There’s a common misconception that engineers and data scientists are “number crunchers,” and are not creative. They use the left side of their brains, as the popular opinion goes, to present stodgy, black-and-white data, trends, ideas, etc. The “creatives” reside on the other side of the company, immersed in the innovative and artistic work – […]
Since the advent of IBM’s punch cards in the 1920s, the information technology industry has fostered improved decision making through data analysis. But the pace of progress has accelerated dramatically over the last decade, with storage costs dropping at an incredible pace (the price for a gigabyte of storage has fallen 99.5 percent since 2000), […]
At Ascent, we have been focused on the growth of data analytics – or as we called it back in 2008, the ”Explosion of Data” – for close to a decade. In the early days we backed companies such as ZoomInfo, Cymfony (acq. by TNS) and Bizo that comb the web, collecting data to build professional […]
We’ve long been excited at Ascent about the tremendous potential gains from the analysis of data and the complex business problems it can solve. And now I believe we’ve reached the point that organizations need to begin the shift toward data-driven decision making that can move the needle. But for many businesses, this shift is […]
I have written a number of times about the massive potential that resides in extracting insight from data. Leveraging new database, storage, parallel processing and cloud infrastructure, we can now get to these insights at cost levels and in timeframes that can impact decision making at very regular intervals and in major ways. This was […]
Last week Ascent portfolio company ClickFox published the below infographic, which shows two major trends at work simultaneously: how Big Data insights can illuminate consumer behavior and how retail is evolving from bricks-and-mortar to multi-channel commerce, which Ascent calls “More clicks, less bricks.” ClickFox leveraged more than 500 million consumer behaviors across their customer base […]
Last week, when I was at the Xconomy Future of Big Data event moderating a panel on analytics & data infrastructure, one of the speakers essentially said the term ‘Big Data’ is somewhat meaningless. He’s right, of course; there are too many important sub-categories for one overarching term to have any real meaning. He also […]
There was a widely circulated news item recently that tried to explain the mindset of this year’s college freshmen, noting that, for them, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Kurt Cobain have always been dead. (Message to this generation: please do yourself a favor and delete a few LMFAO and Lady Gaga tunes from your iPod in […]
Forbes last week listed the “10 Greatest Industry-Disrupting Startups of 2012,” citing “amazing” companies rapidly transforming industries that affect our daily lives. It was nice to see one of our portfolio companies, ClickFox, recognized in the article. Ascent has seen extraordinary innovation, both within our portfolio and the broader market, from companies that create business […]
