Analog by Night

I don’t often have business conversations with people, but I end of catching enough spray and foam from that roiling ocean of internet punditry that I occasionally end up with a few interesting things. The ones that tend to really interest me are ones that speak to the larger picture of what is happening in the world of innovation and technology. I’m not terribly interested when somebody leaves a post, or stocks trade up or down. I’m interested when technologies come into the world that seem to really have a good chance of creating political change, economic change or changes in our identities as global citizens.

A few weeks ago I discovered something called the Gartner Hype Cycle. Here’s a bit from Gartner’s explanation of what their Hype Cycle is, “Gartner Hype Cycles provide a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities.”

I recognize some of these. I’ve even worked with some of them in the last year.

What do you think these technologies mean for the world we’ll be living in as these things come online? It seems like we should expect “Virtual Worlds” which sounds about twenty years old, to have new meaning or new relevance in the next few years if not months. How do you think these technologies will affect the recession we’re in? New jobs?

It looks like we’re definitely seeking new sources of information, new types of communication and new refinements to how we perceive the world around us.  We’re working pretyy hard to augment the brain. Ubiquitous computing seems to be a big theme here. Look at a few of the topics on those earliest inches of the graph, and pair those up with Speech Recognition, “Idea Management”  and tell me what you think