I'm proud to call myself a Mashable alumnus.

The world's most successful entrepreneurs play hard, but they work even harder.

There was more data transmitted over the Internet in 2010 than the entire history of the Internet through 2009.

Building a successful company (or living a happy life, for that matter) is not about embracing someone else's philosophy, but staying true to your own beliefs about the world and learning from the mistakes you make along the way.

Entrepreneurs may be brutally honest, but fostering relationships with partners and building enduring communities requires empathy, self-sacrifice and a willingness to help others without expecting anything in return.

Google has placed its faith in data, while Apple worships the power of design. This dichotomy made the two companies complementary. Apple would ship the phones and computers, while Google would provide Maps, Search, YouTube, and other web tools that made the devices more useful.

Google is famous for making the tiniest changes to pixel locations based on the data it accrues through its tests. Google will always choose a spartan webpage that converts over a beautiful page that doesn't have the data to back it up.

More and more, the things we do in real life will end up as Facebook posts. And while we may be consoled by the fact that most of this stuff is being posted just to our friends, it only takes one friend to share that information with his or her friends to start a viral chain.

Point-to-point transit via low orbit could dramatically speed up international flights, connecting the world even further. And safe, consistent space travel opens up the possibility of commercial space stations, trips to the moon and exploration beyond.

Sharing with just your friends doesn't protect your privacy. I know the people at Facebook will disagree and argue that users can control what is shared with whom. But this is simply an illusion that makes us feel better about all the sharing we have done and are about to do.

The big reason why we don't have space colonies and regular trips to the moon is that flying into outer space is just plain 'hard.' The business of safely transporting people off the Earth is a costly affair that requires a lot of technology.

Trending topics helped make Twitter a more relevant metric of what the world was talking about at any given moment. Google has worked for years in the space, most notably with Google Trends and Hot Searches, but Google+ offers the search giant the ability to see what is truly trending in real time.

What can we learn from the battle between data and design? What can we learn from the relationship between Google and Apple? Clearly no one school of thought is right: Apple and Google are both wildly successful and profitable companies that changed the world.

Windows Updates have sometimes been a pain point for users. The update pop-ups can interrupt a movie or a video game, and the automatic restarts can result in lost data or confused users.

With every inch of land on Earth now catalogued by our satellites, the stars are the next place we as a species must travel. And with a booming world population that will hit 9.1 billion in 2050, large-scale space travel may become a necessity.