Today, in Episode #1335, Lisa Marie asks if you can get Excel data on to a map.
Google Code-In Final Statistics
Thank you to all of the participants in Google Code-In, a contest designed to introduce pre-university students from around the world to the many possibilities for participation in the open source community.
The contest was a great success with 361 students (ages 13-18) from 48 countries completing a total of 2,167 tasks during the 7 week contest period. The students completed 769 Easy tasks, 798 Medium level tasks and 600 Difficult tasks during Google Code-In. We are thrilled with the response and the quality of work completed for the contest and look forward to seeing more from these talented students in the future.
The top 10 countries with the highest number of participants were, in order: The United States, Romania, Bulgaria, The Russian Federation, India, Poland, Canada, Germany, Italy, and Australia.
We would also like to extend a huge thank you to our 20 mentoring organizations and administrators from all over the globe, who through their guidance and encouragement are introducing young coders to the numerous ways to contribute to diverse open source projects.
Please stay tuned as we announce the Google Code-In contest winners on Monday, February 14th.
Google Places Hotel Booking Feature To Be Available to All …. Someday
In November of 2010, Google integrated a hotel booking feature into the Place Page of most hotels. This is a feature that Google started testing in March of 2010. The feature is currently only available to a limited number of partners but Google noted today (after several months of inquiries) in the Help Forums that it will, one day, be available to all:
Thanks for your questions everyone. What you’re seeing is a new feature that shows price and availability for hotels. We’re currently working with a number of partners to allow users to click through and begin the booking process. In addition, we’re working to expand these partnerships and exploring ways to allow individual hoteliers to easily share updated pricing / availability. In the interim, you can already add direct booking links in Google Places (see help article ). Thanks for your excitement about participating; we’re looking forward to opening this up to more partners.
Cheers,
Brianna
From a small hotel’s point of view, this can happen none to soon. Often times the likes of Orbitz or Expedia can take 25% of their booking fees on a regular basis and upwards of 50% in a clearance situation. While the large hotel booking sites do not like the idea of “disintermediation”, the hotel chains and small hotels most definitely would.
At some point we can assume that Google is planning on making the Places Page a transactional environment for many industries. This is likely but the initial foray.
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