TheOpenForce.com

5 Stars for Guy Kawasaki's "Reality Check"

In case you haven't figured it out, I'm a fan of Guy Kawasaki and his "How to Change the World " blog.  If you like his blog, you should check out his book "Reality Check."  Yes, you can read most of the content for free on the web, but sometimes a printed copy is more convenient.   Like if you're on the toilet.  Or if you want to underline it.  Or if you want to underline it while you're on the toilet.  Ok, you get the idea.  As I wrote at InfoWorld:

The book covers some of the best items from his blog, categorized into themes like starting a company, raising money, business planning, innovation, marketing, schmoozing, management, hiring and firing and more. It's not a bunch of high-falutin' theories either. It's hard lessons learned by working with hundreds of entrepreneurs. Guy is also a player coach, having built four startup companies and served on the boards of ten companies. So it's practical advice rather than academic theory. And even though it's practical, it's still entertaining. You won't find the top 10 lies of VCs or the top 11 lies of entrepreneurs in any other book. And I doubt you'll read either of those pieces and not learn something either about yourself or about how you conduct your business. With more than 90 essays (including some great Q&A pieces) if you heed just a fraction of the advice in this book, it will pay for itself tens if not hundreds of times over. How's that for a compelling ROI?

While a lot of his advice is oriented towards startups, I think most of it is equally applicable to large companies.  It's all about focus and execution.  Guy was one of the top rated speakers we ever had at the MySQL Users Conference, and he's well worth whatever he charges for these events. 

• InfoWorld: A Needed Reality Check for Enterpeneurs
• Amazon: Reality Check 

MySQL UC CFP ASAP!

 

If that was too cryptic, here's the news: we've extended the deadline on the Call for Papers for the upcoming MySQL User Conference which will be held April 20-23 in Santa Clara CA.  You've got until Nov 5 to get your proposals in. 

If you want to increase your odds of being accepted, here are some tips:

• Make it technical, but accessible
• Include both theory and practice (e.g. here's what we did and why)
• Clearly identify who your talk is for (e.g. developers, DBAs, managers etc)
• Topics related to Cloud computing, Data Warehousing, Performance tuning, are always hot
• Showing off new capabilities in MySQL 5.1, Falcon, Maria, Drizzle, MySQL Monitor is good
• Make sure someone technical submits the proposal, not a Marketing or PR flak
• Don't make it a commercial for your product or business

And for those who didn't notice, MySQL 5.1 is now in its final RC candidate (this time for sure!) with Version 5.1.29 now available.  We've been running this version internally on our web site and it looks great.  At this point we are down to a handful of final bugs to fix before it gets declared GA.  Thanks to everyone who has helped find or fix bugs in 5.1!