Ged Carroll

Category: web of no web | 無處不在的技術 | 보급 기술 | 普及したテクノロジー

The web of no web came out of a course that I taught at the La Salle School of Business at the University Ramon Llull in Barcelona on interactive media to a bunch of Spanish executive MBA students. The university wanted an expert from industry and they happened to find me by happenstance. I remember contact was made via LinkedIn.

I spent a couple of weeks putting together a course. But I didn’t find material that covered many of things that I thought were important and happening around us. They had been percolating around the back of my mind at the time as I saw connections between a number of technologies that were fostering a new direction. Terms like web 2.0 and where 2.0 covered contributing factors, but were too silo-ed

So far people’s online experience had been mediated through a web browser or an email client. But that was changing, VR wasn’t successful at the time but it was interesting. More importantly the real world and the online world were coming together. We had:

  • Mobile connectivity and wi-fi
  • QRcodes
  • SMS to Twitter publishing at the time
  • You could phone up Google to do searches (in the US)
  • Digital integration in geocaching as a hobby
  • The Nintendo Wii controller allowed us to interact with media in new ways
  • Shazam would listen to music and tell you what song it was
  • Where 2.0: Flickr maps, Nokia maps, Yahoo!’s Fireeagle and Dopplr – integrated location with online
  • Smartphones seemed to have moved beyond business users

Charlene Li described the future of social networks as ‘being like air’, being all around us. So I wrapped up all in an idea called web of no web. I was heavily influenced by Bruce Lee’s description of jeet kune do – ‘using way as no way’ and ‘having no limitation as limitation’. That’s where the terminology that I used came from. This seemed to chime with the ideas that I was seeing and tried to capture.

  • George Gilderism + more things

    George Gilderism

    An interesting debate on what I would term “George Gilderism” of the techno-utopia is just around the corner versus the concern that innovation is slowing. George Gilder is the author of Telecosm; which encapsulated techno-utopian optimism at its peak in the mid-1990s; just as the web was coming into its own. ‘George Gilderism’ has since been brought to issues such photo and video imaging through to a blockchain based web.

    I’ve been making my way slowly through The Rise and Fall of American Growth which makes a convincing argument against ‘George Gilderism’. Stewart Brand in his work The Whole Earth Discipline makes a tepid case for ‘George Gilderism’. Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants suggests that technological progress almost has a will to happen. And that will or technium as he puts it is running at increasing cadence which seems to counter the idea of slowing innovation. Kelly doesn’t make a compelling case for ‘George Gilderism’ either, technological progress brings its own problems. Innovation runs at different speeds at different times, in different fields.

    Here’s Intel executive Stacy Smith on what would have happened to the car industry if it had been able to reap the benefits of innovation in the same what the semiconductor field had:

    If you apply the same metric to something like gas mileage, it says you could drive to the sun from Earth on a single gallon of gas.’

    If there were a Moore’s Law in the car industry, you could drive to the sun on a gallon of gas – MarketWatch (April 1, 2017)

    Noah Smith makes the case for optimism here: Answering the Techno-Pessimists (complete) – Noahpinion and the Applied Divinity Studies blog makes the case for the great stagnation – Isolated Demands for Rigour in New Optimism | Applied Divinity Studies

    Finance

    The rise of crypto laundries: how criminals cash out of bitcoin | Financial Times – so it’s a threat to offshore financial industry? There are so many things wrong with cryptocurrencies, but this seems like an odd flaw to pick on.

    Share price ‘pop’ in US IPOs falls by half | Financial Times – this could be a good thing, as it shows that IPOs are closer to being optimally priced rather than management teams leaving a large amount of money on the table

    FMCG

    Nestlé document says majority of its food portfolio is unhealthy | Financial Times – they’re ok in moderation, but this will bring in a lot of shareholder pressure

    Ideas

    We Need More Public Space for Teen Girls – Bloomberg – “We had nothing to do and there was nowhere to go. So we’d go and hang out on the swings in the early evening and chat as the light slowly faded into dusk. It was better than sitting around at home.” – but why are spaces failing now where they didn’t in the past? I talked this through with a few friends of both genders who thought it odd. It sounded more like a law enforcement issue around public safety than a space issue. I could see an argument for a safe online space, for girls, boys and everyone in between – but that comes with its own complexity. I thought that the problem was that kids are the PlayStation generation or have their lives stuffed with activities by middle class parents.

