OSBC Coming to a Close

Well, OSBC is coming to a close.  The exhibit hall is closed and all packed up and the final sessions are underway.  What a great networking event.  Don't expect to get leads at this show, but if you want to hobnob with the "players" in open source, you have to be at this show.  Speaking of which, this is a picture from the Open Source Database Panel held yesterday.  OSBC 007

From left to right in the picture:  Moderator Matt Aslett, Analyst for the 451 Group, Zack Urlocker, from MySQL, Andy Astor, CEO of EnterpriseDB, Ken Jacobs from Oracle and Roger Burkhardt from Ingres. 

The panel was okay in my opinion.  Zack did an excellent job as always and Andy held his own, as well.  I thought Ken tried to be an open source guy, but the veil was thin and he was in an awkward position.  Oracle did not belong on that panel at all.  Roger was a walking sales pitch and his act got old quickly.  All in all, it was entertaining.  But, 50 minutes was too short and the whole thing was a little too marketing, even for me.OSBC 004a

We had a nice looking booth (if I do say so myself) and I am including  a picture of that as well.  I had a lot of conversations with other marketing executives from open source companies and the discussions were the same over and over.  Lead generation and lead nurturing were always hot topics.  How to turn free usage into paying customers.  After all, this was the Open Source Business Conference.  We are in business to make money. 

That is all for now.  I have a lot more to talk about, but don't have the time.

Postgres Rocks

Yep, there I've said it.  In case you have been hiding under a rock and thought MySQL was the open source database of choice, now you know.  This blog post officially puts you on notice that Postgres is taking over.

Today, EnterpriseDB announced the release of the Postgres Plus family.  But, that's not all we announced.  Here are three bullets on what we announced at OSBC this morning:

I will have a lot more to say about all three of these MAJOR events over the course of the next few days.  But, I wanted to get the main news out there.  I am at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco this week for the announcements.  If you are at OSBC, stop by and say hello!

While the World Slept...

Ever have one of those defining moments when you realized that you were a part of something special?  Well, it's 1:46am here in San Francisco and I am sitting in my hotel room testing our new website.  And at the same time, there are a dozen folks in the office in Edison, NJ doing the same thing.  They are working through the night and all of them worked ALL WEEKEND to make this happen.  Are they all marketing folks?  Of course not.  This is not their job.  They do other things like, sales, sales engineering, development.  The co-founders are involved testing too.  And, its not just here.  All around the world, every office is involved in testing the site that just went live.

No, this is not their job.  But, this is OUR company and everyone here jumps in to help the other.  We all have the same goal and we are all rowing in the same direction.  It really is something to see. 

Take a look around your office today.  Would it be the same in your company?  I can't say that it would have been this way in any other company I worked for.

When you spend forty, sixty, eighty hours a week working, you need the reassurance that this is more than just a job or a career.  If you don't, I encourage you to find your own EnterpriseDB.

Where the hell have you been, Derek?

Well, I have not blogged since March 1.  Why?  Check back in just a few hours.

What's your start page?

What do you use as your start page when you fire up a browser?  I think there are four answers:

  1. Default.  Whatever the browser came with.  Are you like my wife?  She still uses IE and never bothered to change the start page.  She uses MSN.  Yes, she is a lemming when it comes to PCs (as I expect most are.)
  2. Blank Page.  You use the net to research something and be done.  You don't care about the news, sports updates or anything else.  Give me a black slate and I will choose what to look at.  (I suspect there are only a few of these folks out there.)
  3. Corporate Intranet.  You work for one of those companies that sets the page for you.  Unisys was like this.  The corporate-standard start page for the corporate-standard Microsoft browser was the Unisys intranet.  Now, it was better than most intranets, but I don't care to be so internally focused.  Fortunately, they do let you change it.  Anyone who can change the page but haven't?  Please refer to number 1 above.
  4. My Page.  If you are like me, you have set your home page to a start page that collects and digests all the information you need in one spot.  MyYahoo! is a prime example and has been my staple start page for almost 8 years.  I think a lot of people fit in this category.

But, I am changing...  Over the last 8 months I have been playing with Netvibes and I really like it.  For some reason, I still keep MyYahoo! as my start page, but I use Netvibes much more regularly.   It is a wonderful too for both work and play.  I have multiple tabbed pages.  One is for news (local, national, international).  I also have weather on there.  The next page is all about analysts.  If I am a subscriber and they have an RSS feed, its on there.  Next, a stock tab.  This is less about my portfolio and more about the stocks that I am tracking that are related to work.  I also have a tab of blogs.  This includes industry blogs and individual blogs from folks that matter in the world of open source or Postgres.  This page also has a blog search module that searches nine different blog aggregators or search engines.  This is the most valuable tool on the whole page.  The last work related tab is all about Oracle.  This is a great tab and was actually created by someone else and made public to all as a "Universe" in Netvibes.  What a cool concept.

I encourage you to check it out.  And, if you have a suggestion for another web 2.0 start page, let me know!