In an effort to introduce secondary school and high school students to open source software development, Google has announced the Google Highly Open Participation Contest at the Open Source Developer’s Conference in Brisbane, Australia.

Students can compete for prizes such as cash and t-shirts; ten grand prize winners will receive a chance to visit the Googleplex in Mountain View, Ca. The contest features tasks that fall into the categories of code, documentation, research, outreach, quality assurance, training, translation, and user interface.

Over the past three years, college level students have participated in the Google Summer of Code where they have been introduced to open software development. Throughout that time, thousands of people from around the world have begun developing and writing millions of lines of code together, and now it’s time for Google to turn their attention to the younger crowds.

In an attempt to compete with Google Apps, Microsoft has launched Windows Live Community Builder. The idea behind Microsoft’s new service is to allow businesses or non for profit organizations to obtain a more engaging and deeper connection with their community through customized applications like email, photo service, messenger, writer, livedrive and more.

Windows Live Community Builder also offers company specific domain support while enabling the ability to register a domain name via supported partners included in registration.

Sponsored search ads on mobile devices have been tested by Google for quite some time now but the company is really beginning to entice advertisers using Google Adwords by giving them free clicks until November 18^th.

Answers to questions such as how and where ads will run on mobile devices and how landing pages will be served can all be answered on Google’s new Adwords support page. Pages that are not mobile device friendly will not be available for mobile Adwords:

Each ad’s eligibility will be determined by its landing page and only ads with landing pages that can be adapted for viewing on mobile browsers will be shown. You can monitor each ad’s performance via a special performance tracking page within your account called “Performance Data: Search Ads on Google Mobile Search.”