Google I/O Sells Out In 20 Minutes 221
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.
is it the content or the SWAG? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Hopefully Google does the right thing (Score:4, Interesting)
If Google does the right thing, they'll find and cancel the scalped tickets - and do a second round.
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Sounds good (and hillarious) but I think it would be harder to pull off than one would think, even for Google.
How would Google identify which tickets were scalped? I guess they could make the tickets non-transferrable but that would affect people who bought tickets with the intention of going but later found out they couldn't and would give their tickets to someone else (or sell them at cost).
Re:Hopefully Google does the right thing (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess they could make the tickets non-transferrable but that would affect people who bought tickets with the intention of going but later found out they couldn't and would give their tickets to someone else (or sell them at cost).
Just make them non-transferrable but refundable and problem solved.
Google would buy them back (Score:2)
Solutions to Scalping (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Solutions to Scalping (Score:5, Informative)
There was an even better solution to Hannah Montana or one of those other Disney types a year or so back: buyer's name goes on the ticket, and only that person can get in.
The biggest problem is between bands demanding a certain amount of money per show to play, and the touring management companies who feed into it, raising ticket prices in the process. This mostly applies to older bands, but it's easy to see where it leads.
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Bands time is finite, so they can't increase supply forever. And many of those popular bands feel some responsibility to their fans who've supported them for years. That means they don't want to charge limit their audience to the rich. In this case, neither of your solutions are workable.
Fortunately, the Grateful Dead came up with a solution. Ticket lotteries. One entry per person, a small maximum number of tickets per entry. This way, at least you have a fair chance of getting a ticket, instead of i
Re:Solutions to Scalping (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
How about Google consider who they want in the audience, and make a strategy to get tickets to those people? They aren't trying to sell the most tickets or make the most money, but promote their technology. They could do simple things like: scatter pre-registration codes through tech channels months before, or have tech questions tied to the registration system, or make people identify their 3 main areas of interest and restrict tickets to those events, etc...
Solution type: Innovative
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Increasing supply doesn't really work for something like this, though. There are only so many people that can fit into the venue, and only so many days the Google engineers can take to actually present stuff.
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When you sign up for the lottery, you sign up for how many are in your party.
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Oh wow. They legalized scalping AND profited from that? I knew the Olympic committee was composed of evil scum but I hadn't considered they'd flout it so blatantly.
It would conflict with Google's mantra though if they copied this.
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The point is to GET RID OF SCALPING, not give Google an actual interest in continuing scalping.
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I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the problem with scalpers is far, far bigger than the problem you suggested.
If someone legitimately can't go, offer them a refund, and then Google can offer that ticket to the next person on the waiting list. Problem solved.
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WTF, this is capitalism. At its finest. Next you'll be asking them to spread around some of their money.
Exactly, the fact that their tickets are successfully being scalped simply proves that Google could have charged more per ticket. If the ticket price was equal to the perceived value, scalping would not be successful and scalpers would have to find another way to make money. The fact that they sold out in 20 minutes says that they should have opted to host the event at a bigger place.
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Since when does Capitalism require that someone charge the maximum price they can? Further, what is "efficient" about 3rd party scalpers entering in for the sole purpose of reselling for a profit?
Tickets should not be transferable. If you're going to buy tickets, then you had better have the intention of going.
Re:Hopefully Google does the right thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hopefully Google does the right thing (Score:4)
I think you're the one who should take a course in marketing or economics.
You're missing out on the fact that by "spending" money on tickets priced less than their perceived value a company may very well be trying to increase profits down the road rather than NOW NOW NOW THIS QUARTER! PROFITS! NOW! PROFITS! FIRE EVERYONE TO MAXIMIZE THIS WEEKS PROFITS! NOW! MONEY! NOW! YOU CAN BUY MY MOTHER FOR $10! OK! EIGHT BUCKS BUT I WANT IT IN CASH!
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Scalping tickets is NOT capitalism. Capitalism is supposed to be about the efficient allocation of resources. There's nothing efficient about having to to through a 3rd party to get tickets to a developer conference, when that 3rd party simply bought the tickets just to sell them at a markup. If anything, that's causing extra resources to be spent that otherwise wouldn't have to be, thus a glaring inefficiency.
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According to you, people would buy everything straight from the producer. That rarely happens in the real world. Everything you buy changes hands once, twice, maybe three or four times before you get to pick it up from the store shelf and put it in your shopping cart? Did you buy your car straight from Ford? No, you bought it from a Cal Worthington Ford. Did you buy your lettuce from the farmer? No, you bought it from Albertsons. Did Albertsons buy it from the farmer? No, they bought it from a distributor,
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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).
Would be really easy for Google to find out: stop giving away SWAG and measure how many people are ready to pay $900 for this.
Obviously, they won't do this, because the really like the attention this is getting
Better way to give out tickets (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Not really... (Score:2)
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
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Google could reward actual developers only by requiring they have an app registered to them/their company in the official app store.
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Just make the tickets named, and non-transferable. Tell people before sales that if your name doesn't match the ticket, you don't get in. Scalping over. Of course that doesn't stop the people who're just going to the conference for the hopes of netting some good swag, but the only true solution for that one would be some sort of accomplishments based invitation vetting process, which seems to be against the nature of these conferences.
