There's certainly a profitable startup idea somewhere that targets improving ticket sales and purchases for hot items. Google itself is absolutely miserable in this area, and I think most other large sites are as well.
I'm not sure this problem is solvable. The capitalistic response to Google I/O tickets selling out is to increase the price until they don't. But that would be a PR distaster for Google and likely be contrary to what they actually want for their event.
Well, there are a number of areas for potential improvement. I know that the absolute number of tickets sold isn't really going to change, and the price isn't something a startup could fix. I was more thinking about qualities like server load, customer fairness, etc. Google Play went down when the Nexus 4 launched, gave incorrect information to customers, spat out ridiculous errors, etc. And it seems there is no end to the complaints about the lack of notification or timing for very qualified and excited people to purchase tickets to I/O. A method of holding tickets until the purchaser demonstration of value, for example. Or something. I don't know.
In the meantime, be sure to brush up on your coding skills. They’ll come in handy when the new application process opens in February. That’s all we can tell you for now, but we’d advise against making travel arrangements until then.
* Increase ticket prices and then corporate people push out indie developers.
* Increase venue size and then each attendee gets less value out of it, and there's an upper limit to venues anyways.
* Add a lottery and now your most loyal customers may not be able to go.
It honestly seems like the best solution is to just throw open the floodgates at an announced time, and assume the people who really want a ticket will be the ones most committed to getting one.
I don't understand why they wouldn't do an auction - their entire business relies on auctions for ads, and they even did their IPO as an auction. Seems like it would be a unique solution to the problem of charging for events like this
let people bid for tickets, they see the current lowest bid that got in so they can increase their bid, then charge everyone the lowest bid that got in
Unfortunate, looks like I won't be going this year like I planned. It's overlapping with BlackBerry Live, that goes from May 14-16 in Orlando. Would've liked to have gone to both, since I love both platforms. Looks like I'll just have to catch the Web casts again.
Granted, Google's future is much brighter than RIM's at this point, but raw stock price is a pretty bad way to convey that - it contains 0 information beyond what it costs to acquire one share in the company.
Right, but you listed Google and RIM's stock price as though comparing the two prices by themselves is significant. It isn't. RIM could have substantially more shares outstanding than Google.
Comparing their market caps? A little better. Comparing how their prices have changed over time? Probably a lot better. Comparing the two prices by themselves? Useless.
What is your original argument? Microsoft is also worth over $200 Billion but that doesn't mean Windows Phone is doing good. Or in other words, Google makes their money by selling ads, largely on desktops. Raw stock prices or market caps mean nothing.
I have not been. But I would expect a very large part of the value to be in networking - being surrounded by top industry experts, market leaders, etc will go a long way.
Networking is definitely one of the main reasons. It's why I'd encourage anyone who doesn't get tickets (so, given the odds, probably me and most people here!) to stop by one of the local satellite events the Google user groups run. They're good fun, and the larger ones live stream many of the sessions.
I've been to I/O the last three years and I've found it to be worth the price of admission, even if you ignore the free stuff they've given out. The sessions are streamed or filmed, but if this stuff is your bread and butter professionally it's well worth it to go in person and talk to fellow humans.
The networking opportunities are great. I have sat down at lunch and realized the guy next to me was a developer of an open source package I was using in an Android app I've published.
They usually have office hours sessions for the various developer platforms they have, where you can bring your questions to their dev-rel people and engineers.
They've also been doing some code labs where you can try out some new part of a platform in a guided manner. There's another networking opportunity there, the way it's laid out means you get to exchange help and get to know the people sitting around you.
Having gone last year I got in on the Glass preorder (which was exclusive to I/O attendees) and I'm looking forward to having an opportunity as a developer to get out ahead of this tech.
And they generally have a pretty fun afterparty lined up, if you're into robots that fly, music, and games.
Putting the pros and cons of the free hardware aside, I'm not sure getting rid of it would solve the demand problems. Apple charges $700 more for WWDC tickets, give away no hardware, and it still sells out in under two hours.
I agree that you can't do anything if your raw demand is too high. But I think free hardware creates artificial demand, where some people are there just to get the hardware, and other people are there because the hardware makes the financials a bit easier to swallow.
Personally, I don't own an Android device, but I'd probably sign up if I lived in the area. It would be fun and I'd probably break even so why not?
Yes...this was noticeable even though I don't care much about Google I/O. Last year I saw someone I follow on twitter announce that he had a ticket and it became quite obvious to me that he's a swagster. Great guy but not one of the people whom I think would add the most value to a developer conference. :)
It's fine to sell out a developer conference if there is high demand by developers. The problem with I/O, is that there are some who go, even though they aren't core Google platform developers.
I consistently hear the key reason to go to WWDC, is that a good portion of the Apple Engineers take the week off, and go there to answer, one-on-one, questions that external developers have regarding APIs and use cases. Quite often, the person answering the question, is the Apple Engineer who wrote that API in the first place.
They could also raise the ticket price. The demand is high, the supply is limited, and having lots of digits keeps people from flooding the registration page.
I have now been to every Google I/O, and I will say that this last year was exceptionally disappointing (by which I mean that I feel like it fell off a cliff as opposed to continuing a gradual decline). It used to be that you could go to the "office hours" areas, which were setup like rooms full of the developers that work on various projects, and kind of "hang out" with developers, talking about use cases and issues you had run into.
