Google I/O 2012

[rdl]

I wish they'd take a small number of tickets (10? 100?) and auction them off, with the surplus over retail price going to charity.

In general I think all sold out/exclusive events should do this kind of thing; it raises hype, makes the people who get a ticket for normal price feel like they got a deal, and helps the charity. Anyone willing to spend e.g. $10k of their own or a company's money to attend is likely to have some value at the event as well (investor? lawyer?).

You don't want to do this for all the tickets, or even a large number of tickets, because having all 5k people be from Fortune 500 companies willing to spend $5k/ticket makes it a lot less interesting than an event with mostly independent developers, but 100 out of 5000 isn't going to change things much, either.

[rbanffy]

The best way to make developers go is to lower prices and not give away fancy, unique, unavailable elsewhere hardware.

You can also make passing a small programming test a requirement.

[k-mcgrady]

Although it's good to give money to charity I don't see the point in this. The tickets would most likely go to non-devs. This is an event to help developers learn about new tools and platforms. As many tickets as possible should be going to them.

[guelo]

This already happens through craigslist and ticket brokers, without the charity piece.

[cr4zy]

Looks like no preregistration for past attendees like previous years:

https://plus.google.com/111395306401981598462/posts/Ty3M5UDd...

Ruben Orduz - +Google Developers No pre-registration for past attendees? Also confirmation about no test for registration would be much appreciated.

Google Developers - Just to confirm, registration will be first come, first served on March 27th. We spent a lot of time thinking about this and decided that first come, first served is the fastest and fairest way to give everyone interested a chance to attend.

[kelnos]

I agree with this policy -- why should past attendees get preferential treatment?

[mesh]

I was just able to pre-register (based on past attendance).

[mtholking]

not true, I just got my I/ON pre-registration email

[siculars]

Academic price:

2010 $100

2011 $150

2012 $300

I mean, hey, I'm not complaining but wow. Take a look at that inflation. I only mention it because when I was forced to sign up for Google Wallet they presented me a list of my transaction history. And there it was staring me in the face in all its inflationary glory. Maybe they will mandate that people must wear only Googly colors or use their gmail emails to sign up... Oh, right.

[ben1040]

$50 increase, every year, but it was a 2-day conference. So add 50% to account for it being 50% longer, and you get $300. Seems to make sense.

[mrpollo]

might be nothing but i found traces of "vipcode" on the javascript of the building game here:

https://developers.google.com/events/io/input-output/

code here:

https://developers.google.com/js/script_foot.js

search for "vipcode"

[thekieran]

digging through that stuff, if anyone does get to register at least we know he or she will get a shirt

[henryl]

Anyone have a guess as to why they use a jpg sprite instead of an animated gif for the bouncing orb? Is it just a color space thing?

[jashkenas]

No need to guess. Here's a very complete and detailed article about precisely why and how this particular animation works the way it does:

http://awardwinningfjords.com/2012/03/08/image-sequences.htm...

[vibrunazo]

That's an interestingly huge sprite sheet indeed.

https://developers.google.com/apps/images/io/particle_hover-...

I would guess it's because of the color palette maybe? GIF was only 256 colors last I used it (over a decade ago). SO maybe they tried a gif animation, noticed some weird looking graphical artifacts because of the color difference from background to foreground. Then decided use a JPG sprite sheet instead for more colors?

[karolist]

OT: what tools allow automatic sprite generation based on object movement such as this?

[ender7]

Or possibly they get better compression with a JPG.

[moses1400]

Think about this... Google charges you $900 to attend a conference that they will "teach you" how to build apps that work on their systems which benefit them way more than you.

I know Apple charges a developer fee as well.

Amazing how this hacker/developer world works - pay for access to their app stores, pay for conferences to learn how to make apps for their app stores, etc.

[BHSPitMonkey]

Bear in mind that all of the I/O developer session videos get posted at no cost after the conference.

[mhansen]

It's not zero-sum. The devs get a lot out of it, too. All the devs that buy tickets to IO think that IO benefits them more than the $900 they're parting with.

