Read the original article at Consulting essentials: Building your business

In the last two posts on how to build a successful consulting business I shared advice and tips on closing deals and managing and completing your engagements.

This post will look at where to focus your efforts in order to sustain your consulting business, and build skills.

Focus on your subject matter expertise

Being a subject matter expert takes years of education, and professional experience to build. It’s your most valuable asset. Build it, and use it. This is not to say there isn’t great value in …

Read the original article at Consulting essentials: Managing & Completing Engagements

This is the second in a series of three articles on Consulting Essentials.
Read the previous post, Consulting essentials: Getting the business

Communicating well and knowing when to step in or stand back is the linchpin of successful consulting.
Some people have natural charm. If you’re one of these people you’ll find consulting is definitely for you. You’ll use that skill all the time as each new client brings a half dozen or a dozen new people to interact with.

If it doesn’t come easily, practice practice practice. Try to get out of your own head space, and hear what troubles …

Read the original article at Consulting essentials: Getting the business

Over the years, a lot of people have approached me asking how to become a tech consultant. What do I need to do to get started? How can I take my first step?

I also hear from managers and CEOs that have asked how I got my start, and how I keep the business running. What lessons from consulting can be applied to startups and small businesses? Having worked independently for many years I’ve built up my own cache of strategies and methods which I hope can be helpful to anyone looking to strike it out on their own.

This is the first of a series of three articles on consulting essentials. Part two covers …

Read the original article at Tyranny of a Google vote

Image by Hajo de Reijger, politicallyillustrated.com

For the past year I’ve been seeing headline blogs analyzing the effect of Google’s last algorithm update, dubbed the Panda. There was much talk of unfair relegation from the first page of Google search results, and general indignance by the SEO community.

As with any subject in which I only have cursory knowledge I didn’t think much of it. I thought that as long as I didn’t engage in link-buying and whatever is known as “black hat” tactics, the search engines would be fair. What I didn’t realise with Google was how subjective it has become in ranking websites. I was particularly tripped up in the …

This week we listen to MySQL founders David Axmark and Michael "Monty" Widenius talk about all sorts of topics, from the MySQL ecosystem to "Crazy Monty", an open source restaurant. David and Monty don't always agree, so this panel is enlightening and also funny.

News/Events/Feedback
MariaDB 5.5 features - 5.5 is now GA!

IOUG podcast about MySQL Connect and the new Development Milestone Release (DMR) of MySQL 5.6.

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This week we talk with Mark Atwood of RedHat about OpenShift, a free, auto-scaling Platform as a Service (PaaS) for applications. Use promotional code "oursql" when signing up!

News/Events/Feedback
We are very thankful for our listeners! Last week we won a MySQL Community Contributor of the Year award (Sarah Novotny, Gerry Narvaja and Sheeri Cabral, who have all been hosts, won the award). Here's a picture of the award we all won.

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Read the original article at The Age of the Platform by Phil Simon

I picked up Phil Simon's The Age of the Platform after running into his blog, and some of his writing online. Simon is an interesting guy with an obvious strong technical background. He's also an accomplished speaker and you can find several videos of his speaking online.

The first thing that struck me about this book was how it came to be. The book was funded through Kickstarter, an online platform for people to fund their creative projects. Perhaps it was Simon trying to drive home the point of his book. But it gets better, he self-published the book through Motion Publishing. Furthermore …

Read the original article at What Wouldn’t Google Do?

In his latest book, What Would Google Do? Jeff Jarvis seems to have authored a gushing tribute to the search giant that has pledged to do no evil. He paints a very optimistic picture, and shows us over and over how Google has opened up industries, and how that same openness helps consumers like you and I.

Jarvis, if you don't know him by name, has been a journalist for some time, but gained particular cred and notoriety when he blogged with the headline "Dell lies. Dell Sucks" after his horrible experiences with Dell computers and customer service.

While digging through Googly chapters, on Real Estate, …

Read the original article at The Problem with Startup Bootcamps

Scanning Crains NY Business recently, I saw an article on 'starting up' in 54 hours.  It's the brainchild of Marc Nager, Clint Nelsen and Franck Nouyrigat called Startup Weekend. Startup bootcamps seem to be the current extra-curricular activity of choice these days. Wharton is also getting in on it with their Innovation Tournament. Then there is the …

Read the original article at Scalability Rules for managers and startups

Abbott and Fisher’s previous book, The Art of Scalability received good reviews for shifting the way we think about scalability from merely splitting databases and adding servers, to include the human factors that weigh heavily on its success. Together with the authors’ distinguished pedigree (PayPal, Amazon, and eBay between them), I picked up a copy of their second book, Scalability Rules - 50 Principles for Scaling Web Sites without a second thought.

If Art was about laying a strong foundation for a scalable organization then Rules is the …