    BUSINESS: Warren Buffett sinks climate measure, says world will adapt – www.eenews.net – completely missed this when it originally came out. On a related note I was listening to a podcast interview with Niall Ferguson promoting his book Doom and he mentioned that we have seen remarkably little volcanic activity over the past 200 years. When that picked up again, we could be dealing with global cooling. (This also explains why when I was a kid; the concern wasn’t global warming, but a new ice age). But even at that time, although the media missed it; the general consensus that carbon dioxide causing global warming was a bigger effect than short lived particles in the air reducing sun and causing global cooling. Even Richard Turco’s A Path Where No Man Thought which posited the idea of a nuclear winter has been proven wrong in subsequent analysis. There may be some cooling effect but not the kind of effect envisaged by massive nuclear conflicts.

    Xi Jinping on external propaganda and discursive power – China Neican 内参 – aka more and better Wolf Warrior. It was interested that this was misinterpreted by many people as a softening in tone by China. The reality is that the CPC views everything in terms of struggle, which is means their strategic approach is like a ratchet. It was interesting to read alongside the below article in The Spectator

    China is not as strong as it appears | The Spectator – The truth is that China is not as strong as it appears. As the Stanford scholar Elizabeth Economy points out, the country spent $216 billion on domestic security in 2019 — three times its expenditure of a decade before, and even more than what it spends on the People’s Liberation Army. Yet if Beijing’s internal problems continue to get worse, it will fall back on nationalism as a source of legitimacy. This will not be a comfortable experience for the West. ‘Communist China is bad, Han nationalist China will be worse,’ – the party is already validated by Han nationalism and has been a good while, so this worst case scenario is already here.

    Intellectual property

    Maine man sues his company, claiming it allowed Chinese access to US trade secrets | War Is Boring

    Luxury

    Busan’s Rich Have Only Malls to Spend Money on – The Chosun Ilbo

    Marketing

    Miller Lite, New Balance team up on ‘dad shoe’ beer koozie | Marketing Dive – Through the Shoezie, Miller Lite is hoping to appeal to the middle-aged men who represent an important cohort of beer drinkers and those who embrace dad fashion, which has become a trend as consumers retro looks. New Balance’s 624 Trainer — the model on which the koozie is based — is referred to as the classic “Dad Shoe” in the announcement. DDB San Francisco organized a modeling session for the Shoezie in which dads were placed in typical dad scenarios, such as cleaning the garage and searing a steak. By combining these elements of dad culture, Miller Lite is taking a lighthearted, relatable approach to Father’s Day

    Modern brands have forgotten that good ad slogans work (rest and play) | Business | The Times – Lloyds Banking Group, Pepsi and the food division of Marks & Spencer have brought some or all of their marketing in-house, partly as a cost-saving exercise. But partly, as Richard Warren, Lloyds’ head of marketing, claims: “No one can write in ad agencies any more.” Ouch. – So much here in factors causing this move. Relentless cost cutting has reduced agency talent bench, if you’re 40 you’re done. Agency focus on disruption and innovation over craft because of the media buying profits offered from online.

    Retailing

    How the Depop generation thinks | Vogue Business – so a lot of similarities with earlier generations at their age then. the Etsy acquisition of Depop is more about consolidating crafting and thrifting rather than a generational play per se.

    Tymbals – The edge @ ROI – The latest wonder to be rolled out of Nigel Scott’s RoboVC investment model. The DTC Dropship Arbitrage for evaluating the relative efficiency of eCommerce biz models

    Security

    Polish trial begins in Huawei-linked China espionage case | Reuters – Huawei, which fired Wang after his arrest but has helped finance his legal fees, told Reuters in a statement last month that its activities are “in accordance with the highest standards of transparency and adherence to laws and regulation.” – some interesting bits in the article. First of all, Huawei picking up a good deal of the legal fees for an employee that they ‘fired’. Secondly, Wang was interested in tapping of military optical fibres in Poland, which hints at technology theft and the depth of military and intelligence alliance between Russia and China

    Technology

    Huawei’s HarmonyOS: “Fake it till you make it” meets OS development | Ars Technica – All the evidence points to HarmonyOS being built on top of Android; but with Android mentions removed. Knowing Huawei they are probably violating GPL as well

