It is that time of year again when tech geeks pull back the curtain to see how their new favorite technologies are developing and how long they are going to take to get to full blown success: The Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies has been released.
For those not familiar with the concept, Gartner study emerging technologies to create a graphic that shows the success and development of specific technologies. It indicates how developed the technologies are in addition to predicting roughly how long it will take them to become mass-market ready and contains five stages through which they go before reaching mass market adoption:
- Innovation Trigger, this is the stage at which technologies become known amongst early adopters
- Peak of Inflated Expectations, the stage at which the expectations of the technology is hyped up to almost unrealistic expectations
- Trough of Disillusionment, here the realities of technologies becomes better known and the speed of their development frustrates people
- Slope of Enlightenment, the technology begins to pick up momentum and is more widely adopted
- Plateau of productivity, this is when technologies become more wide spread and accepted by a larger number of people/companies
This year's updated version does not throw up too many surprises, with technologies like 802.11ax and 4D printing just making their way onto the innovation trigger section, and Blockchain and Autonomous vehicles hitting their peak inflated expectations. However, the element that is truly indicative of the progress that we have seen within data is that 39.4% of everything on the graphic is directly related to data collection and use.
It says much of the impact that data has had on our society, given that in 2012 only 12.
