Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) eagerly anticipated World Wide Developer Conference, or WWDC, is slated to occur between June 2nd and June 6th this year, an announcement this morning revealed. This immensely popular event enables developers who make us of the iOS and Mac ecosystems to mingle with Apple’s personnel, discussing the direction of current design and developments that can be expected in the near future. This year, Apple has added a lottery as a method of obtaining tickets to the usually sold-out gathering.
Generally, the tickets to the WWDC are sold out within a few minutes of sales going live. This gives potential attendees an immense advantage if they happen to live in certain time zones. The majority of people coming to WWDC in recent years, in fact, have been residents of the United States’ East Coast, whose one-hour time zone advantage enabled them to snap up most tickets before developers from elsewhere in the country had even switched on their computers in the morning.
This arrangement is obviously a problem if Apple Inc. (AAPL) wants to keep fresh ideas and a good mix of people attending its events. Technical innovation usually comes about from bringing together as diverse a group of thinkers and designers as possible, and anything that narrows the pool too much has a cramping effect on inventiveness. The previous ticket sale model had narrowed selection to a single geographic region and time zone.
Today’s break with this pattern will enable people from other parts of the United States, and indeed from all around the world, to have a chance at visiting the globally renowned event.
Registration for the lottery is free, though the registrant must be a member of one of Apple’s (AAPL) three developer programs, the Mac Developer Program, the iOS Developer Program, or the iOS Developer Enterprise Program. Lottery entries will remain open through April 7th. A drawing will then occur on April 14th, at which time a number of random people will be picked to have the chance to buy a ticket to the WWDC at the standard $1,599.
Since attendance is limited to 5,000 people, the new lottery system opens a large door of opportunity to those who would otherwise probably never have attended. Though only a small fraction of those likely to enter their names into the drawing will “win,” and a few of those will back out of actually buying the ticket when given the opportunity, the system seems likely to give many highly intelligent developers their first real chance to attend the conference, learn the latest, and even make their voices heard to some degree.