    RISC vs. CISC Is the Wrong Lens for Comparing Modern x86, ARM CPUs – ExtremeTech

    Telecoms

    Bandwidth Boosts Could Help Unclog Space Communications | EE Times 

    Web of no web

    Killer drone ‘hunted down a human target’ without being told to – The March 2020 attack was in Libya and perpetrated by a Kargu-2 quadcopter drone produced by Turkish military tech company STM “during a conflict between Libyan government forces and a breakaway military faction led by Khalifa Haftar, commander of the Libyan National Army,” the Star reports, adding: “The Kargu-2 is fitted with an explosive charge and the drone can be directed at a target in a kamikaze attack, detonating on impact.” – At the start of my agency career, autonomous software agents would aid the consumer. I had a German dot com client called DealTime who had a Windows-only app for consumers. It would go out and find the best price on the web for items that they where interested in and keep an eye on those prices over time. Now we have Amazon and suicide drones.

  • AgXeed + more news

    AgXeed

    Claas acquires share in Dutch robot manufacturer | Irish Farmers Journal – Claas has acquired a minority shareholding in Dutch start-up AgXeed B.V, with the aim of co-operating on the development and commercialisation of autonomous agricultural machines. AgXeed makes robot tracked tractors that look suspiciously like vehicles from the first Terminator movie. Automation like AgXeed is going to become more important in agriculture at labour moves to the cities and farming consolidates. You can see how unskilled factory work is also having to look at automation in the below piece from the South China Morning Post. AgXeed is the flip side of the coin to industrial robotics.

    As China’s working population falls, factories turn to machines to pick up the slack | South China Morning Post – makes a lot of sense for a brand like Midea who needs less precision than say a smartphone assembly line

    Beauty

    What’s driving the Chinese boom in cosmetics for children? | Vogue Business – In China, it’s more socially acceptable these days to show individual identity in looks. Parents born in the 1980s or 1990s are less likely to curb their daughters’ interest in beauty products and may even encourage it. The current boom is certainly one to watch: according to data from Kaola, in May 2020, sales in China of children’s cosmetics were up by more than 1,200 per cent year-on-year. Disney’s sales alone were up by 100 per cent over the same period. 

    In China, children’s cosmetics are defined as those for children aged 12 and under. On e-commerce platforms, a quick search for children’s cosmetics brings up dozens of brands and thousands of products, with prices ranging widely. Products are typically sold in sets, including colourful eye shadows, blush, lip gloss, nail polish, compact powder and makeup brushes

    Consumer behaviour

    What Gen Z Really Think And Why You Should Care – GWI – at least the author was thinking about life stages when they wrote this copy

    Energy

    Hydrogen plant planned for Cork but viable market yet to emerge 26 May 2021 | The Irish Farmers Journal – but if there isn’t hydrogen production, there won’t be hydrogen infrastructure and marketplace.

    Hong Kong

    EXCLUSIVE Hong Kong threatens Lai’s bankers with jail if they deal in his accounts | Reuters – “We can now see that any banking relationship you have centred on Hong Kong makes you vulnerable under the national security law – that is going to be a big wake-up call for the wealth management industry here, and their rich clients,“

    China’s Communist Party chips away at Hong Kong business houses | The Economist – Expropriations may violate local law. But laws can be changed, as the imposition of new security and electoral rules show. Such an outcome looks “all too believable”, says Mr Blennerhassett. The tycoons thought “they didn’t have to do anything as long as they didn’t question Beijing”, says Joseph Fan of Chinese University of Hong Kong. Now the Communist Party will not even settle for overt expressions of fealty. It appears intent on extracting value, too. – not terribly surprising. The hubris of Hong Kong business people is surprising, even to someone like me

    Legal

    British Business in China: Position Paper – British Chamber of Commerce in China | Beijing – Chinese data protection rules a key issue

    Luxury

    Can Gucci Sell High-End Watches To China? | Jing Daily – “Gucci’s high-priced watches are lacking legitimacy. Real watch collectors will not buy,” Müller concludes. In fact, the expansion into high-end watches may not help Gucci attract new clientele but will undoubtedly enhance the Italian maison’s prestige. As the luxury entry barrier lowers, the brand is required to expand in the high-end sphere to retain its exclusivity and appeal to local high net worth buyers

    Marketing

    The Test Screening That Almost Killed Fast Times at Ridgemont High | Slate – such a great interview, but would you have a cultural moment like that now; or would it be over like yesterday’s news or a TikTok meme?