[Achshar]

this amount includes the gadgets that they give to people. last year there were three if i remember correctly. one was for game devs only.

[vincentmac]

Good to know I can fax them if I have any questions. https://developers.google.com/events/io/register

[fourstar]

That's as techy as Sacramento gets.

[alain94040]

PS: if you are complaining about the price, it's time to show your entreprenerial spirit and organize a free unconference at the same time and nearby. Don't complain, do something!

[samstave]

Thats the thing that sucks about such events; $900 is very expensive.

If anyone wants to sponsor a fellow HNer, I'll give you a bunch of digital Karma :)

[vibrunazo]

Doesn't the free phones pay for it? I'd suppose those early limited edition devices are worth more than the ticket.

[stevejabs]

Cheaper than WWDC and it's likely you'll get a bunch of free hardware.

[moses1400]

Double the price of last year.

[elefont2]

there is a bright side to it - the 'sold out in a hour' situation last year was ridiculous. While i would have preferred a coding challenge to eliminate that problem, a price increase is another method of fixing it.

[johnzimmerman]

It is, but the increased price might be because there is an extra day this year.

[alanh]

A bit annoying they force you to sign up for both Google+ and Google Wallet to attend.

[fourstar]

Why? They'll probably give you a phone integrated with Google Wallet, so it'd make sense to have you using it beforehand.

[ZenDan]

This was going to be my first year at IO until I saw the ticket price. $900!!!

[brh_jr]

Same here I thought it was going to be free. Wishful, naive...

[vibrunazo]

I'm trying out the demo chrome experiment on the page. It seems there's a bug that the "Keep trying" pop up just won't go away after the tutorial. Or is it just me? I'm using Chrome 17.0.963.65.

[breckinloggins]

Some bugs I noticed (Chrome 17.0.963.79):

- There seems to be several bounding box issues for collision detection. Specifically, the track component affects the surrounding space in odd ways.

- If you move a small component inside the radius of a larger component, there appears to be no way to select the smaller component without moving the larger component back out of the way. I was expecting a "click again to select the next object in the z-order" functionality.

[rplnt]

Does not work in Opera... until "masking as Firefox". Then it's just slow. Still don't get why to block it out though...

[unicorn_box]

Ball has to make it through the output on the right to finish! Need to win the tutorial to complete!

[toonse]

$900 is not that much, I'm actually surprised it's so low.

A GDC All Access pass is $1,950, and a GDC Main Conference pass (typical) is $1,350.

[portman]

Agreed.

And Joel Spolsky's "Business of Software" conference is $1600 for two days, and Microsoft's PDCs were $2200 for 3 days.

This is about 1/2 of the market rate for major multi-day tech conferences.

[krosaen]

MVP?

https://developers.google.com/events/io/input-output/ahNzfmd...

edit: looks like you might need to open up in incognito to go straight to the machine I built (2 parts)

[justinsb]

Nice idea. I built a one part device.

Sadly it looks like there's a bug in Google's saving code, so there's an extra (completely unnecessary) wall.

https://developers.google.com/events/io/input-output/ahNzfmd...

If you're going to share your output, make sure that what you're sharing is what you saved!

Edit: And on top of that, it depends on your screen size. Hopefully the registration system doesn't have as many problems!

[neilparikh]

Does anyone know if high school students qualify for academic pricing? I'm assuming they don't, as most places that offer a education discount only offer it for university students, but maybe I'll get lucky.

[ek]

I attended I/O twice in high school and received the academic pricing without incident. I do know that not having been 18 either time, I had to get my parents to sign some sort of a waiver form, but it wasn't a big deal.

[Kopion]

https://developers.google.com/events/io/input-output/ahNzfmd...

[mattieuga]

Anybody notice how the io machines are completely resolution based? i.e if you don't run it at the same resolution it was created, it won't work?

[alphamale3000]

Google tax! Hail to our new Google overlords.