Richard Giles

I’m at University Cafe in Palo Alto having a Mocha Smoothy, that will knock your socks off with a nice caffeine hit. I flew up this morning from San Diego to meet with an executive at Sun Microsystems in Menlo Park. I had time to kill, and love Palo Alto, so swung past.

Yesterday’s last day of ETech was a disappointment. It felt like it should have had a parting keynote. Instead we all sat in cramped rooms, and tried to use the failing wifi. I recorded a 20 minute podcast to sum up some of my thoughts at The Gadget Show. I should probably do another soon, because there was much more than I reported. It probably acts as a cursory overview.

I went to Borders, just up the road from here, to by Max Barry‘s novel, Company. I love his work, and promised myself when I interviewed him that I’d grab a copy when in the U.S.

The interesting part of the free wifi I’m now using is it’s business model. It’s free, and it seems they blanket most of University Avenue with access. However, when dropping into Amazon I noticed that they use Squid to replace the URL so they can get referral fees. I’m guessing that they do it with a bunch of other online stores/services. It makes for an interesting idea, and there is probably a business in making small devices that can drop into well visited locations that generates revenue from auto-referrals.