    Media

    China’s Hottest Livestream Trend: Fraud – The episode was a disaster for Li. Her company had paid 200,000 yuan ($31,000) upfront just to secure a spot on the influencer’s show. It had also stocked over 4,000 boxes of shakes, anticipating a sales bonanza. But in the end, they hadn’t earned a single yuan. “Apart from the financial losses, we felt humiliated,” says Li. “All the other employees at the company were whispering that our team was totally fooled.” – ad fraud is universal but this one seems to be particularly shocking

    Technology

    iFixit tells the sad story of how Samsung “ruined” its upcycling program | Ars Technica – “Samsung, like every manufacturer, should set their old phones free. Open up their bootloaders. Let people use their cameras, sensors, antennas, and screens for all kinds of purposes, using whatever software people can dream up. The world needs fun, exciting, and money-saving ways to reuse older phones, not a second-rate tie-in to yet another branded internet-of-things ecosystem.“

    Web of no web

    Europe looks to the end of the mobile phone | EE News Europe – The aim is AR glasses that are wearable all day and weigh less than 60g with a 500mW power consumption. “We can achieve that this year with 1000nits for outdoor brightness, compared to 500nits that needs darkened lenses, and a 30 to 50 degree field of view (FoV) is enough,” he said. 

    “In the end there is a tradeoff in power consumption. The way you build the relay optics is where you lose the field of view. Increasing the field of view means the energy is relayed into the comb of the lenses so the limitation is on the capabilty of the waveguide to have a good colour uniformity across the field of view, and we are working with waveguide makers to get to 60 to 70deg. Today Hololens has 55 degree field of view for example but the military were asking for 85 degrees.” – more related content here.

    US-China tech war: China’s GPS rival BeiDou poised to support industry worth US$156 billion by 2025 | South China Morning Post 

  • Mi Air Charge & things that made last week

    Mi Air Charge

    Mi Air Charge is a smartphone controlled air purifier by Xiaomi. The ad promotes it as being an essential item in a dystopian austere bachelor pad. I am not sure why the Mi Air Charge was controlled by an app, except to sell more It reminded me of a product advert specified and designed for the engineers that likely worked on the product.

    Dyson has done similarly sparse interiors in its ads, but they usually cast a couple or family.

    Bob Ross paintings

    Anyone who has watched TV in the middle of the night has likely come across the TV series of Bob Ross painting landscapes. For each show that he did, there were three paintings. Bob Ross’ paintings have never come up in auction. They were given to friends and the rest held in an archive by the company that carries his name.

    Uniqlo Japan AIRism advert

    Uniqlo set a high standard for adverts and creativity. This particular example for its AIRism casual wear is notable for its natural portrayal of a Japanese lesbian couple. Usually Japanese advert portray the struggles that the LGBTQ community face. Whereas this normalises its protagonists with a slice of life approach.

    https://youtu.be/PsfpCd0TAxU

    Luther Vandross would have been 70 last week

    On April 19, the Google Doodle celebrated Luther Vandross’ 70th birthday with a new animated video to accompany his track Never Too Much. The animation was done for Google by Sam Bass.

    And here is the original video from 1981. I love the way the video intercuts film that they shot on the street into the track. The song was recorded using a Studer A800 multitrack recorder.

    The Mercedes Benz 500E was inspired by AMG’s efforts with the Hammer and increased competition from the likes of Lexus. This video gives a good guide to the car, including clarifying that Porsche helped in the assembly but its not a Porsche sedan.

  • Metabolist architecture + more things

    Metabolist architecture

    kisho kurokawa’s metabolist ‘capsule house K’ from the 1970s to be preserved in japan – the metabolist group, formed by architects, designers and critics, imagined a world of flexible cities where buildings, like people, were transient and ever changing. designed and built between 1971 and 1973, ‘capsule house K’ exemplifies the ideas of metabolism, recyclability and exchangeability – What separates the Japanese metabolist architecture and design movement from the western prefab manufacturing is that it was genuinely modular. A single capsule like this house could exist on its own, or could be part of a tower structure. The focus on flexible cities at the centre of metabolist design and the idea of recyclability. The western prefab approach is all about bringing product line techniques to create quick builds.

