Which is to say, in terms of registration issues I'm not sure making it more technical and getting rid of the free swag would alleviate matters, if you just go by what happens with WWDC.
Google can serve mail and handle search, but online registration and payment gateways don't seem to be its strong suit.
I'd love to know what, exactly, I'm trying to spend a cool grand on.
contrary to what the current conference/technology trend may dictate, technology is not a rockband where the live show is better than the studio recording.
I have to believe eliminating the "free goodies" will definitely return it to a dev conference vs. an Oprah event. Maybe this will be the year. This year the system said they found a ticket (actually several times), but apparently they were just dangling it in front of my nose, because I couldn't get through payment gateway, Google Wallet.
Each year registration is like a game of Google Plinko.
I'd be curious to know the # of user requests that brought the Wallet to its knees.
Their 'fix' appears to have been handling page reloads for us, and making sure it's only done every 30 seconds- rather than, say, addressing the underlying weakness in their system.
Obviously it's a small chunk of all online sales, but it always seems like the process fails somewhere
So if sales start at 9:00 am we have the following schedule:
09:00 am : $10,000
09:01 am : $9,990
10:30 am : $1,000
12:00 noon: $100Google doesn't necessarily want the richest companies/developers to attend. Nor are they interested in extracting the maximum amount of money (though of course they could do a few charity auctions). A good mix of small companies, freelancers, corporations is probably what they're aiming for.
Although if they want to control the composition of their audience even more, they can sell some tickets via Dutch auction and use the profit to pay for the costs for attendees are specifically invited.
Console says "Failed to load resource: the server responded wit status 401 on checkout.google.com/inapp/api/v1/purchase_options"
Geez....
Trying again, but now I'm seeing this: "Try again. We couldn't find you a ticket, but there still might be tickets left!"
I hate to be obvious, but putting registration up in the morning for a bunch of developers (most of whom are on the West Coast) isn't the best idea in the entire world. Especially when it sells out in 15 minutes.
Last year Apple put WWDC tickets on sale at 5:30AM PDT without notice...the rumour mill suggested this was deliberately done by Apple to ensure more attendees from outside the west coast. I heard something similar from someone at Apple as well.
Whatever time you put tickets on sale, somebody is going to complain. There are certainly two sides to the coin here...I'm not pretending to have a solution, but merely pointing out a time that's convenient to you may well not be convenient to, say, developers in Asia.