Prediction of values, how?

Hey guys,

 with our university we have to try the actual See Click Predict Fix contest on kaggle in a seminar to get a grade :)

But I do not really have much experience with MATLAB.

The data-set is based on US 311, you can submit a problem, e.g a broken window and I have to predict the number of votes, comments and views for this entry. In the training-set we have the actual number of votes, comments and views, so we can compare how good the prediction is. As given values we have the id of the problem, the location (in latitude and longtitude), a summary (e.g. Pothole in Street) and the time (e.g. 04.12.2012 18:58:00)

My idea was, to devide the whole data-set in sub-data sets, e.g. by lat/lon to make smaller sets for the prediction of votes, views and comments...than I want to predict the values vor votes, views and comments and compare them with RMSLE to the actual values of the train-file to get the error-term and to see how good the prediction is.

 I think important paramters are the location, time (maybe divede the data-set in day/night) and the summary...

But, I'm not really sure how to start with the predictions, I do not know MATLAB to well, can someone maybe give me a little help where to find methods for predictions or so? I hope to get a starting point for the prediction.....maybe someone could help a noob like me^^

I don't know how to start the prediction, with linear regression or what would be a good approach?