The future is real­ly, real­ly bright! Today, I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to sit down with my com­pa­ny for a meet­ing with Tick­le Founder/CEO James Cur­ri­er. Tick­le was for­mer­ly eMode.com (if you don�t know), which was bought by Mon­ster World­wide last May. eMode.com, or should I now say Tick­le, pret­ty much gave out tests for per­son­al­i­ty, IQ, favorite num­ber, your oppo­site-sex type, what kind of dog you are, etc. The list is pret­ty much end­less even back then.

Mean­while, even though the time allot­ted for the com­pa­ny sit-down went over, way over, I real­ly learned a lot. More than I was expect­ing. Rein­forc­ing what Mon­ster Founder Jeff Tay­lor quot­ed a few weeks back (in his own sit-down ses­sion with us), “Big ideas don’t cost no more than small ideas.” Bot­tom-line, GO BIG OR GO HOME.

But that�s were it�s some­what an argu­ment as well. Some great com­pa­nies now start­ed with small ideas as well; so it can go both ways too. But what I’m get­ting from it is, don’t be restrict­ed to think big in the beginning—or think and dream at all.

One thing that I found very inter­est­ing from James’ pre­sen­ta­tion was that the Inter­net is just bare­ly get­ting start­ed. New tech­nolo­gies are being thought of every­day. Some of these to note are: AJAX, CSS2, XML, RSS and Atom Feeds, etc. Yes, some­times we think that all great ideas (that can make us mil­lions) are thought of already. But that�s one thought process we should­n’t bar us from extend­ing our cre­ativ­i­ty and imag­i­na­tion.

For exam­ple, look at the suc­cess sto­ry of Google. Before it, there was Yahoo, Lycos, AltaVista, etc. But how did it become suc­cess­ful? You may ask. It was through peo­ple; and small talk. Seri­ous­ly, I did­n’t find out about Google through ads or any­thing like that. It was through one of you. “You should try Google out. It’s real­ly sim­ple to use.” Right? Right.

Virility—to say it in all in one word. It�s just fun­ny to how this is true with Google’s recent prod­uct, Gmail. How did peo­ple find out about this? Well, it all start­ed prob­a­bly when the Google peo­ple went to a par­ty and met some peo­ple from Blog­ger and said,

Hey, we’d like to push our new email sys­tem out. How about if we invite your (Blog­ger) mem­bers to try it out?

So the idea sparked. Blog­ger mem­bers got the Gmail invites. Then they were sold on eBay for $100–200 the first few days. I think it�s those damn geeks that want­ed to reserve their new email address. Pret­ty much get first pick from the creme of the crop.

Any­ways, I am learn­ing a lot from these com­pa­ny sit-downs. It shows: how peo­ple react to busi­ness; how peo­ple react in busi­ness; how ideas are made, and how those ideas make oth­er ideas; etc. The list of the things I’ve learned so far has exceed­ed my expec­ta­tions in the past three months I’ve been here; and the fact that there is more to come makes it even more excit­ing and a priv­i­lege to work for ’em. That, and to serve those peo­ple who pro­tects our freedom—the troops.

From my mind to yours, keep think­ing. Keep explor­ing. Use your imag­i­na­tion. Net­work your­selves and don�t be scared to fail or fall from those small and/or big ideas. After all, we fall “so we can learn to pick our­selves back up.”