Key Trends to Watch in Gartner 2012 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle

Most of the technologies necessary to enact this scenario are available and charted on Gartner’s 2012 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technology. In fact, it is only a matter of a few “tipping point” technologies that still need to mature for several compelling scenarios to take off.

Each year, Gartner’s Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle helps businesses understand which emerging and embryonic trends they should examine for competitive advantage. While fast movers from 2011 include media tablets, Big Data, 3D printing, cloud computing, and near field communications (NFC); this year’s trends are tempered by those technologies in each potential scenario that have yet to reach their tipping point. Sure, our phones are smarter, mobile payments are possible, and 3D-printed toys might loom on the horizon; but for widespread adoption to be possible the technologies must progress through the hype cycle to the plateau of productivity, where performance and value are predictable.

Gartner’s 2012 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle

(see pic. above)

For example, smartphones can understand some voice commands, but not all. They can recognize individuals – but will have trouble if they put their glasses on. And location sensing ability might not find us, especially when we’re indoors or underground. In other words, if enterprises are to deliver new business value and experiences through a set of technologies rather than individual ones, then it is important that they understand which technologies are already mature and which ones are not there yet.  Often it’s just one or two technologies that are not quite ready and limit the true potential of what is possible.  

Here are some of the more significant scenarios and the “tipping point technologies” that need to mature so that enterprises and governments can deliver new value and experiences to customers and citizens:

Bring Your Own Everything

Consider the consumerization trend that makes it acceptable for enterprise employees to bring their own personal devices into the work environment. An important aspect of this trend, known as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), sits at the top of the Peak of Inflated Expectations in this year’s Emerging Trends Hype Cycle. It is tempered, however, by three technologies that have yet to reach their tipping points. The first, hosted virtual desktop, sits in the Trough of Disillusionment because performance levels are not yet adequate for enterprises to port images of employees’ corporate desktops onto their tablet devices. The second technology, HTML 5, must reach widespread adoption to allow development of applications and services across devices. Finally, improved power supplies such as silicone anode batteries, which are rising towards the Peak, will be required to power new generations of these mobile devices.

Smarter Things

A world in which things are smart and connected to the Internet has been in the works for over a decade and many of this year’s emerging technology trends enable them such as Autonomous Vehicles, Mobile Robots, Internet of Things, Big Data, Wireless Power, Complex Event Processing, Internet TV, Activity Streams, Machine-to-machine Communication Services, Mesh Networks: Sensor, Home Health Monitoring, and Consumer Telematics.  However, there are already more things than people connected to the internet and the industry needs to find the right balance of cost, bandwidth and power consumption to make it plausible for the massive scale connection of things.  Furthermore, the common wireless protocols of 3G/4G cellular, WiFi and Bluetooth need to be complemented with wireless networks better designed for things (e.g. Zigbee, Dash7, or WAUN in Japan) to keep costs down.  

Technology Interaction – The Human Way

In addition to a connected world of smarter things, people also look to interact with their technology in a more natural way. Near field communication can help bridge the digital and physical worlds by providing cashless payments with mobile devices. Additional opportunities include turning a smartphone into a hotel or car key, authenticating employees performing maintenance on field assets for only specific tasks, or even silencing phones in movie theaters.

Additional technologies that aid natural interactions include gesture control, human augmentation, volumetric and holographic displays, biometric authentication methods, gamification, among others. Natural language question answering is on the brink of transforming human interaction with information, but computing power (both cloud and distributed) and algorithms remain a limiting factor to its broader progress. 

Future of Payment

In a near-cashless world scenario, most transactions are an electronic one and technologies on this year’s hype cycle such as Near Field Communication (NFC) Payment, Mobile over the air (OTA) Payment, and Biometric Authentication will enable it.  NFC moves towards the Trough of Disillusionment, however, and will not be widely adopted for mobile payment scenarios until certain devices, such as Apple’s iPhone, embed NFC chips into their models. Related technologies will also impact the payment landscape – albeit more indirectly.  These include the Internet of Things (i.e. things being able to do their own transactions), mobile application stores (i.e. Apple iTunes possibly becoming a payment vehicle – such as Apple EasyPay trials and Passbook) and Automatic Content Recognition (i.e. technology that enables the smartphone to recognize a song, movie or product via the microphone or camera and allowing the consumer to purchase it).

In addition, two technologies that aim to turn the smartphone into a wallet, NFC payment and mobile over the air (OTA) payment still face consumer and merchant adoption challenges. The level of success of these technologies will be country-specific so unlike other limiting factors, success and failure will be local.

The Voice of the Customer Is On File

Humans are social by nature which drives a need to share – often publicly.  This creates a future in which the “voice of customer” will be stored somewhere in the cloud and can be accessed and analyzed to provide better insight on customers.  Recording what gets shared, liked, streamed, viewed, consumed, and timelined and who friends or follows whom, creates an extremely rich pool of insight – at the cost of being alarmingly un-private. 

Privacy backlash is the single biggest showstopper that will limit this future scenario.  Each country and domain (e.g. social networks vs. internet TV) will have its own privacy limitations. Additionally, organizations may question the investment to store and analyze huge amounts of data to be better at selling to or servicing a customer or citizen. 

3D Print It at Home

This scenario paints a future in which 3D Printing allows consumers to print physical objects such as toys or houseware products at home – just as they print digital photos today.  While more robust forms of additive manufacturing technology allow enterprise and academia to 3D produce designs never before possible (e.g. special aerofoils and medical implants), this scenario focuses on mass consumer use of 3D printing. 

Combined with 3D scanning it may be possible to scan certain objects (e.g. action figure) with a smartphone and print a near duplicate.  As with other scenarios, we are close, but this one will take well over five years to mature beyond the niche market due primarily to the ease of use, cost, speed, and print materials necessary for mass adoption by consumers.

Each of the technologies included in the 2012 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies is included because of particularly high levels of hype or because Gartner believes they have the potential for significant impact. For more information on all of the included technologies and their positions on the hype cycle, view the Gartner’s Hype Cycle Special Report for 2012.