GigaOM

Because I am the first to post in the comments!

I guess being the first to comment will not count as a valid reason :-)

Here are couple of real reasons
- early stage company building a social application on Google appengine. having access to information straight from the horse’s mouth would be a great jumpstart
- Early stage = broke = cheap founders. free is always welcome

I deserve to go more than anyone else because I am sure it will be a comfortable environment to doze off and catch up on sleep :)

On a serious note, a couple of weeks ago, I just began working on a new web-based project (a lot more than just a website) which will continue for the next 3-4 months. Since I am new to this and doing it on my own, I can use all the help I can get in terms of getting upto speed with open tools and standards for the purpose. This will hopefully accelerate my work and/or give me new ideas/perspectives.

In return, I’ll share my experiences here :)

I would be very interested in learning more about the App Engine and will in exchange create a write up about it.

I’m willing to take the time and effort to trek out to California from the middle of the country to attend, given enough lead time to plan. I bet no one else within several hundred miles will, but people nearby will gladly listen to me tell about what I saw and learned…and I take great notes. It’s not quite bringing the road show out here, but it’s pretty good.

I deserve the free ticket because I’ve built a breaking-even business around a useful Facebook app with more than 400,000 users. For some of my next-level ideas I’d love the get a bit of an inside track on what’s going on chez Goog.

I just got my appengine account and I started playing with it. I would love a chance to ask them questions regarding issues and roadblocks that I encountered. Perhaps the 10 people that goes can come up with tips for how to better use Google tools.

Because I have tokens to our alpha test site in exchange. ;)

I deserve to go the most because i’m a struggling computer science student here in San Francisco. The choice between eating for the week and $50 dollars for the conference is a tough one but i’d probably have to choose the food. I’d really love to go I/O and learn a lot about these APIs. Help support for the future of CS! :D

Two weeks ago, we were not sure we going to enter the Android developer challenge. Last Thursday, we decided to give it a shot. The new dateline is Monday, April 14. We have to port Fon11 and Open Landmark (iPhone version) to Android in less than 10 days. Can we make it?

On Saturday, we concluded our mobile Web version is not going to cut it. We can’t invoke the Location API, native map and address book to integrate our app with the Android platform.

We have to write native Android apps.

Android XML-based UI layout is easy to recreate the Fon11 UI on Android. We need to figure out how to manipulate the UI elements with dynamic data. This shouldn’t be too difficult. Calling Android location API, native map and address book is quite straight forward.

This is Tuesday night now. We got together at a code camp at 1 PM last Sunday. Ten of us got together. Most of them were my former/current students. Patrick and Tim led the project with Thomas, P. Hetroy, Eric, HsiaoYun, Lex, Chetan and Martin. By 8 PM, we have all the Fon11 pages created on Android. Next, we have to modify the UI dynamically from Java.

Tonight Patrick, Tim and Lex are trying to figure how to invoke REST APIs on the server side. Oh, oh, we have a problem consuming the JSON object from JSON. This is not an Android problem. It is a known problem with Jersey (we use Jersey to create our REST API). Okay, Lex wrote a hack.

Everyone really likes Android now. They are sold. The programming model is cool. Full Java on mobile is cool. Well, I think we have a native Android Fon11 app to enter the challenge. We will submit both Fon11 and OpenLandmark. Fon11 as a native Android app. OpenLandmark as a Web app. Fon11 will launch OpenLandmark.

The iPhone Web app version is 100% compatible on Android browser. Android is an iPhone competitor.

I can use a pass or two. They are not for me. I want to give them to my students at the code camp.

why you, more than anyone else, deserve to go

My simple answer is: Why not me? What do you have against me more than anyone else in not giving me a ticket. Tell me 5 reasons why I do not deserve to go? :-)

Hello, I’m from Russia and I would very much like to attend the conference. I am going to be in SF at the time of the conference, so please, please, please, can I have a ticket :)?

I think it’ll be a awesome chance to learn more about Google and its plans for the (mobile) Web.

We’re pretty big on mobile here in Asia (iPhone reviews by Asian bloggers on Gizmodo notwithstanding), so it’ll be pretty great to be able to bring some of new stuff Google is working on back here to share =)

I deserve to go because I need Google’s help launching and marketing my new Om Malik action figure with exploding cigar (insert begging sound here…).

Starting a company in an emerging market that focuses on using technology to bring the unbanked into the formal economy. We are excited about how android and other Google initiatives can change the economics in the mobile / PC world and how that can cause a paradigm shift in business models at the bottom of the pyramid.

Please please please help me get a ticket

I’m a graduate student studying digital communication at Johns Hopkins. My thesis, starting this summer, deals with computer mediated communication and how it affects our everyday language. The opportunity to pique the brains of one of the leading digital communication firms and get time with their new products would be a wonderfully educational experience.

As the author of Symbian OS Internals, who is now concentrating on competitive analysis, I’m quite well placed to make comparisons in an article for you.

I shall vow never to pitch a social networking concept to any potential investor.

Because I have people skills, damn it.

Actually, I have no good reason. I work full-time as a Senior Programmer Analyst plus run side business as a IT consultant. Barely have time to even sit down and read my magazines or hundred rss feeds. I enjoy just reading articles and having conversation about inspiring ideas about our global community.

It’s always has been my dream to know about the tools and technologies that Google internally uses to build such wonderful products. Google I/O is an opportunity for that. It would be really interesting to know about project development strategies, application architectures, the API structures, deep binding between all the Google products etc.

I am working on a concept with ad-sense for Speech and I am sure attending Google I/O will be very very beneficial.

I don’t think I qualify to be in your top 9, to be honest.

