The cover story of a recent issue of BusinessWeek magazine featured a photograph of Digg.com founder Kevin Rose. In the photo, the boyish-looking Rose is sporting a backward baseball hat, headphones and an impish smile, and his thumbs are pointed upward. The headline across his chest proclaims, "How this kid made $60 million in 18 months."

Of course, Rose hasn't really made any money off of his venture, at least not yet. But the point is, the headline and the photo are eerily familiar. Haven't we been here before? Didn't we learn anything from the dot-com boom and bust of the late 1990s?

Remember the first technology bubble, the irrational exuberance, when venture capital was thrown willy-nilly at every dot-com company that came along, and companies received millions of dollars in investments, even though many did not have real business plans and often were not even generating profits?

Although tech bubble 2.0 may be inflating on the West Coast, the Wisconsin refugees and survivors of the first dot-com crash of 2000 say they won't make the same mistakes this time around. For the most part, Wisconsin technology companies are founded on solid business plans with tangible assets of goods and services that have real value in the marketplace.

That's why four of the five fastest-growing small businesses in southeastern Wisconsin are technology companies, reflecting the ongoing evolution of the region's economy.

The Council of Small Business Executives (COSBE) of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce (MMAC) honored the Future 50, the fastest-growing small businesses in southeastern Wisconsin, Thursday, Sept. 14.

According to COSBE, the five fastest-growing companies among the Future 50 are: Wisdom Infotech, a Brookfield information technology solutions provider; Independent Care Health Plan (iCare), a Milwaukee provider of health care benefits for people with disabilities; CCI, a Milwaukee business software provider; Mortgagebot LLC, a Mequon provider of software for financial institutions; and Capital Data Inc., a Milwaukee information technology solutions provider.

To read profiles of this year's Future 50 companies and learn how Wisconsin's technology companies learned lessons from the first dot-com crash, visit www.biztimes.com.

- Steve Jagler is the executive editor of Small Business Times. He can be reached at steve.jagler@biztimes.com.

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