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Google I/O Sells Out In 20 Minutes
netbuzz writes "Last year it took almost an hour, but this morning Google's enormously popular conference for developers sold out in about 20 minutes, Vic Gundotra, Google's senior vice president of engineering, told his followers on Google+. 'While we're overwhelmed with the interest and enthusiasm around Google I/O, we know it can be very disappointing and frustrating when an event sells out this quickly,' he wrote. Those who did not get tickets were not only disappointed and angry, but mystified as to why they were left out of a first-come, first-served sale despite being online and ready to buy the second the bell rang. And, of course, tickets were quickly being scalped on eBay." Of course, everyone who gets in drives away in a free Tesla.
I've always wondered with I/O how much people want to go because of whatever new technology is being introduced or discussed there or because the expectation being set that all attendees will get a full featured Android device (phone or tablet or STB).
The developer of the dominant alternative recovery for MANY android devices wasn't able to get a ticket this year (though he may well get one via back-channels) due to the mobs of people who snatched up the tickets like it was a Queen concert complete with zombie Freddie Mercury.
Also as TFS pointed out I suspect there are a fair number of people who got tickets with the intention of reselling them at a profit.
If Google does the right thing, they'll find and cancel the scalped tickets - and do a second round.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Maybe instead of an online first-come first-serve process Google should hold a ticket lottery for those who want to attend, That will help get the tickets into the hand of pre-qualified developers instead of eBay ticket scalpers.
Of course, everyone who gets in drives away in a free Tesla.
What reference am I missing here?
It's a shame, because a couple of these guys are Java wizards with a strong interest in developing for Android. A simple programming challenge at the gate would've thwarted all the posers.
Oh, well. I guess I'll start learning Objective-C.
All Google has to do is ban scalping of the tickets. You buy a ticket, YOU get in, not the holder of the ticket.
Not really. The scalpers would just get hundreds (thousands?) of people to register to be in the lottery to ensure that they get the tickets. Hell, they could probably even get more that way.
Honestly, I would think that the best way is to have some kind of lottery system combined with some process to vet people who are actually developers or industry folks who should be there. Maybe a really basic question about development that only developers would readily know the answer to. Once you've "passed," you don't have to do it again next year, you're automatically in the drawing (if you want to go, of course) for five years or such.
I'd love to see the same thing for popular concerts and sporting events.
The Raspberry Pi organization and its distributors are based in the UK and manufacturing is done in China. But don't let facts get in the way of paranoid rants.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
And where will I go to suck dick now.
The after-party of the next Apple WWDC?
I ended up getting a ticket, though I'm giving it to a co-worker (who work is paying to send).
From what I saw, it wasn't actually a first-come first-serve setup. One of my co-workers who got in "queue" before me didn't get a ticket. I started about 5 minutes after they were posted and I got a ticket. So it seems that once you were in their queue, it may have been random who they gave the tickets to.
I can't speak for others, but I attended Google I/O for their GWT (Google Web Toolkit) and related talks. The GWT sessions were actually rather popular, even though Android is the hip tech that everyone is interested in. I'm guessing people also wanted to attend the Android talks in hopes of getting free phones (some of the talks last year gave phones to people who went to that specific session).
If I was a student in the Bay area, I would definitely fork over the money (only $300 for students) to get the free swag. But for a regular priced ticket ($900), plus hotel and travel, I figured it would have cost me around $2600. I couldn't justify that cost, especially since all the talks are posted to Youtube within a few days of the conference.
Its not what it is, its something else.
Perhaps they should increase the ticket price to enough to buy two Teslas, one given to the attendee, one given to a deserving Google engineer.
Shortage of tickets to google I/O and shortage of raspberry pi boards now equals food/clothing/housing shortages?
If a developer couldn't go because of illness, Google could offer to buy them or at least broker them at face value to someone who could go. If the tickets were non-transferable except through the brokering service, that would be less evil than letting the scalpers get them.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
It's a little late, but I have two thoughts. One was a band that discovered something like 80% of their tickets had been bought by scalpers, who were demanding 10X the ticket price. Their solution? They held 3 more shows. The first, originally scheduled, show was practically empty - the other 3 were packed.
Solution type: Increase supply.
