Google I/O Registration 2014 | Hacker News Reader

Google I/O Registration 2014

stancarney.co

73 pointsjabsters31 comments

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, 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

i would prefer if they stopped the freebies. tons of non-developers register for a conference that is basically designer towards developers.

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.

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)

It's hard to disagree without sounding like sour grapes. Last year I navigated the gauntlet while this year I signed up for the lottery the evening that they opened registration and didn't get selected. Discussion about possibly buried and hidden codes didn't surface until a couple of days after I'd already signed up.

Normally I love puzzles like this, but how many tickets could they have possibly given away with these codes? Compared with the total number of attendees, these were just a drop in the bucket. The overwhelming majority are simply going to be lottery winners. I fail to see how that is an improvement.

It's a very google-ish thing to do a web scavenger hunt like this. It creates some fun buzz if anything else.

No, I realize that. I even spent a little time participating. I'm not sure I could have changed my registration after the fact and ultimately didn't find anything new. Since I was already registered in the lottery, I didn't spend a lot of additional time hunting.

So while I do think the scavenger hunt is very Googleish, I still don't think the overwhelming majority of attendees will have gotten passes as a result, so I don't think this game really does much to tilt the needle. Most of the attendees will have fronted their $300 or $900 and will have been selected at random instead of by merit.

I'm still looking forward to the event but I can't help but be disappointed by the result and I'm not sure this particular selection process will have generated the best pool of attendees. Demand simply exceeds supply, and no matter what selection criteria have been used, someone more deserving will be left out. I don't necessarily qualify that by suggesting that I'm more deserving, just that this process accentuates it.

Ultimately it is Google's event to run and there is something to be said about providing an equal chance to everyone, but there are tradeoffs with this approach.

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

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.

Not to mention if you ebay it during the conference, as many people do, you often get several times the eventual retail price. Then just buy it cheap when it comes out.

They say there is no free lunch. Wondering what the rationale behind freebies is ?

The intent (on top of just basic "get our name out there" promotion) is to get devices into the hands of developers to make it more likely they will develop software for it. The sort of ultimate example of this (though obviously not as successful as hoped) is RIM basically giving PlayBooks away like candy to developers when it shipped. The thought being if developers have this device, they might be inspired to write software for it; or if developers have our specific Android device, they may give it special attention as a development/test target, which helps us.

In the case of Google IO though the freebies were such a good deal that many non-developers who are constantly looking to resell hot gadgets (the slickdeal-reading types who camp out at walmart before a new console release and try to buy 5 units so they can "flip" them on ebay) tend to come out of the woodwork when IO rolls around. This seems to contribute to the massive amount of registration interest Google IO gets relative to the size of the event (combined with the fact that all the talks are published in video form right after the conference) and the anecdotal rapid drop-off in attendees present at the conference from day to day.

Interesting... and frustrating. Certainly where I work, any new handset or tablet will be used for testing our apps. Freebies are most welcome; there's a lot of red tape involved in purchasing a device just for testing/validating.

Maybe they could key the freebie devices to your Google I.D. and use a non-OEM plain plastic ziplock so that the flippers will have to manually wipe it and list it as "open box" on Ebay.

Anyway, I enjoy watching the keynotes and classes from the comfort of my home office. You can't beat the price.

$900 + travel expenses + hotel/quarters expenses

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

Heh, Stan Carney is the man who deserves credit. I just posted a link to his blog ^^;

Wow, Hotline FTW. I remember it well. It still exists, actually, with some old Mac OS servers out there, still. Problem is, the transfer protocol tops out at something like 50kb/ps or something that's fairly silly today, so it's not that great for modern large file transfers...

Really? I remember it topping out much higher than 50k. I remember maxing my download speed at 800k. Must've been a low slots/high queue server.

As someone who used to dabble in Hotline servers, you could make enough bank to pay for your internet with those "find this word" directions. Most people would do it if they really wanted the stuff on the server, or they could pay, or they could upload. Really, it became a self-sustaining system.

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.

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?

"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."

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.

I think being able to write a web crawler is a better test for your development skills than opening a $25 developer account. And don't forget that most Android developers do not publish their work on their own private accounts.

Anyway, the easter eggs were just that: a small game for promotion and fun. There were around 300 of these - the Google+ I/O community alone has 43000 Members (Disclaimer: I got one 3 days after they started the easter eggs).

If Google's I/O team is smart they secretly check for peoples public activity through their Google+ account when they select winners in "the lottery". If they favor people who follow Google Developer pages or who liked some of the tech videos on youtube, they would already filter out a lot of the civilists.

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.

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

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com