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Odds are that any such question would be fairly easy to Google.
I think the best way to do so is to bind a ticket to a person, make them non-transferable but refundable, and hold a lottery to see who gets them. As tickets get refunded, people on the waiting list are given a chance to go.
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I think there was actually a way for developers to game the registration process. For example, the registration page was doing client-side validation on date, so setting the system clock on your machine forward to past 7am would let you agree to the terms and move on to the next phase before the 7am live time.
Unfortunately for me, I only thought to do that about 6:45am, so I wasn't able to figure out how to game the second step in time. Did anyone else navigate the whole path this way?
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Maybe instead of an online first-come first-serve
I'm not so sure this was the case. I applied, and after the first "Sign up" button there was a page that said something like
"We're looking for a ticket for you. Please don't refresh this page or you will have to start over"
It lasted about 3 minutes before going to the next page where you could select your T-Shirt size, food preference and a few more things.
I don't believe those 3 minutes were overload. Maybe when google said "We're looking for a ticket" they meant "we're looking you up, looking for an
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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.
No, Google should just auction them off on Ebay in the first place. It's hard to make a profit at scalping if the scalper has to pay more in the first place than the next highest bidder.
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But if the tickets were sold on eBay, the bids would go up so much that nobody could afford them!
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But if the tickets were sold on eBay, the bids would go up so much that nobody could afford them!
Except, you know, for the winning bidders.
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And we're right back in the problem we have with the scalpers: The price is too damn high.
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Except now you've said that only the rich get to go. That's no better than the situation we have now.
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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.
That won't help. They need to print your name on the ticket. If your ID doesn't match the name on the ticket, you don't get in.
Re:Better way to give out tickets (Score:5, Interesting)
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Why would you need this to get hired by Google?
If you want to work at Google, just go work there. They still hire massively worldwide.
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I think they should have some kind of Google programming question as a prerequisite for registration.
It needs to be something that would eliminate the PHB's.
"Hey Jim, ya mind filling out my registration for the Google shindig? They're asking about some weird techy stuff."
Granted, that may not be viable in a 20 minute window.
A Tesla? (Score:2)
Of course, everyone who gets in drives away in a free Tesla.
What reference am I missing here?
Re:A Tesla? (Score:5, Informative)
The ever increasing "stuff" that attendees get, a few years ago everyone got a Nexus One, a couple years ago I forget but last year people got a XOOM tablet and some other multi-hundred-dollar gizmo.
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Ah, thanks! Maaaan... In that case, I do wish I could go. I love new gizmos, especially the multi-hundred-dollar variety.
Re:A Tesla? (Score:4, Informative)
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Actually it was a Samsung Tab 10.1 with an Android on the back (limited edition), and a Chromebook?
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Historically, I/O attendees received giveaways that exceeded the ticket cost in value.
For example, 2011 attendees paid $350 I believe, and received, at a minimum, a tablet worth $500 (Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1).
This year, the ticket price was increased to $900, the question of course is - will the swag value increase or decrease? If it decreases or stays steady, it may not sell out so fast next year. If it increases to match the ticket price - this problem will continue because the conference becomes effect
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What self-entitlement? That device was given to me at the show. Not my employer.
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I think Apple just found their proper half insane/ half brilliant replacement for Jobs.
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They figured out how to clone Nikola Tesla in their 80:20 time. Everyone gets one.
I think Apple just found their proper half insane/ half brilliant replacement for Jobs.
Given some of the things he was building, I think Nikola Tesla was (like the fictional Sheldon Cooper) one lab accident away from becoming a supervillain.
My school's CS club is very disappointed (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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If they are indeed a couple of Java wizards with a strong interest in developing for Android, they don't need to go to Google IO to do so.
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What? No you don't. There are a few APIs that you have to do in C, but most of the Core Foundation stuff is Objective-C.
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Objective C is a superset of C, so if you know Objective C, you know C.
I don't know much about Objective C, so I'll accept that first part is true. However, as a general principle, one can't use formal logic to say that "language B is a superset of language A, therefore if you know language B you know language A".
For a start, it depends on one means by "know". For example, IIRC some of the C++ standards are supersets of C, but it doesn't follow that someone who learned C++ first will know C well. In fact, even though C++ inherits the C facilities (by definition), they're not
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Objective-C is a strict superset of C. C++ is not a strict superset of C. Your example doesn't work.
no scalping (Score:2)
All Google has to do is ban scalping of the tickets. You buy a ticket, YOU get in, not the holder of the ticket.
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Agreed. For all the technology and data store that Google has, they're probably be able to barcode the tickets to your DNA. It should be a no-transfer ticket, but you can turn your ticket back in and allow them to send them to wait-listed people if you decide you can't make it. Sort of an enforced don't-be-evil requirement for attendees!
Re:no scalping (Score:4, Interesting)
All Google has to do is ban scalping of the tickets. You buy a ticket, YOU get in, not the holder of the ticket.
How would one implement that while maintaining the ability for a business to decouple purchasing a ticket from the decision of which member of a development team gets to go?
