I have a lot of practice buying first come first serve tickets as a sometimes occasional scalper, and I'm good at it. In the industry, scalpers would have labeled this onsale as "suspicious", as in a lot of tickets were likely held back and there probably were far fewer than 5000 tickets onsale.<p>I've hit no available tickets 4 times now. My advice to everyone reading this is to keep trying until 8AM in case they are releasing the tickets in batches.<p>EDIT: Definitely batches, got 1 at exactly 7:15.
Yes, I managed to claim an academic ticket and then the payment page was timing out and I wasn't sure why. Turns out it was Ghostery, but once I disabled it, it worked. I wonder what happens for all the people who have claimed a ticket but not paid. Will Google release their tickets and sell them? Call them and tell them they owe 300/900 dollars?<p>It's pretty clear that Google needs to restructure this event if they want it to continue to have meaning as a developer conference. This sort of waste of people's time, only to have tickets sell out in 30 seconds or whatever ridiculous number is just not valuable.<p>What would Google have to do to maintain the substance of the conference? Simply promise that there won't be any free toys given away? I missed out on I/O 2011 after having attended in 2009 and 2010 because bad people went simply for the hundreds of dollars worth of free and early-release hardware Google hands out.<p>I would have paid 300 dollars for the conference regardless of whether Google gave me the latest gadget.
Has to be batches. Nothing else explains why it would say "no tickets available AT THIS TIME" several times in a row, then suddenly open up and let a few people get a ticket.<p>That said, I don't have one. Waiting for an academic ticket too.
Oh well, I was wrong. Official page says that it is sold out! <a href="https://developers.google.com/events/io/register" rel="nofollow">https://developers.google.com/events/io/register</a>
This is ridiculous, the sell out time has gone from days to 10mins (last year) to 30 seconds this year, even at $900! At this rate, next year they'll be gone in microseconds.
I'm assuming others get to a "There are no tickets available at this time" alert and then you have to start over. At least, that is what is happening to me.
I finally got through and registered as of 7:16<p>Edit: I got "no tickets available at this time" several times before getting through so don't give up.