Another option is to hold a 'dutch auction' for the tickets. Easy enough for shows with one seating category, but only a touch more difficult with multiple to handle people who are willing to pay $X for 'good' seats, but $Y for 'normal' seats only if they don't get good ones. The tickets then go for the minimum price that 'just' sells all tickets. Yes, this means that only the richest and/or most dedicated fo fans get to go, but at least the money ends up in the hands of the artist's company, not scalpers. If the artists feel that the price has risen too much, add shows.
Solution type: Increase the price so that demand equals supply.
I don't read AC A human right
Personally, I like PCIe for internal and fiber optics for external. I don't think Google is even a hardware or network service provider. It's no wonder it sold out so quickly.
Google should post an open-ended problem. Those with the best solution get in for free, the worse your solution, the higher your cost. If you invent a one-of-a-kind, genius solution, Google hires you.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Those who did not get tickets were not only disappointed and angry, but mystified as to why they were left out of a first-come, first-served sale despite being online and ready to buy the second the bell rang.
Oh, please. BlizzCon was doing this to people long before Google made it cool.
Man. I sure wish I could have gotten a ticket. :(
Google seems to have lost it. They are quickly turning into a company that, mark my words, will be as easily hated as Microsoft.
And this latest idiocy seems to be *exactly* the kind of stupid, not thinking about the problem, problem that Google now has.
Clearly, over 75% of the "attendees" of this conference are not even going for the conference, they are going to get free shit.
So, what's the point? How can you have a developers conference, when a large majority of the people there are not even going to be developers?
I'm in agreement with the posters who have stated that there needs to be a little programming test to get in, that would seperate the developers from the posers.
As their "system" stands now, scalpers rule the day, most of the people that *want* to develop don't get in, and most of the people that do get in have no actual interest in attending.
I'm reminded of "TED", certainly in the early days of TED, where it was enormously expensive to get in, and Negroponte wrote an editorial in "New Media" magazine complaining "There are no new ideas here". -- Duh. "New Ideas" come from small studios, not giant corporations, who were the only ones who could afford to attend.
Google is a big company now. And big companies only like to play with other big companies. It's unfortunate that they have lost sight so quickly, of what it was that brought them to where they are now.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
i.e., the few thousand tickets available could have theoretically been sold out in seconds. The Moscone Center West would not even have the capacity for 25K+ Google employees, let alone the 10's of thousands of developers/students who would like to attend. My only point here is that there's a lot of demand and very little supply, so there's going to be a lot of disappointed people. I don't think a better registration system, programming challenges, doubling capacity, a lottery, etc will do much to placate everyone who wants a ticket. Perhaps the only sensible way to reduce demand would to be double, triple, or quadruple the price.
FWIW, I've been in 2009 and 2011 - in my experience, it's mostly engineers, developers and others interested in and actively working on Google technology - not people there for just for the freebies (although they are certainly welcomed).
Any of the following is probably better than "first come first served" when "first come" is hard to determine or unfair to large numbers of potential attendees
1) Auction to the highest bidder. Takes scalping (mostly) out of the equation but locks out those of limited means. If you pride yourself on being non-greedy, donate the "over the face value" profits to charity.
2) Limit "1 per organization" and prohibit transfers outside of a pre-files small list of alternate users. Limits scalping.
3) Invitation-only event.
4) Require participation to attend, e.g. submit a paper, if it's accepted, you get in but you also have to / get to present your paper.
5) Require you submit a portfolio showing your presence is desirable for others who are there and/or that you are likely to benefit from attending more than someone else in line.
6) Lottery.
7) "Diversity" factors, e.g. we want 40%-50% of the attendees to be experts in the topic of the conference, 10%-20% to be newbies, and 30%-50% to be somewhat knowledgeable in the topic. Or, we don't want any more than 10% of attendees from the same company or more than 25% from the same industry segment.
There are other ways to "shake things up a bit" as well.
You can do this with just about any "over-subscribed" event from concert tickets to elementary-school transfer requests.
"First come first served" has its place, but when people start standing in line early for the sole purpose of making a buck on eBay, then either they are denying others who really should be there but can't pay $$$ a slot or they are denying you or your charity the $$$ you could've made with an auction.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The first 500 people to actually use Google+ will get tickets.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I'm still waiting for you to apologize to all the users that your moronic names policy alienated, like Skud and GrrlScientist. You are a hypocrite and an asshole.