So a business can buy a ticket for a to-be-named-later employee, but you gotta prove you're an employee of the company to use the ticket. You can get your money back up to a certain point in time, and that spot goes to the next person on a wait list. It's not that fucking hard to ban ticket scalping for these kinds of events.
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dunno.
ask how 3gsm does it.
hint: it's pricing the tickets accordingly so that they don't run out but you get a loooot of people to come, some of them sponsored by some company xyz some of them not.
if there's scalping going on then the PRICE WAS NOT RIGHT.
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Company name on ticket, company ID required to get in.
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I work for one with 100 employees and we have one.
If your business is sending 10 people at $900 a pop to Google i/o you can spend $49.00 on getting some ID's made.
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I can also set up a new company for an hours worth of time and 50 dollars in fees. Adding the badges to "Fictitional App Writers, Inc." won't hurt the bottom line all that much. And they're not going to detect it.
No, just let people get their own ticket. A company can decide to reimburse.
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I have a company picture ID, but it's also an electronic access card. Due to security considerations, it has no company or building information on it to make malicious usage more difficult should it be lost or stolen. Not really usable for third-party authentication.
Since there's no standards about private company IDs, there's no reason someone couldn't fake up one that was more-official looking than the one I actually have.
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Buy it in the name of a legitimate company prefixed with "designated employeee of".
Re:no scalping (Score:5, Insightful)
Link the ticket to the company and have the employee provide credentials to show they are a current employee. How was that hard to come up with?
"Yes, I do work for ScamScum Ticketing Inc. It says so right here in this letter - on their company letterhead! - which they conveniently sent me along with my overpriced ticket".
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The company tells the conference runners who they are sending and the person's identity is checked based on an agreed upon Form of ID.
I'm with you so far, but I still don't see how you distinguish between bona fide companies sending real employees, and scam companies sending "employees" (with genuine id!) who have paid over the odds for their tickets.
This is a long solved problem.
The solution you describe has existed for a long time - unfortunately it's the solution to a different problem. It does stop gatecrashers getting in to a conference they haven't paid for, but that's almost the opposite problem - these people have paid too much!
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How on earth would they do that with any authority? How does google know what an authentic Acme Software Employee badge looks like? I can have a badge made http://www.easyidcard.com/ [easyidcard.com] pretty cheaply and easily.
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How do you propose to enforce this magic?
Really? The same way they do at the airport.
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Google I/O will be using Perv Scanners?
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What magic? Is this year 1? You look at the ID, and then you check if it matches what is written on the ticket. People can be fucking stupid sometimes...
From what I saw... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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If you're forking over $300 - then the swag isn't free. It cost $300.
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point taken. :-D But last year at a minimum, everyone got a Galaxy Tab 10.1 and a Chromebook. If I would have ebay both of them, I would have made around $1200 (and tickets were $500 last year for full-price).
But I guess I could argue the $300 is covering food and drinks. They feed you breakfast and lunch for the 3 days of the conference. As well there is 1 night of partying (with free alcohol, and live music (last year it was Jane's Addiction)).
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Unless they're particularly inefficient, or you're a particularly heavy drinker/eater... they're making a profit of about $200-250 if you just look at applying it to the food.
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If you're going to correct people on basic economics, consider that the swag they get greatly exceeds the cost of the conference. It literally costs nothing. Now if you want to include hotel, airfare, that's another story, but it doesn't apply to every attendee.
Never buy Google I/O (Score:5, Funny)
A Better Way (Score:2, Interesting)
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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.
How many times are you going to post the same comment in the same thread? And why are people modding both comments up?
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I didn't even realize there was an objective to the game.
6K QPS (Score:3)
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).
Obvious solution (Score:2)
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Google employees and good friends didn't have to wait for tickets. My contemporary got his tickets couple weeks ago, and he may not even go...
rationing high-demand slots (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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I would think Google would want to base the tickets on how active people are on Google+ and how INactive they are on Facebook (no doubt they have a way to track that down). Yeah, I'd even use Google+ for some swag.
Re:First raspberry pi not goog IO (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
First world problem. (Score:2)
Shortage of tickets to google I/O and shortage of raspberry pi boards now equals food/clothing/housing shortages.
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I dunno. Sounds like sour grapes to me.
I attended Google I/O last year. From what I can remember of the people I spoke to at the mixer event, one was building Web apps for a major university, and most of the rest were eager Android developers from small shops. They tended to skew young. I definitely did not see many of the classic blue shirt/khaki corporate developer types.
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You and me ... we can start our own company ... hire smart people that hate the advertising model. Anonymous Cowards, Inc.
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Let the queued buyers click an option to offer to pay the added processing cost.
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And don't forget "Anonymous Coward".
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Apparently Google wants hackers to attend this year.
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So just go to a judge and have your name legally changed to "Anonymous Coward".
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OMG! That means there's going to be an influx of 488 people trying to join Google+ in the same month!
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It's the scale of the thing. Far far more people want to go than there are tickets/space. Google needs to hire out a football field plus its parking lot. Hell ... BUILD a football field complete with server farms under the stands.