Google I/O Registration 2014

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.