WHAT WE'RE READING
The Investing Edge
of Enterprise IT
Apr
2013
Ascent Index: BYOD (March 2013)
What a difference a year makes. Well, almost a year. For our newest Ascent Index we took another look at BYOD, the evermore popular news topic as more employees use their personal devices for work purposes. Our Index data confirms that BYOD is only gaining steam, and that’s putting it mildly. In the month of March 2013 BYOD received more
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Nov
2012
Ascent Index: Cybersecurity
AT&T last week reported that cybersecurity was a billion dollar opportunity for the company, as attacks on its networks had doubled in the past four months. But it’s not just the telecommunications giant that hopes to seize on the cyber opportunity; many leading companies – be they Google, IBM, General Dynamics or countless others – have acquired information security vendors
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Sep
2012
Observations from Dreamforce 2012
I was at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference yesterday with 95,000 of my closest friends. Seriously, that’s how many people registered for this event. It’s an impressive display of organizational prowess and the Salesforce team puts on a great show. The keynote yesterday morning featured lots of slick videos and loud music. It also included appearances by Tony Robbins, The Cake Boss
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Aug
2012
Ascent’s Own “IronMen”
On behalf of Ascent Venture Partners, I’d like to congratulate Partner Matt Fates and VP of Finance Tom Scanlon for what I consider to be a pretty amazing accomplishment – completing an Ironman Triathlon. Cheered on by friends, family and thousands of supportive spectators at Mont-Tremblant in Quebec on August 19th, Matt and Tom completed a 2.4-mile swim in Tremblant
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Aug
2012
Finding Your Optimal Investor – Due Diligence for Entrepreneurs
I’ve seen the venture capital due diligence process from both sides of the table and I know how comprehensive and exhaustive it can be (sometimes to the chagrin of the entrepreneur). But it’s a critical part of the process, ensuring that the venture investor is fully bought into the team, product, market, etc. A typical venture capitalist makes only a
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Jun
2012
Ascent Index: BYOD (June 6 – June 20)
We know bringing your own device to work (that’s ‘BYOD’ for most of us) is a hot topic right now – and getting hotter. Over the past two weeks alone, the term had nearly 22,000 mentions on social networks which is a 10 percent increase over the first half of the month. One reason for the uptick could be the
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Jun
2012
ASCENT INDEX: e-commerce (May 23 – June 6)
We’ve been keeping a close watch on our enterprise IT terms over the past few weeks, and noticed one standing out high above the others. While not a new term by any measure, yet still a very important one that continues to see growing activity, “e-commerce” had 28,847 mentions in the two-week period we examined, with an average of 1,800
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May
2012
Considering the Human Element in Online Trading
Earlier this year I participated in the Computational Science Ventures lecture series hosted by Harvard’s Institute for Applied Computational Science. It was an opportunity to engage with students and faculty on a topic we follow closely at Ascent – the merging of the physical and digital worlds and the resulting opportunities for innovative new products and services. One of the
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May
2012
ASCENT INDEX: CLOUD SECURITY (MAY 4 – MAY 18)
One of the most tweeted stories on the cloud so far in May has been a contributed piece on Mashable examining how cloud computing and Google products are changing a generation, namely students. It discussed how students as young as five and six are using tools such as Google Docs, and how demands from college students are driving universities to
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