Agora Media Group Innovation Blog

Gartner’s Hype Cycles and Priority Matrices are used by many as part of the technology-planning process and a way to understand the trends, expectations and create snapshots of technologies.
The reports by Gartner are annual and give an assessement of 1,800 technologies and trends.

Below you will find an introduction on the Hype Cycle and the Priority Matrix and where emerging technologies are in the Hype Cycle.

What is the Hype Cycle?
Gartner states:
“Gartner’s Hype Cycle characterizes the typical progression of an emerging technology, from overenthusiasm through a period of disillusionment to an eventual understanding of the technology’s relevance and role in a market or domain. Each phase is characterized by distinct indicators of market, investment and adoption activities.”

What is the Priority Matrix Graphic?
Gartner states:
“The Priority Matrix is a tool for prioritizing emerging technologies by forcing technology planners to look beyond the hype and assess technology opportunities in terms of their relative impact on the enterprise and the timing of that impact.”

What does it mean for you?
As explained by Gartner it will help you as a company to understand what the trends are, where to look at (be it for internal or business/growth opportunities) and what the “state” of these technologies are.
Jumping bandwagons without solid trend information does happen often, depending on the corporate culture (Innovator for instance) this can be good, for many others an understanding before applying technologies is a sure way to go.

For us Agora Media / AppMarket.tv it means to understand technologies like Augmented Reality, mobile technologies and convergent technologies, what the benefit and mainstream adoption timeframe is.
The latter is important for planning and business development. Too early has its advantages but also challenges, entering too late the market means losing share and a certain brand recognition/positioning.

Gartner provides many Hype Cycles, which you can find on this page.
For this article, three of the Hype Cycles that are relevant for our business are:
“Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2010″
“Hype Cycle for E-Commerce, 2010″
“Hype Cycle for Business Use of Social Technologies, 2010″

Below you’ll find the individual technologies that are mentioned in the “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2010″ and where they are situated in the Hype Cycle.

You can relate the phases below to the shown first image in this article.

On the Rise
Human Augmentation
Context Delivery Architecture
Computer-Brain Interface
Terahertz Waves
Tangible User Interfaces
Extreme Transaction Processing
Autonomous Vehicles
Video Search
Mobile Robots
Social Analytics
3D Printing
Speech-to-Speech Translation

At the Peak
Internet TV
Private Cloud Computing
Augmented Reality
Media Tablet
Wireless Power
3D Flat-Panel TVs and Displays
4G Standard
Activity Streams
Cloud Computing
Cloud/Web Platforms

Sliding Into the Trough
Gesture Recognition
Mesh Networks: Sensor
Microblogging
E-Book Readers
Video Telepresence
Broadband Over Power Lines
Virtual Assistants
Public Virtual Worlds
Consumer-Generated Media
Idea Management
Mobile Application Stores

Climbing the Slope
Biometric Authentication Methods
Internet Micropayment Systems
Interactive TV
Predictive Analytics
Electronic Paper
Location-Aware Applications
Speech Recognition

Entering the Plateau
Pen-Centric Tablet PCs

Augmented Reality is at the peak, meaning attention is reaching a all high record. Companies like Layar, T-Immersion, Junaio are pushing -with much success- the boundaries of this technology.
Microblogging on the other hand is sliding into the trough, meaning it will have hard times to prove itself within the environment and usage. In case of Microblogging I do see a bright future, but less hyped and much more relevant than in many present cases.
Interactive TV is climbing the scope, it has passed the trough and modified/enhanced offers are globally being developed, making it an interesting emerging market.

What do you think of the Hype Cycle management model?
Do you make use of it during strategic planning and growth strategies?