Leapfrog! All you need to know you learned from frogs!

All I really need to know I learned in kindergarten - I haven't actually read Robert Fulghum's book, since I assumed the list below summarizes it's philosophy of living.

• Share everything.
• Play fair.
• Don't hit people.
• Put things back where you found them.
• Clean up your own mess.
• Don't take things that aren't yours.
• Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
• Wash your hands before you eat.
• Flush.
• Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
• Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
• Take a nap every afternoon.
• When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
• Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: 
• The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
• Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we.
• And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned - the biggest word of all - LOOK.

The one I like best? Nap every afternoon! ...but despite having a nap pad outside my office at work, I haven't taken this advice. I even have unused massage coupons - I guess I did not learn in kindergarten. Have people noticed that what we learned - be direct and honest - doesn't always earn the best results in corporate life?

In Silicon Valley, others don't seem to have learned from kindergarten either - the philosophy seems to come from frogs - Leapfrog!

If you don't innovate, and don't leapfrog the first chance you get, you die! 

Given the recent news about Apple and Adobe, it looks like some folks played hookie from kindergarten and collected frogs instead - or maybe, they learned from frogs in school - (Eliot did ... in E.T., and learning toys from Leapfrog are popular...)

Leapfrog philosophy in action:

• Mobile tech: Countries with poor communications infrastructures have decided not to waste time fixing the problem - they've simply skipped to mobile technology. 
• Microsoft: Effectively created by IBM, they took their Windows-OS2 learnings and now effectively own the personal computer.
• Oracle: Seizing on an opportunity created by IBM, they pulled forward in the database market.
• Google: Given a conduit to succeed by Yahoo!, the original web directory, Google now owns navigation of the web.
• Apple: Stuggling for years on the personal computer, they are now king of the hill with the iPhone, and taking the momentum to redefine personal computing with the iPad. The computer is personal again - and HP didn't do it!

Leapfrogging is not about sharing, saying you're sorry, and not necessarily about playing fair, or being nice and giving credit! It's about sitting on your haunches, and kicking off with the strongest legs you have and landing as far afield as you can.

Sharing? Qualcomm and Broadcom are looking to share nothing more than the word "com" in their names! Patent law is about not sharing! And while folks cry on about sharing (open source/open systems anyone?) most successful T-ecosystems - Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Blackberry, IBM are pretty proprietary, if you ask me.

Apple just about slapped Adobe, which, through the years has been pulling Macs with their products (or did Adobe screw itself?). Didn't Microsoft actually help Apple tide through some tough times, only to see them surging forward on phones, and now, personal computing?  Google settled a core search advertising Yahoo! lawsuit - for a tiny amount (in hindsight), and isn't really opening up the lane for the Apple-mobile to cruise - Android anyone? Oracle, through its acquisition of Sun, effectively chops MySQL off at the knees, just before it jumped ... frog legs for a snack! Kodak? Anyone use Kodak anymore?

Flush? Companies regularly acquire competitors, or use other means just to flush them down the toilet.
Amazon - Junglee. Microsoft - Sybase. Autonomy - Verity (after leapfrog!). When you play Frogger, you better watch for traffic!

Hey ...this ain't kindergarten! Leapfrog or croak!

Grandson, Grandpa do good in 2 Silicon Valleys

In the very same year, grandson and grandpa ended up doing a lot of good!

Rikki and his student council helped Williams Elementary School raise $1400 for Haiti earthquake relief in Silicon Valley, California.

Half a world away, in India's Silicon Valley, his grandfather (my dad) was felicitated for having conceived, raising support, cajoling the Bangalore Corporation (that's hard), getting the Corporation to dedicate funds (that's really hard) and actually getting them to build a state-of-the-art park in Koramangala's 6th block without paying anyone any bribes (that's really really hard). The park is still being maintained, with security, sprinkler systems, and an entrance fee that people actually pay  for a walk-in-the-park in the evenings.

I'm proud of them both!!

Happy birthday Rikki.

Tr.im that shortening!

I hate short URLs. Why? There are very few reasons for their existence! One: Twitter. Two: Tracking. Three? ... My friend Joshua has an excellent take on this. There may be some reasons for shortening URLs, but embedding URLs in posts is not one of them.

Twitter is convenient for short posts, but needing to go get a bit.ly or tiny.url in the 21st century is seriously a step backward. It slows us down. 2 steps instead of 1. Yes, yes, I understand the 140 character limit, but why enforce that limit anywhere beyond SMS? Who uses SMS to tweet anyway? Anyone? Enforcing this limit in environments beyond SMS is bogus and is responsible for a bunch of random services to exist and for slowing down the web (via unnecessary redirects).

I no longer know a tweet URL I'm clicking on - it could be spam, it could be great - the only signal is whether I trust the person who tweeted it. Therefore, shorteners are now offering more services on top (of an unnecessary service):

"First we'll shorten it for you, so you'll have to take an extra hop on the internet, and we have a reason to exist. Next, to look more useful, we'll provide you spam signals and trap you before you do harm to yourself. Then, we'll provide you metadata and statistics.  We're so useful." 

Baloney! If a URL is driving users to my own content, guess what - I already have (or should have) tracking, e.g., Google Analytics, at my web site/blog. If it is not my own content, then measuring why and how many people are clicking on (my) URLs to news sites, magazines and journals can't really be anything but self-serving. So, shortener tracking is basically an artificial need.

Facebook does not have this limitation; I add a link and Facebook does more for me - it extracts images and summarizes for me - that's value! Metadata? How many people have linked it could be useful, user ratings on the target document would be useful, a favicon of the site could be useful - not the damn cryptic URL that adds nothing. Do I really want to remember that tcrn.ch stands for Techcrunch? No! I'd rather have the TC favicon next to the URL. That's authority for the simple-minded! Of course, that authority is a little suspect after stories like this and this and then this (more like Valleywag :-))

Even if Twitter needs to shorten, do they really have to put the garbled text for the link anchor? Can't they just say "LINK/STORY" instead of bit.ly/3746q876oq and link to whatever silly URL trimming service they favor that morning? Twitter? Anybody home? Are you listening?

It makes me upset that this silly trend has caused further proliferation of shortening services, which sometimes frame URLs instead of redirecting, rather than shorten the lives of the few that existed. And, of course, these services are trim-med all the time, so we can't depend on them!

I don't know if Google Buzz, or Yahoo! Updates will succeed/flourish, but at least shortening is not mandatory fat for these services, and I sure hope they help short URLs die!

Mobile is surely going to leave SMS limits behind - and if people really  need to use SMS, use technology like compression to send longer messages over SMS - this is text for heavens sake! Weren't people using fancy compression to send larger messages over SMS? Do it people!

We all know shortening is not good for health!