DoCoMo's competitors jumped into the fray, upping the ante with more and more complex versions: with color, better resolution, more variations, animations.
With two or three owners always willing to ante up more and more millions for Alex Rodriguez last year or for Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi this year, salaries keep soaring higher and higher.
Its myriad displays of explicit violence are, for the most part, boring, and, if audiences seem to be inured to it (when in fact they're just lulled by it), other filmmakers may be moved to up the ante not more imaginatively but merely more copiously, not in quality but in quantity.
One looks forward to Ms. Ferris's upping the ante even more.
Succeed and you can leave with what you have or up the ante for more.
Over the last several weeks, Mr. Malmsten and Ms. Leander, who together own about 40percentt of the company, had been pleading with investors to ante up more.
The state official, Mark Peters, began contacting other insurance companies, including MetLife and State Farm, and persuaded them to ante up more than $600 million.
Which means upping the ante on more adventurous designs: nestled among this fall's lace pump by Dolce & Gabbana and glossy velvet slippers by Giuseppe Zanotti are curvy booties by the Turkish designer Burak Uyan.
This year, said Mandy Putnam, vice president of TNS Retail Forward, a retail market research firm in Columbus, Ohio, "Stores are upping the ante with more personalized customer service, particularly if they've depended on that for sales in the past".