    Consumer behaviour

    Taking Stock With Teens – Spring 2021 Infographic 

    Marketing

    Did pharma overshoot digital sales rep calls? Study charts decline in effectiveness | FiercePharma – I think that there are interesting implications for a lot of digital marketing activities, like LinkedIn and email marketing

    Media

    The Wall Street Journal’s Internal Audit – The New York Times – none of the editors understand digital and that the paper is unlikely to have any success reaching the younger readers they desperately need without managing to write something about either race or gender. More media related content here.

    Security

    A secretive Home Office unit has hoarded data on millions of people | WIRED UK – more than 30 data providers are listed in the documents. Only two of these, fraud prevention company GB Group and data analytics firm, Dun & Bradstreet, were not redacted. GB Group acknowledged it provided data to the unit but declined to provide any further details citing “confidentiality obligations”. Dun & Bradstreet says it is against its policy to comment on its work with clients. I’d be surprised if they weren’t

    Technology

    Microsoft accelerates industry cloud strategy for healthcare with the acquisition of Nuance – Stories – I wonder what this means for Apple and Google voice recognition

    Wireless

    A booming industry based entirely on missed calls helped bring India online — and vanished overnight – Rest of World – Kumar’s friends and family members began ringing each other but hanging up before being charged for a call; the resulting missed-call alerts functioned as a kind of code between them. “It was decided in advance,” Kumar says. “We would say, if I’m coming to pick you up, I’ll give you a missed call, and you come out of your house.” 

    Leaving missed calls in this way — effectively using a mobile phone as a kind of latter-day pager — was a consumer hack that, in the 2000s, before India’s cheap smartphone and data revolution, grew more popular than texting. The missed call emerged in India as a critical means of communication for those who counted every rupee spent on recharge credit. But the practice soon spread, became trendy, and, even as call rates plunged in the 2000s to among the lowest in the world, evolved into a general tool of convenience: a missed call could mean “I miss you,” “Call me back,” or “I’m here.” The fact that the missed call demanded only basic numeric literacy made them accessible to the third of India’s population that was illiterate. In 2008, one study estimated that more than half of Indian phone users were in the habit of calling people with the expectation that they wouldn’t pick up – you had similar consumer patterns around the world, but Indians seem to have taken it to a new level

  • Lee Dunne + more things

    Lee Dunne

    How Lee Dunne challenged the depiction of working-class mothers | RTÉ – I originally didn’t know Lee Dunne as a novelist. Instead he was part of my childhood. Lunchtime listening when I wasn’t at school was Harbour Hotel, a radio soap opera written by Lee Dunne that gave a good sense of everyday life. The graininess of listening to the show on medium wave added to the experience. Dunne wrote each episode a bit like Roshomon, with each character talking about an event (like an argument) from their perspective. RTÉ’s obituary also focuses on Dunne’s social commentary literature that was banned by the Irish government in the 1960s through to the mid-1970s. Lee Dunne like James Plunkett wrote about the everyman. Plunkett’s work differed from Lee Dunne in that it had more of a socialist tenor to the content. Lee Dunne had particular success with his 1969 novel Goodbye To The Hill, more Ireland related content here.

    Beauty

    Shu Uemura to Exit Korean Market | BoF – Shu Uemura, a Japanese beauty brand owned by L’Oréal, is exiting the South Korean market in September after 16 years. While some speculate this is due to Korean consumer boycotts of Japanese products that began in 2019, L’Oréal states the withdrawal is part of a strategy to optimise its brand portfolio and respond to local market demand. Another contributing factor is likely the intense competition within the Korean beauty market. Shu Uemura currently operates over 70 outlets in the country.

    Five China market strategies that domestic brands do better than foreign brands | Daxue Consulting – I would add western brands rather than all foreign brands

    Consumer behaviour

    NewNew™ on the App Store – god this dark. In th sage words of Matt Muir – how else do you describe a new app, with significant VC funding, whose main purpose seems to be to allow ‘creators’ (we’ll come back to that word) to earn money from their ‘fans’ in exchange for letting said ‘fans’ determine the course of their life, in some sort of modern, ersatz version of The Diceman?