Frankly, I DO NOT see how google will be able to rally forward the developer community with it’s code labs. Yes, yes, I see the value in GWT frameworks, built a proto or two for others to pitch. Played around with the Android some - wicked good samples and tools. Love it (quite a turnaround for an sdk that was just skids late last year..) @thesame time Dalvik seems neither open nor standard. App Engine promises much.

But is there real momentum behind all this: That rock solid creator guru at the far end of the pipe in a google campus/posting near by, when shit hits the fan? Are users asking the right questions or just fishing ? How does google go from providing a bunch of interesting tools to being a platform provider with real wind behind; Replicate something like say, java or eclipse (ibm) or what open source has been able to in recent times. (Conceded that it does have the rallying force/trust of being the world’s homepage…)

Regardless, that’s GOOG’s gambit. The game’s begun. I like what it is doing to the mobile community and to the web too.0h.. Time to see the creators in flesh & blood and flush the mktg from the real and blog away..

.. just curious.

I admire Google and will really like to learn best practices from an insiders point of view. I have just joined a new start up and would love to apply what I learn in this conf.
Quiet frankly, I don’t think my company can afford the registration fee so it’ll be awesome to get this chance from you guys.

Because I only use typewriters.

I think I’d like to go because I wanna learn… more. Been developing with various web technologies for many years, listening and learning from those geniuses would be a wonderful experience.

I probably can afford $400, but free would be fun and a motivation to go :-).

Thanks for the offer.

Leveraging the new cloud tools will democratize the development process, and as the support cloud grows so will the circle of locations where it is possible to do exciting work. We are a little start-up trying to do a new form of top-down semantic search while located in a place where such ambitions would be ludicrous without the cloud of remote services represented by Google IO. We are based in Ohio (among the cows), but does that matter when services such as Google IO make new ideas more important than infrastructure? Google IO, and all the cloud services, are about much more than APIs and server farms, they will let a thousand flowers bloom in places that previously were deserts. Please send at least one of our team.

As a young, volunteer, national CIO for my fraternity, I’d like to use my opportunity to attend Google I/O in order to explore how Google’s new ideas and technologies can help small organizations and nonprofits like my fraternity collaborate and operate more effectively and efficiently.

Some questions I would explore at the conference:

• As a national social fraternity, how can I leverage new social technologies to connect our members across the nation and recruit new members in new ways?
• How can I use Google’s emerging mobile technologies to enhance our own events, conventions, and conferences, where we manage registrations of dozens of people?
• Using Maps/Geo technologies, how can I take our current membership data, apply it to Google Earth/Maps, so our decision makers can visualize where our members are moving over time, and where we have the highest alumni density, so we may be able to identify low risk areas to cultivate new chapters and colonies?
• As a nonprofit, our tight budgets require creativity in finding cheap but effective solutions to our business needs. How could I use Google App Engine as a platform for our organization’s data and web applications such that they can be deployed quickly and at a much lower cost than we have today?

I believe I deserve to go because I can already see the potential of how these technologies could impact my organization and others like it, and attending Google IO will throw me straight into the deep end and give me knowledge I need to begin turning these visions into solutions.

Thank you for your consideration!

me me me.. coz

• we are frugal like hell
• garage stage building social apps on opensocial and android..
• we contribute back to developer community
• I am pissed google is charging anyways for the developers conference.. cant fathom why?

Well, as crazy as it sounds, I’m building a local/mobile search engine. Yeah, I know, who isn’t?

I’m doing it by myself and on minimal money. Neither of those are by choice, and I would say that “by myself” is the biggest challenge. I’m currently located in the central US where the cost of living is low, and so is the density of potential co-founders.

On top of the obvious AppEngine knowledge gained, attending the conference would also give me a chance to meet like-minded individuals who might be a fit for my project.

Being forced to work with minimal money has actually been a blessing. It has forced me to be creative with issues that you would otherwise throw money/servers at to solve.

I’ve got enough local data to get started, I’ve got a decent url and naming structure, and I’ve created a localization routine that is fast, flexible, and extensible. (Editors – Feel free to ask me more on this via email).

Basically every conference topic applies to what I’m building. I can do it with little money. I believe I can do it by myself if that’s how it has to be. I cannot do it without knowledge, and I believe this conference would be a big boost to that.

Because… I’m broke!

Seriously though, because I’m bootstrapping my startup. I would love the chance to meet and mingle with industry leaders, and learn an amazing amount of information in a short time from a great line up of familiar faces and technical sessions.

I insatiably crave more information about AppEngine and Android. With all of these great technologies at our fingertips, more than ever we need all of the knowledge we can get to write the best applications we can for our users (as developers.)

That, and I’ve only been to California once. I need the warm weather in my east coast bones!

Thanks for taking the time to read and consider my entry.

I, more than anyone else, deserves to go to Google I/O because:

1) I am a .NET developer but am teaching myself Python simply because I find AppEngine to be a very interesting development platform. Attending I/O will help me get up to speed much quicker.

2) In order to help others who are also trying to learn more about AppEngine and Python I setup a Ning site at (link) containing how-to videos.

3) I have contributed to an Open Source project for almost five years now and it would be nice to be on the receiving end of a freebie for a change.

4) I snagged the username “appengine” on Google AppEngine … that has got to count for something…

i’ve been up for 3 days for finishing up a project… my brain is blank now, but i know that this is something i really wanna go, even to keep up for another 3 days… i decide to post before going to sleep. thanks!

i really really really want to go…..

Do announce when you’ve made your choices. You don’t have to specify who got the tickets, but it’ll be good to know to exhale.