Hype

E-book readers have bottomed out, Internet TV is nearing the peak of inflated expectations, location-aware apps have emerged onto the plateau of productivity, and augmented reality is beginning a long slide into the trough of disillusionment.

At least these are the conclusions from the Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2011, an annual report from market research firm Gartner that positions emerging technologies on a rather dizzying roller-coaster graph from research and development to mainstream adoption.

Each technology starts with a "Technology Trigger" and rides up a "Peak of Inflated Expectations," down a "Trough of Disillusionment," then up a "Slope of Enlightenment" before reaching a "Plateau of Productivity."

Sounds more like a Zen monk's career path or the arc of a Hollywood thriller than a road map for a technology such as e-books.… Read more

At the start of the year, I did a little roundup of the 12 most-anticipated tech products of 2011. Well, the year's more than half over and many of those products have come out already.

We had the BlackBerry Playbook, Nintendo 3DS, Chrome OS notebooks, Motorola Xoom, HP TouchPad, and iPad 2, to name some of the high-profile launches we've seen in 2011. So what's left?

Some good stuff--and even a few items beyond the obvious Apple gear. Have a look and as always, if you think we missed any potential items, feel free to suggest them … Read more

NEW YORK--One thing that anyone could learn from the three years (!) of Apple iPhone launches at the city's midtown flagship store is that things go best when they're kept simple. The original iPhone launch was remarkably smooth, but the next year, when in-store activations were added into the mix and AT&T's servers were swamped, it got messy. The iPhone 3GS launch last year was, in comparison, very calm.

So this time around, for the launch of the iPhone 4 at 7 a.m. on Thursday, the store has two lines--one for people who preordered, and … Read more

Back in December, I did roundup of the most notable tech products for 2009. Well, looking back is nostalgic and all, but looking forward is more fun.

Since many companies like to keep future new releases under tight wraps so they don't short-circuit sales of their current products, we can't predict what all the new hot gadgets will be this year. But we did see a fair amount of intriguing stuff at this year's CES in Vegas and we know that plenty of sequels to today's popular products are on the way--whether the company wants you … Read more

It's been said that information technology is a fashion industry--that we just keep following the latest hype and fads. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison last year referred to cloud computing this way.

Ellison loves this dig, and he uses it least once every technology generation. He's not alone. I, however, disagree with the entire curmudgeon corps' "It's just hype!" attitude.

While it's true that we in IT have our fashions, just like any field of human endeavor, we're generally pretty practical. It's hard to see either IT's executives or its technicians as … Read more

Whether it's hardware, software, or vaporware, there's no shortage of intense hype for new products and technologies at E3. But beyond the breathless product demonstrations, the reality doesn't always live up to the promise (not that this is all that different from any other part of the tech industry). Even having gotten a close-up, in-person look at some of these big buzz-worthy introductions at E3, it's hard to separate fact from hype, although one thing is obvious: only a handful of these hardware developments are even close to actually being released.

Project Natal, the Xbox 360's motion-sensing camera add-on, certainly has potential, but the promo video for it Microsoft showed off was purely a work of science fiction. In it, a happy family enjoys multimedia content, chats with friends, and plays complex interactive games without a controller, just using their bodies. The actual playable demos were a few generations behind that, more reminiscent of the Sony Eye Toy accessory for the PS2--the main example was a simple game where players bat a ball back at the screen by swatting at the air, with just enough lag to be annoying. We're very excited about the potential of this new motion-sensing, face-and-voice-recognizing, camera add-on, but for now the gulf between the reality and prerendered video is sizable.

A much-hyped software package that uses the Project Natal hardware, Milo was presented as a virtual onscreen boy who could recognize you and carry on an intelligent conversation. The demo video was impressive, but obviously shot in a tightly controlled environment with clearly scripted responses. Talking to several people who got a chance to try out talking to Milo in person behind closed doors, the responses were uniformly disappointed, describing the supposedly realistic Milo similar to a Tamagotchi virtual pet, with only very basic interactivity. Milo was created by Peter Molyneux, a game designer infamous for over-promising and under-delivering, with ambitious but flawed projects such as Fable and Black & White. … Read more

April 1 has come and gone and in the minds of many people the Conficker worm turned out to be a joke instead of the major Internet security event that might have been envisioned. Was the hype good, or bad, and who is to blame?

"I'm not sure what to think," said Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer at BT, who is usually critical or pessimistic. "In a sense, the whole Conficker thing just puts a name on a general problem."

The problem is that there are tons of malicious programs and attacks out there … Read more

TechCrunch tells us Web 2.0, at least as a buzz word, is dead, with Google Trends data suggesting that 2008 saw the term drop consistently and then precipitously as a matter of search interest.

I'm sure this is right, but I'm just as sure that it doesn't matter.

Tim O'Reilly, who coined the term "Web 2.0," has a knack for spotting trends and then moving on once they become less interesting. For him, that usually means once the rest of us have caught on and once the technology or trend in question … Read more

Here's a message for all the tech bloggers and reporters freaking out over the alleged Associated Press bombshell that some copy-paste legerdemain led to the revelation that Facebook valued itself at $3.7 billion at the time of the ConnectU vs. Facebook court settlement:

Please, chill out! This is not news!

While it had not yet been reported that the ConnectU settlement was a reported $65 million (though since it was in cash and stock, that value may have dropped with the onset of the recession), the $3.7 billion Facebook valuation has been around since July.

The New … Read more