This took place at Developer Day in Australia, so, as you might imagine, at least one of the mashups won’t (in its current state of being) be of much use to anyone outside Australia.  It’s still pretty nifty, however, and the other mashups appear to be much more widely applicable.

PropertyGuru, the Australia-only example, also won the whole speedgeeking event.  It’s described as “a map driven real estate search engine, comprising of homes for sale throughout Australia.  It features an intuitive interface, powerful search and property comparison tools,” and “allows the home buyer to locate potential properties by moving an interactive Google map to any area in Australia, bringing up pins for properties that meet their budget and requirements.”

There were five other finalists and, as far as I can tell, they all “work” everywhere.  Bikely doesn’t seem to be aware of many bicycle routes in Russia, but, well, you can’t have everything.

Another entry, Remember the Milk, “is here to save us from ourselves!” according to the Sydney Morning Herald.  Perhaps I’m not quite as worried about my grocery list, but this task management service “integrates with Google services by providing task management in Google Calendar (including another Maps mashup), and sends reminders via Google Talk.”

The last few mashups in the speedgeeking contest were planOfile, FGMap, and Cannondade (The Patrick O’Brian Mapping Project), and they are, respectively, “a trip collaboration system,” “a Google Map web app,” and a sort of book-related fan map.  Very interesting stuff – maybe there’s something to this speedgeeking thing after all.

Developing At Google: Podcasts And Code Sessions

Google’s Developer Days have taken place at company locations around the world. For its next Developer Day taking place at the end of May, a change of venue has been announced.

"Thanks to the incredible interest in Google Developer Day, we’ve moved the session portion of the day to the San Jose Convention Center. From 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., we’ll be bringing ourselves and a little of the Google campus a few miles south," Andrew Bowers said on the Google Code blog.

No one will miss out on visiting the Google campus, as the after-session party will take place there when the sessions have been completed. During the sessions, attendees will take part in the following agenda:

1. Developing with Geo: Google Maps, Google Earth, and SketchUp
2. Mashups and More: AJAX, Google Gadgets, and the GData APIs
3. Tools for Better Web Development: The Google Web Toolkit, open source, and other developer initiatives

For the listening pleasure of developers, there are a couple of podcasts that just debuted. The Google Developer Podcast arrived with a discussion of Google Guice, through a talk with developer Bob Lee.

At the Summer of Code blog, Google has its first podcast episode available. Angie Byron with the Drupal project talks about ideas for this year’s SoC developers.

"After all, who knows the trials and tribulations of SoCer student life better than a former participant?" Google’s Leslie Hawthorn of Byron’s participation in the podcast.