A friend of mine said this weekend that the things I have on SHARKRIDE! are “weird.” (I have good ears.)

When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, it was at first greeted sceptically. The head of the telegraph company Western Union labeled it an “electrical toy.”

Nolan Bushnell, the legendary founder of Atari and Chuck E Cheese, told me that when he originally pitched the concept of Chuck E Cheese, most thought it ridiculous: “Why would people want to go to a restaurant with a huge RAT mascot?!” It was one of the fastest growing restaurant concepts of all time.

When Ruth Handler saw a doll of an alluring adult woman, essentially a perverted plaything for men, on a vacation in Switzerland, she immediately sensed opportunity. But her colleagues at Mattel were skeptical, “Why would a parent buy a doll with BREASTS?” “Children play with baby dolls - not adult sex toys!” More than a billion barbies have been sold.

Most people thought Ted Turner was crazy when he launched a 24 hour news channel. “Most people poo pood the idea,” he says.

Who would have thought that yet another search engine in 1999 would be a success, with AOL Search, Lycos, Excite, Yahoo, Go To (Overture), Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, Infoseek, HotBot, LookSmart, MSN Search, Magellan, Web Crawler etc. already competing? Google couldn’t even license its search technology, so it was forced to go at it alone. Of course, in hindsight, Google’s technology was vastly superior, and the “simplicity” of its search page and purity of its results garnered incredible loyalty.

Beanie Babies?? An under-stuffed animal that looks like “road kill,” Ty Warner was told, “would never sell.” He’s now worth $4.5 billion.

So, are your innovative ideas “weird,” or “visionary?” (…or perhaps both?)