Gist.

Although blogging used to be the exclusive province of overly-emotional teenagers, it’s now widely accepted as a legitimate business marketing strategy.  In fact, a well-established, highly-regarded blog can go a long way towards enhancing your perceived authority and driving new customers into your business’s sales funnel.

However, just because blogging has become more accepted doesn’t mean that it’s an easy course to internet riches or startup success.  Becoming a blogging all-star is a long road that requires hard work and effort, although it’s possible to increase the likelihood of your success by taking the following steps:

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Most entrepreneurs are – by nature – solitary people.  Choosing to pursue business visions at the expense of traditional employment frequently leads to a private, self-involved mindset – which too often prevents entrepreneurs from building the strong relationships they need for both business and personal success.

The unfortunate reality is that few projects progress successfully as the result of one person’s effort.  You need the feedback and support of others, which is why building a diverse collection of strong relationships is a vital part of succeeding as an entrepreneur.

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Often times, what seems like a simple vision for a new project in your head turns into a boondoggle in the implementation phase, as different teams butt heads over the course of the development process.  Stop me if this sounds familiar…

You’ve recently begun work on a new web app, but while your UX worker is convinced that the product’s interface or backend should be built in one way to enhance usability, your developer has an entirely different vision for how the product should be structured.  In the best case scenario, these conflicts might hold up your product’s progress temporarily – at worst, they’ll derail its completion and future success entirely!

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Are you the type of networker who likes to make it rain business cards?  Maybe you’re a business card hoarder whose assortment of contact cards rivals the size of your childhood baseball card collection?

There’s no doubt about the fact that business networking is important.  In fact, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) estimates that as many as 70% of all jobs are filled through networking!

However, there’s a big difference between approaching networking like a seasoned professional in order to effectively gain access to the world’s “hidden job market” and committing any of the seven deadly sins of business networking described in the infographic below.

Read on to find out if you fall into any of these “7 types of professional networker” categories to uncover the business networking mistakes that could be killing your career!

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If you’re like most serial entrepreneurs, you’ve likely got a thousand different business ideas buzzing around your head – each waiting for its own ideal time to be developed and launched.

So how do you cut through all this mental chatter to narrow down your startup ideas and ensure that you’re working on the right projects at the right times?  Consider any of the following techniques…

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If you build it, they will come – right?!  Unfortunately, in the hyper-competitive world of business startups, simply building a product that’s jam-packed with exceptional value isn’t enough to guarantee success.  You’ve got to promote your business – and that often comes down to leveraging press relationships to drive media coverage of your products or services.

It’s not always glamorous, but it is essential – as one single mention on a popular blog or news site in your industry can result in a tremendous amount of new users and investor interest.  So if you haven’t yet tackled this area of startup operation, here’s a quick primer on how to build press coverage for your startup:

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If it takes a village to raise a child, then it takes an entire army of highly-talented, motivated professionals to grow a successful startup!

The reality is that even though the initial stages of a startup’s launch may feel like a solitary pursuit (especially if you’re a sole developer busting out line after line of code by yourself), it’s the team that you surround yourself that may ultimately play the biggest role in your success.  Too many entrepreneurs have failed because they didn’t recognize this – so protect yourself and your business by bringing on the following team members:

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We are excited to announce a new version of Gist for BlackBerry (GfBB) is available in App World! In this version we’ve added some cool new features to help you manage and grow your network even better than before.

Invite to BlackBerry Messenger
You can now invite others to connect with you on BlackBerry Messenger within GfBB. As you already know, it’s easy to “Get the Gist” of a contact from the email, calendar or contacts app on your BlackBerry device. Simply, select the “Get the Gist” option from the BlackBerry menu key in any of these apps and the Gist app opens displaying profile information, social updates and any notes you’ve added related to your contact(s). On the profile tab, you will see we’ve added a new option to “Invite to BBM” (assuming you aren’t already connected). Once selected you will be prompted to send an invitation email to the contact.

Click invite to BBM (above) to send the email displayed below.

To maintain the security and privacy of other users, we give the other user the option to connect, but assuming they do, you will be real-time messaging with them in seconds.

Export Gist contacts to BlackBerry Contacts App
Many of you have requested export capabilities from GfBB to your BlackBerry Contacts App. We are happy to let you know that this is now possible. From the contact profile tab in Gist, scroll to the bottom and select “Send to BlackBerry Contacts”.

We know many of our users have a large network and therefore many contacts in their Gist account. Our founder, for example, has over 70,000 contacts in his Gist account. We suggest using this new feature to export the people you contact or look-up on a regular basis and leave the rest in Gist. With the rich Gist search you can quickly and easily find contact information as you need it on Gist, versus exporting all of them to your device.

Add and Delete Contacts
Until now users have had to log into gist.com on the web to manually add or delete contacts in their Gist account. You can now do this from your BlackBerry device! Open the Gist contacts list view, select the BlackBerry menu key and choose either add or delete contact.

We hope you enjoy these new features. This is another step in our mission to bring the powerful features of Gist to the Blackberry audience.  To see more of our work, check out the recent work on the Playbook Contacts app and stay tuned as we bring even more power to Blackberry 10.

These days, if you want to attract top talent to your company, you’ve got to offer something that’s “above and beyond” compared to traditional office settings.  You can blame this new way of doing business on Google (who is widely recognized as being one of the first major companies to offer such perks as flexible workstations, onsite catering and other amenities), or you can get with the times and transform your own office into the cutting edge workplace your employees desire!

Here’s how to go about making the leap from traditional office to engaging, invigorating workplace:

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While we at Gist are obviously big fans of the Playbook 2.0 native Contacts app, we do also recognize that a substantial percentage of users out there rely on Google Contacts and other Google services to power their business networking.

And although we certainly recommend installing the Gist app for Gmail in order to build the power of a social CRM system into your Google email and contact management system, there are a few other tips and tricks you’ll want to follow to make the standalone Google Contacts program work better.

Here’s what you need to know:

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