    How China’s online hate campaigns work – Protocol — The people, power and politics of tech – In today’s China, a nationalist campaign involves something far more complex than paying people to post scripted messages parroting Beijing’s line. The government has mastered the craft of influencing people’s genuine emotions and having these ordinary users do the trolling and doxxing — for free. Oftentimes, this means appealing to misogyny or chauvinism, something that virtually guarantees more clicks. Many videos and articles attacking Xu have tried to paint her personal life as promiscuous and delinquent. Web users have frequently called Xu a “female Han traitor,” a dog whistle that conflates concepts of chastity and national loyalty

    Europe

    Why Can’t Europe Cope With the Coronavirus? – Carnegie Europe – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – EU states are too integrated to manage the crisis separately and not integrated enough to do so collectively, an inability to make rapid decisions, and a breakdown of trust between governments and the governed

    Ethics

    P&G reportedly testing Chinese workaround to Apple’s privacy changes | Marketing Dive – I find it hard to believe. if they’re seriously considering this, P&G have their head up their ass on ethics. They don’t need to do highly targeted marketing because Byron Sharp. This just looks like a waste of money

    Finance

    How China structures loans to become Africa’s “preferred” lender — Quartz Africa – Chinese contracts contain broad confidentiality clauses that stop borrowers from sharing details about the contracts, or sometimes even the fact that they exist. And with a confidentiality clause in every contract in the dataset since 2014, the contracts had become more secretive over time. Most of the clauses commit the borrowing countries not to disclose any of the contract terms or related information, unless required by law.

    Hong Kong

    The Rise and Decline of Hong Kong – From the British Colonial Era to the Chinese Communist Takeover | The Greater China Journal 

    Hong Kong’s electoral changes: the Communist Party is taking over | Hong Kong Free Press HKFP – good summary of the different structures and challenges in the new Hong Kong ‘electoral’ system

    Hong Kong’s elites should think about an exit strategy – Nikkei Asia – The most serious concern for Hong Kong’s elites is the impact on their interests if China’s economic integration plan is fully implemented. Hong Kong’s tycoons may see this plan as a great opportunity and believe that their connections on the mainland will help them. But they may be in for a rude shock. Beijing wants to integrate Hong Kong’s economy not to enrich its tycoons, but to make the city’s economic future even more dependent on the motherland. In this process, Beijing would understandably give preference to mainland players, in particular state-owned enterprises, at the expense of Hong Kong’s businesses. – this covers all the reasons why I think Jardine’s pivot to Indonesia is smarter than Swire doubling down on mainland China

    Ideas

    Zhang Baijia: Reflections on China’s Research on Frontiers and Relations with Neighboring States | 高大伟 David Cowhig’s Translation Blog – Hard intelligence is specific information; soft intelligence is the understanding that makes possible the interpretation of hard intelligence. I found this differentiation fascinating delineating information and knowledge

    Information security

    Israel Reportedly Behind Cyberattack That Caused Blackout at Iran Nuclear Facility – reminds me of the Tehran show on Apple+ about Israeli spec ops and hackers in Iran

    Apple Mail Zero-Click Security Vulnerability Allows Email Snooping | Threatpost 

    Media

    Cannabis streaming service sets debut date, program slate – The Third M – MM+M – Medical Marketing and Media – High Times meets NBC. What’s next Crypto News Network for the bitcoin and NFT fans?

    Retailing

    The great British retail reopening | Vogue Business – The 12 April reopening of all physical stores in the UK is an occasion for optimism, but it’s heavily laced with caution. “The big question is how much of the massive increase in total share of spend will online retain?” says Richard Hyman, veteran UK retail analyst. His rough estimate, he says, is about 85 per cent. “If online hangs on to a material portion of spend, then the cost of selling something in a shop will have gone up significantly.”

    Covid’s effect on Rodeo Dr, Oxford St, and Russell St retail closures — Quartz – worthwhile looking at for its retail information and its beautiful interactive design

    Technology

    Job search | Amazon.jobs – interesting job ads. Amazon is looking for a lot of product designers and software engineers to work on visual search and augmented reality as part of the ‘next generation of shopping innovation’ – I found this via the ex-Yahoo! employees groups on LinkedIn. Yahoo! had a large contingent of people working in areas such as image and video search that would be of interest to Amazon now. The team is based just down the road from Sunnyvale in Palo Alto