Next head across the Brooklyn Bridge to stroll the deliciously breezy Brooklyn Heights Promenade, catch an outdoor Shakespeare performance in Brooklyn's vast green Prospect Park, and scoop up a butter pecan sundae at the waterfront Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory (1 Water St), housed in a 1920s fireboat house.

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There had been the prospect of vast job cuts, with a total of about 16, 000 staff expected to be axed worldwide from a combined workforce of 142, 000.

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Firms the world over licked their chops at the prospect of a vast new middle class.

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When Netflix combined DVDs and streaming, it offered both a vast selection of up-to-date content and the prospect of instant gratification.

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What used to take months of golf outings and lunches is now pulled together by a solution like Salesforce.com and its vast ecosystem of partner solutions which provide volumes of research data on any given prospect.

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But this is the era of vast new-issue wealth, and Babson did not want to alienate a hot prospect like DeMello.

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