The Google Code-in is one of the newest contests presented by Google’s Open Source Program. For students who have wanted to get involved with open source, this is a tremendous opportunity to dive in and give it a shot.

Google will team up with a variety of open source organizations to come up with a list of tasks to be performed by contest contestants. Who is eligible, you ask? Any students between the ages of 13 to 18 before the start of the contest are free to participate.

Google isn’t shorting their participants in the incentive department, either. Contestants who successfully complete one task will receive a t-shirt and a certificate. But it gets bigger: For those who complete three tasks, they will receive $100. For every three tasks after the first three, contestants will receive an additional $100, up to a total of $500 for 15 successfully completed tasks.

10 lucky grand prize winners will receive a trip to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, where their accomplishments will be rewarded with an awards ceremony.

The contest is slated to start on November 22, 2010. You can find additional information on the contest at the Google Code-in website.

The Google Code-in looks like a tremendous opportunity for young students to explore, learn and potentially develop a strong interest in programming. It will provide students with a great opportunity to network and work alongside some impressive leaders in the computer programming field.

What are your thoughts on Google’s contest?

(Photo Credit: Google)

Post and video by Miiko Mentz

In the spirit of Che Guevara, MindTouch rallied the crowd at Web 2.0 Expo last week with its social enterprise collaboration revolution. Bubblicious Reporter Jolie O’Dell caught up with the MindTouch team to learn about the newly launched MindTouch 2009, an enhanced developer platform for building rich collaborative applications and communities, and a new bi-directional message bus that further extends MindTouch’s powerful collaborative capabilities.

MindTouch Marketing Manager Sarah Carr explains how MindTouch is revolutionizing the way people and businesses collaborate using MindTouch’s open source enterprise collaboration platform; and MindTouch Sales Engineer Mike Diliberto talks about the new MindTouch 2009. Check it out:

In addition to MindTouch, the Bubblicious team talked with a few other companies offering social computing applications and services. If you missed yesterday’s video, watch our interview with ooVoo and our highlight reel. Stay tuned all week for the full interviews with each company. Tomorrow’s video interview is with Topix.

Disclosure: In addition to being a contributor to Bubblicious, I also work at FutureWorks where one of my clients is MindTouch, which I’ve chosen to include in my coverage of Web 2.0 Expo due to them being an exhibitor and fitting the focus of our coverage.

by Michelle Lentz

There’s nothing quite like the spirit of collaboration.

Freshbooks, the invoicing/timetracking application used by many freelancers, has open-sourced their iPhone tine-tracking application.

The actual application lets you track time for projects and tasks, write notes for each time entry, and automatically queue up pending submissions when you’re offline.

According to Freshbooks, they’ve open-sourced their code to give back and further development in the iPhone App community. ” We decided to give something back to our customers by sharing what we’ve learnt. We want to support our customers that want to make the leap to becoming iPhone developers.”

They make a point that since the NDA was lifted, very few folks have open-sourced their code. The fear (expectation?) is that this will lead to more web-based apps again, as opposed to native apps.

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by Michelle Lentz

My husband is involved in several Fantasy Football leagues. His office league likes to “trash talk” in their own creative way. What does this mean? It means a giant poster of my husband in the downtown office window, with a corresponding sign about how he’ll lose those weekend’s games. (It’s worth mentioning that he won.)

I really could care less about football, but I did learn something from this experience (other than that the poster was hilarious): I learned that I can print a poster from my regular old desk printer.

There’s a catch, of course. The poster is divided into several 8.5 x 11 sheets. However, it makes a pretty good poster as long as you don’t need high-quality single sheet. That’s a job for Kinko’s.

PosteRazor is what my husband’s friend used to the create the poster. PosteRazor takes a raster image and the resulting poster is saved as a multipage PDF document. PosteRazor takes all types of images, including BMP, DDS, GIF, ICO, IFF, JBIG, JPEG/JIF, Kodak PhotoCD, PCX, PBM, PGM, PNG, PPM, PhotoShop PSD, and more. You can set the size of your resulting poster by percentage, number of sheets, or specific size.

It’s a free tool made from Open Source libraries and is available on Sourceforge.net. PosteRazor is available as a Windows, an OSX and a Linux version.

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Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.