Last year, these were replaced with "help desks", and while the people there were very friendly (and while I really appreciated the one guy who went pretty far out of his way to obtain a stock image for a Nexus 7 when it seemed like I might have needed to flash one), all of the people identified themselves as "developer relations", not "developers", and none of the people I had gotten to know as key members of their team from previous I/O events were present.
(I also, like others, find the situation of "it is economically incorrect to not attempt to go to I/O due to handouts" ludicrous, and I wish they would stop doing it, even though I know it would make some of my friends who often attend with me sad. Google has tried to improve the situation by having handouts be given as part of talks and having the timing of central ones staggarred across the days, but it doesn't solve the core problem that there is no entrance cost to attending this conference.)
That has not been my experience with other companies (such as Amazon), and did not seem to be the case for these people at Google I/O (whom I actually had a conversation with about this). Regardless, there is a big difference between someone working on something somewhere in the product and the people in charge of each of the major subsystems (whichb is the specific experience from previous years).
>Last year, these were replaced with "help desks"
This was my main problem with IO last year. The informal developer gathering office hours from previous years were the best part of IO.
I convinced some colleagues to go last year on the merits of that alone. Was seriously disappointed with the help desk format it devolved into.
Your comment is very intriguing. Do you mean as attendees or as partners in the Developer Sandbox Showcase Thing that Google always set up? And also, why?
A large part of the value of going to Ivy League schools is schmoozing with other Ivy League schoolers. If nothing else, I think the same applies here.
Wish they would rent all of Moscone center instead of just Moscone West. I clicked to buy a ticket the second it opened last time and still didn't get one through that means. I was lucky enough to win a coding contest for my ticket the year before and work for an OEM the next year, who seemed to get some pity tickets because they kicked all the OEMs out to make more room for fake living room setups for the Q.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadA lottery, maybe?
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/11/google-io-2012-extend...
In the meantime, be sure to brush up on your coding skills. They’ll come in handy when the new application process opens in February. That’s all we can tell you for now, but we’d advise against making travel arrangements until then.
* Increase ticket prices and then corporate people push out indie developers.
* Increase venue size and then each attendee gets less value out of it, and there's an upper limit to venues anyways.
* Add a lottery and now your most loyal customers may not be able to go.
It honestly seems like the best solution is to just throw open the floodgates at an announced time, and assume the people who really want a ticket will be the ones most committed to getting one.
let people bid for tickets, they see the current lowest bid that got in so they can increase their bid, then charge everyone the lowest bid that got in
(Keynotes from a few recent Google I/Os.)
https://www.google.com/finance?q=GOOG Google: $799.71/share
Relevance? Spend your valuable time at the conferences of companies that have a viable future.
Company doesn't have a future? Down to zero with you.
Comparing their market caps? A little better. Comparing how their prices have changed over time? Probably a lot better. Comparing the two prices by themselves? Useless.
RIM: 6.79B Google: 263.63B
Chart comparing their stock prices: https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1...
I believe the data I've added reinforces my original argument.
It's certainly not the best thing ever by any stretch, but it is out there and seems to be getting bigger.
The networking opportunities are great. I have sat down at lunch and realized the guy next to me was a developer of an open source package I was using in an Android app I've published.
They usually have office hours sessions for the various developer platforms they have, where you can bring your questions to their dev-rel people and engineers.
They've also been doing some code labs where you can try out some new part of a platform in a guided manner. There's another networking opportunity there, the way it's laid out means you get to exchange help and get to know the people sitting around you.
Having gone last year I got in on the Glass preorder (which was exclusive to I/O attendees) and I'm looking forward to having an opportunity as a developer to get out ahead of this tech.
And they generally have a pretty fun afterparty lined up, if you're into robots that fly, music, and games.
2012 free hardware: Samsung Galaxy Nexus ($300?), Asus Nexus 7 ($200), Nexus Q ($300), Samsung Chromebox ($330)
That's for a ticket price of $900.
Personally, I don't own an Android device, but I'd probably sign up if I lived in the area. It would be fun and I'd probably break even so why not?
I consistently hear the key reason to go to WWDC, is that a good portion of the Apple Engineers take the week off, and go there to answer, one-on-one, questions that external developers have regarding APIs and use cases. Quite often, the person answering the question, is the Apple Engineer who wrote that API in the first place.
Now it's just a dog & pony consumer technology show, and Google has so many irons in the fire that each technology only gets a few, if any, talks.
They should go back to having a true developer conference, and have some other conference for the big wigs to play Steve Jobs.
...but of course I'll try and get a ticket this year.
Last year, these were replaced with "help desks", and while the people there were very friendly (and while I really appreciated the one guy who went pretty far out of his way to obtain a stock image for a Nexus 7 when it seemed like I might have needed to flash one), all of the people identified themselves as "developer relations", not "developers", and none of the people I had gotten to know as key members of their team from previous I/O events were present.
(I also, like others, find the situation of "it is economically incorrect to not attempt to go to I/O due to handouts" ludicrous, and I wish they would stop doing it, even though I know it would make some of my friends who often attend with me sad. Google has tried to improve the situation by having handouts be given as part of talks and having the timing of central ones staggarred across the days, but it doesn't solve the core problem that there is no entrance cost to attending this conference.)
I convinced some colleagues to go last year on the merits of that alone. Was seriously disappointed with the help desk format it devolved into.
Care to explain why?
Hope they do this because I want to see some amazing Google Glass apps when they launch this year.