--
Protect your privacy. Say NO to the products and services from the Google creeps!
Make tickets non transferable/non refundable with a system that would allow you to resell your ticket at cost if you cant attend. If ticket sells you get refund minus a processing fee, if it doesn't you own it.
Why does everything have to be fair? It's google's show, they want ppl to show up. Boom done. Move on with your lives and stop whining.
And where will I go to suck dick now.
The after-party of the next Apple WWDC?
I'll leave that to Eric Raymond! Only the most wizened of hackers can handle that. Google is getting harder (pun intended!) every year, but it will take some time before its look-and-feel matches Apple's.
I would have thought that they wanted developers? This seems to push them into other hands.
Bigger venue. If 100K people want to attend your event and pay $900 each, rent a bigger tent.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
To get in you must present the ticket AND the ticket purchase receipt from authorized vendor. Announce that well before the conference so that nobody even thinks of scalping. :-)
Vic Gundotra is one of the biggest assholes in the industry and the imbecile who came up with Real Names policy for Google+. You are doing yourself a disservice if you attend Google I/O. Rather, don't do it and send an e-mail to the Vic Gundotra asshole explaining why.
--
mchurch
Shortage of tickets to google I/O and shortage of raspberry pi boards now equals food/clothing/housing shortages.
Auction off the tickets at various prices based on demand (so maybe someone will start using Google Checkout), maximize income, give the surplus money to charity (unemployed developers?).
Much better than random choice of winners , much less time wasted.
Enormously better than giving the extra money people are willing to pay to scalpers. Nobody likes them, everybody does his best to make them rich.
Technically the employer paid for the conference, so it would be ethical for any significant swag to go to the employer to distribute as they see fit. (Which might be to the developer who went, or it might be a special award for employee-of-the-month or something...). Now if it was a competition, or a draw, or something like that then it might make sense for the developer to keep it since it wasn't expected as part of the conference registration.
In any case, I'm fairly sure that according to a strict reading of our corporate ethics policy I probably wouldn't be able to keep something like a Nexus or a Chromebook anyways if it came from a company that we do business with. Need to avoid any semblance of impropriety.
You made a good point; some more thought and I might of come up with that system. You'll still get scalpers that way, but their income will be limited. They'd put in for the max tickets and hope to get lucky.
I don't read AC A human right
Makes much more sense to have a continually running roadshow. Round the States and Round the world. The possibilities for flow on benefits are enormous.
Sold out of tickets that is...
The best thing to do is let the free market take care of this.
For a software company like Zyanga who wants to port games to ChromeStore and Android a $800 ticket for each employee would be a godsend and would not be resented at all. The price is worth it to guarantee its place and well worth the ROI.
True the college kid looking for his free phone might be pissed. But who should gain that valuable limited resource? Someone who is going to make money, provide a service, and create jobs, or the kid who wants a free phone and play with some code for his phone for fun?
Scalpers correct the free market. Baseball and NFL owners tried to sell a small amount of tickets at first and then sky rocket the rates when seats become crowded. Scalpers quickly corrected this inefficiency to better the consumer.
http://saveie6.com/
I planned to go to Google I/O. When they announced the date, they also announced that they would make sure that only developers would get tickets. I went in 2009 and 2010, but I didn't go in 2011 (despite being offered a pre-sales ticket) because I expected the ratio of developers to nitwits to further drop. When it became clear that this year, it would be "first come, first server", I decided not to try. As always, when there's a new conference, it's very interesting the first time, and the second time, but after that, the original people don't show up any more. That was true for Doors of Perception in the early nineties, that's true for a lot of conferences, that's true for Google I/O. We'll have to wait for another interesting initiative to attend one or two times.
no, I don't have a sig
When someone sells out like Nickelback, they just open a second tour date for that city, and voila, more tickets sold and more people are happy....why dont they just do the same thing here?
Scalpers correct the free market. Baseball and NFL owners tried to sell a small amount of tickets at first and then sky rocket the rates when seats become crowded. Scalpers quickly corrected this inefficiency to better the consumer.
Can you explain this in more detail?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.