New Gartner Hype Cycle Out; Some Interesting Changes From Last Year (Gartner.com)

Gartner provides, for my money, the most comprehensive and systematic coverage of technology trends among the commercial research providers.  One of their best free products is the annual Gartner Hype Cycle.

The Hype Cycle is a useful way of thinking about how typical technologies evolve and mature.  The 2011 version is displayed below (with a more complete report and video here):

http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=1758314

I covered the Hype Cycle last year on SAM and comparing 2010's cycle with this year's is an interesting exercise.  In the first place, there are a number of technologies that are not on both cycles.  Gartner covers 1900 technologies so it is clearly impossible to put them all on a single Hype Cycle graphic.

Secondly, most of the technologies have not moved very much in the last year.  This makes some sense given that many of the technologies aren't expected to mature for "5 to 10 years" or "more than 10 years".

A couple of notable exceptions include augmented reality and the media tablet which have both crested the first big wave of expectations.  If Gartner is right, we should start seeing an increasing number of reports about the limitations of media tablets and the problems with augmented reality over the next 12 months.

I also always pay attention to what is coming in at the beginning of the Hype Cycle and what is about to leave the Hype Cycle.  There are some interesting new additions this year:  3D Bioprinting and quantum computing.  Location aware applications, speech recognition and (surprisingly) predictive analytics are all set to leave the stage -- they have become mainstream in Gartner's eyes.

The Gartner Hype Cycle: An Interesting Way To Think About The "Next Big Thing" In Tech (Gartner.com)

Every year I look forward to seeing the latest editions of a number of regularly published analytic reports. The DNI's Annual Threat Assessment and Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index fall into this category. Even the Aon Terrorism Threat Map, while not an annual publication, satisfies my itch for a regular update on the state of affairs within that functional area.

When it comes to technology trends, however, the best such product I know of is Gartner's annual "Hype Cycle" chart. Gartner is a large and well respected research company that tracks all sorts of technologies.

Their experience has been that new technologies follow a more or less predictable pattern over time that is best measured by the amount of "hype" (i.e. inflated expectations) associated with a particular technology. You can see the current version of the hype cycle below (and can get more detailed information about the cycle, the methodology and additional findings at Gartner's website):

For example, if you look at the image above you can see that biometric identification has exited the "trough of disillusionment" and has entered the "slope of enlightenment". For many inside the intel community, biometric devices are old hat but what the hype cycle seems to be saying is that these technologies are about to become old hat for all of us...

One of the surprises for me was to see predictive analytics so far out on the hype cycle. Of course, then I think about Hunch's Predict-o-matic (available only to Facebook users, unfortunately, and which scared the be-jeesus out of me...) or articles like this one and I understand exactly what they mean.

Even more interesting are those items at the top of the hype cycle; stuff like cloud computing, 3D flat panel displays and augmented reality. If Gartner is right, then, in the very near future, we should start to see mainstream news articles trashing these technologies not as the "next big thing" but as the most recent tech flop.

My favorite part of the hype cycle is the stuff entering in from the left hand side, the technologies that are just beginning to climb the first steep curve of unreasonable expectations. Here we find the way-out technologies -- autonomous vehicles and computer-brain interfaces.

I like to point out to students that these are the technologies that they will have to deal with over the course of their careers; that they will fight with their children not over whether they get earrings in their ears but whether they will get chips in their brains.