Based on the article, there are 5 key mistakes to avoid when it comes to networking effectively:

• You shouldn’t be thinking of getting something from the person you are trying to network with. Instead try and see how you can provide value to the person.
• Never think for a moment that the person you are trying to connect with cares about your needs.
• Never give out your name cards like confetti. It is not about the number of cards given out but the connections that you make with others.
• Don’t ever assume that just because you have lots of contacts on facebook, twitter account etc means that you are connected. There is still hard work to be done!
• While it is good to aim for the top people in your industry to network with, never depend on them only. Find people who can benefit from your expertise.

What do I mean?

Think about the business model behind sites that offer online deals. It is based primarily on getting sellers to  offer large discounts via daily deals to attract potential buyers to buy from them. In return, these online sites get a cut.

If sellers decide to stop offering their products, the revenue potential for the online site will surely be impacted which will in turn affect the long term sustainability of the site as the revenue is what is sustaining the business.

This is my opinion but there could be three reasons why sellers might decide to stop offering their products through these online sites.

• Profit potential is non existent with such deals as sellers have to offer large discounts.
• Such deals might not translate to loyal customers as customers are usually there for the discounts, not to be a long term customer.
• Time spent on buyers of these discounted deals translates into lesser time for loyal customers which sellers might not want to lose.

Sipping my cup of coffee, I began to analyze why this could have happened. After all, a few years ago, owing a Blackberry was “THE” status symbol that showed that you had arrived as someone important.

There were 3 main reasons why I felt Blackberry might have lost its market share:

1. The cool factor
2. Mobile corporate email access no longer Blackberry’s domain
3. Availability of apps and screen size

The cool factor
If you take a blackberry and you put it next to any other other smartphone (iPhone for example), which would you choose during this day and age? I have used blackberry for a long time and most of the designs that have come out are quite similar to previous versions. Take the recent 9900 for example, apart from the trackpad and the keyboard, I don’t think it is very different from their earlier model. While their recent models like the Torch series of phones attempted to provide a larger screen size to compete against the smartphones, the design was either too bulky (9800) or too skinny (9850)

Even in terms of resolution on the phone, I feel that the blackberry still has some way to go to catch up with the other smartphones.

Mobile corporate email access no longer Blackberry’s domain
In the past, the only way for an employee to access his or her company’s email for example was using the  Blackberry. These days it is no longer true, employees are no longer limited to only one phone to access company email. I have heard of companies where employees are allowed to use their iPhone (for e.g.) to access their corporate email.

Availability of apps and screen size.
One of the key areas that I believe Blackberry lost out was the number of apps that were available to their users compared to users using iPhone or Android. Another area would have been the screen size of the Blackberry vs the other phones. The reason why I mention screen size is because of its importance to the overall user app experience. Excluding the torch series, most Blackberry phones screen size are small in comparison to other smartphones.