Google I/O Registration 2014 • Hacker News Board

Re: Google I/O Registration 2014

#31

Post by bookwormAT » Wed, Apr 23, 2014, 12:44 AM UTC

lighthazard wrote: post #26

georgemcbay wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

$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.

Re: Google I/O Registration 2014

#32

Post by fernandotakai » Wed, Apr 23, 2014, 1:04 AM UTC

throwaway1979 wrote: post #17

just2n wrote: post #11

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…

> 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.

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

Re: Google I/O Registration 2014

#33

Post by chinpokomon » Wed, Apr 23, 2014, 2:47 AM UTC

mahyarm wrote: post #5

chinpokomon wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

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.