

Google I/O Registration 2014 - jabsters
http://stancarney.co/2014/04/google-io-registration-2014/

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just2n
Sounds fun on the surface... for people who have nothing better to do than to
be looking at the sources of pages or reading over documentation that's rarely
viewed, or watching random YouTube videos.

By the time this was made public and people were able to build scrapers,
everything was already gone. Person A finds a ticket, tells his closest
buddies so they can find them. Before it's made public knowledge that this
happened, all of A and his friends and their friends have tickets. I don't see
this as a particularly "good" approach. Why not just randomly pick several
developers from GitHub/Google Code and say "here are 10 tickets, give them to
your friends"?

I'd much rather a scavenger hunt be announced and all-inclusive of the
community. I don't see how this is any better than FCFS or lottery. In fact,
the lottery might be the worst of all. It's more likely to be diluted by non-
technical people and encourages gaming by having as many employees sign up as
possible in any given company, since there's no cost to register.

I don't understand what Google's goal is with I/O attendance.

Is this not one of the most technical conferences of the year? Highly
technical talks and sessions for developers by developers. Looking over the
talks at 2013
([https://developers.google.com/events/io/sessions](https://developers.google.com/events/io/sessions),
non-versioned link, so this might point at the 2014 sessions if your'e reading
this in the future), everything seems to be developer oriented.

Why, then, doesn't participation require the ability to do something like
complete a few simple randomized programming challenges to prove you're
capable of benefiting from attendance? Google runs Code Jam, they easily have
the infrastructure to do this on the scale that is needed for I/O. It's also
certainly not necessary that _every_ seat be given out this way, but why not
70-90%?

I'm happy that they put _everything_ on YouTube and live stream the talks, so
I (and everyone else who doesn't win the lottery) can still benefit, but if
people are trying to get tickets just to get the toys Google gives out to
attendees, I feel like there needs to be much more thought put into the
selection process, or Google should just sell those outright to any developer
who wants them. I really hate trying to saturate conference attendance by
giving out exclusive toys, or toys ahead of market. It typically attracts the
wrong people for the wrong reasons.

~~~
throwaway1979
> I don't understand what Google's goal is with I/O attendance.

Excitement. Buzz around the Android developer experience.

It is a fun conference. But lets be honest, if they stopped the freebies,
would it garner the same interest from non-tech folks?

P.S. my personal opinions. I attended it once and had a fun time.

~~~
just2n
Does it need to? It's developer-oriented, not consumer-oriented. The
"freebies" (really ahead of market or exclusive toys that you pay for, or get
some kind of discount on) attract consumers, which is the problem.

If the goal is to have a place to show off all the stuff that's new in Android
(or the new Google devices), that seems like a separate consumer-oriented
conference. Or the big unveiling keynotes followed by the actual I/O, and the
two should have separate attendances.

Look at games. There are many consumer-oriented events (BlizzCon, PAX, E3,
CES, etc) to a few developer-oriented events (GDC). And the two don't
generally overlap too much.

~~~
magicalist
Yeah, I don't think a programming quiz to get a ticket is a great idea, but
definitely agree (and it seems to be the general consensus amongst more
technically capable attendees) that it's nice to get free things, but if they
got rid of the giveaways it would improve the audience demographics and
actually increase my desire to attend.

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toufka
Reminds me of trying to get access to an old Hotline server. "The login is the
eight word after 'summertime' on the last page of this link. Then, register
for this service and the final word of the last paragraph of text is the
password."

Either way, off-putting.

~~~
paulgb
I think it had its intended goal; jabsters is exactly the kind of person I'd
want at Google I/O (rather than someone just hoping for a discount on a new
Nexus-whatever-they-give-away-this-time)

~~~
saregama
$900 bucks for a $350 phone ? :) I would say stop giving freebies and see if
they still need a lottery..

~~~
georgemcbay
I have no idea what they may or may not be giving away at this years Google IO
(they seem to be trying to reduce focus on that) but the retail cost of the
free hardware often exceeds the registration amount.

2012 was probably the best overall in terms of retail price of giveways
relative to registration fee: Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Asus Nexus 7, Nexus Q and
Samsung Chromebox.

Last year was Chromebook Pixels which by themselves retail for more than $900.

~~~
lighthazard
$900 + travel expenses + hotel/quarters expenses

~~~
bookwormAT
or $0 for a trip around the world and a bag full of goodies. Many companies
pay for business trips to tech conferences.

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suyash
I don't think it was a fair play again this year. Hiding url for the
registration codes in images etc was not a very smart idea (although it was
fun for a while), people hacked into it as well and some people got multiple
codes while others got none.

Being an Android developer, I was disappointed, at least only registered
developers should have been allowed in the lottery fist or better yet
confirmed tickets.

Apple was much smarter and it allowed only registered iOS/OSX developers to
sign up for the lottery.

~~~
mbernstein
Why only registered Android developers? There's a lot more to I/O (and Google)
than just Android..

What do you mean by "hacked into it"? Do you mean people used wget -r on the
developer docs and grep'd out codes to try?

~~~
suyash
"Why only registered Android developers? There's a lot more to I/O (and
Google) than just Android.."

\- Ofcourse, I was just eliciting a contrast to Apple's registration system
for developers, Android dev was just 1 use case I'm pointing too.

"What do you mean by "hacked into it"? Do you mean people used wget -r on the
developer docs and grep'd out codes to try?"

\- Did you read the blog in full before asking this? In the blog, this is what
Stan mentioned:

"By this time several HTTP crawlers had been created by individuals looking to
secure a ticket to Google I/O ahead of today’s lottery. The crawlers used
various tools and libraries to download images, web pages, and Youtube video
annotations looking for more codes."

~~~
theelfismike
I think they absolutely wanted people to write crawlers and scrapers for
codes.

Google was created by creating web crawlers that indexed the content to rank
pages. This exercise was a tribute to those algorithms.

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victortrac
Google Code Jam has just started and so Google has the infrastructure and
experience to handle large online coding contests. They should have just made
Google I/O registration a simple programming exercise. Even a 10-minute in-
browser exercise would have self-selected the right audience for I/O.

~~~
mbernstein
How do you get the design folks registered? You're assuming that every session
is a developer based session.

~~~
just2n
Most are (easily > 90%), so why aren't a majority of the seats determined this
way? With a quick glance of last year's sessions, I don't see anything that's
design focused. Maybe technical designers who also do a bit of prototyping and
developing would benefit, but that's a developer-centric role, it's a lot more
than design anyway, and I'd expect such a person to be able to complete a
simple programming challenge.

[https://developers.google.com/events/io/sessions](https://developers.google.com/events/io/sessions)

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serge2k
Shame I didn't have however many hours to waste looking for codes.

Oh well, I guess I will not spend 900 dollars on IO. No big loss either way.

