaming elements into its app — you literally get Karma points for sharing deals and compete on a leaderboard with other users in different categories and regions. Other Postabon users can follow your profile for deals, if you’re especially good at ferreting out shoe sales, for example. Since launching a pilot last week, the site has brought in 600 recommendations, covering sample sales and happy...

Road warriors and telecommuters may get excited about this announcement. Today, Tandberg is announcing that high-end video conferencing features are being built into its low-cost PC video collaboration tool, Movi. The product is aimed at mobile workers who need to collaborate by video without too many quality compromises. The upgrade to Tandberg’s Movi tool makes it more intuitive. It allows someone to share PC content with other session participants. You could thus use it to host your own video conference with presentation materials. It connects users via standard-based H.323 and SIP video conference systems. Norway-based Tandberg pairs its Movi software with its PrecisionHD USB camera, which can transfer video at 720p resolution and 30 frames per second. That good enough for high-definition video quality. The hope is to enable anyone in the world to work with others remotely, said Fredrik Halvorsen, Tandberg’s chief executive officer. Tandberg is in the process of being acquired by...

Having a great idea is the touchstone of every radical initiative, but there is far more to the picture than meets the eye. If your idea is not expressed to others and backed correctly, it might as well go unnoticed and fade away without ever having had a chance to shine. A site like BuildWith. Read more Learn more about BuilditWith.me in Dataopedia.com Find out how much BuilditWith.me is worth with Stimator.com

Ever wondered where your paycheck goes throughout the month and why you didn’t end up saving as much as you wanted?  Most of us do this all the time, but spending money without having any way to track your expenses can be one of the main causes of not saving as much as you want. One [...] Related Posts4 Free iPhone Apps to Download and Read EbooksKeep Track of Your Valuable Comments with BackTypeThe Quickest Way to Save Notes Online: rmber it4 Great and Free Online Image Hosting and Sharing ServicesGenuine, Legal and FREE Music Sharing on Jamendo