Do Technology Trends Have Their Own Hype Cycle?
Found a neat chart over at TechCrunch on technology hype cycles, pulled from the Gartner Consulting website. For those of you who do not know about Gartner, they are an IT consulting group that are also known for trend research. This stuff is not free, however TechCrunch got permission to post one of their hype cycle charts.
The picture shown at the top is the July 2008 tech hype cycle.
Gartner explains hype cycles here, but long story short there are five phases of a technology cycle:
- Technology Trigger
- Peak of Inflated Expectations
- Trough of Disillusionment
- Slope of Enlightenment
- Plateau of Productivity
I’ll just go over the emerging trends, as they are probably the most interesting and also the most likely of places to find available domain names.
Context Delivery Architecture is a fancy name for WYNIWYG: What you need is what you get. It’s the idea of focusing on an individuals needs and delivering the goods. Though it is quite low on the chart, it’s obviously been around a long time. Perhaps they are saying that we now have the technology to take this to the next level.
Mobile Robots, something I claimed to possibly be the biggest trend of 2008, and perhaps future. (Yea, I know… it’s hard to argue against the green machine).
Augmented Reality, as defined by Wikipedia, is the combination of the real world and the digital world. For instance, one could wear translucent glasses and through them see the real world, as well as computer generated images that project onto the real world. TranslucentGlasses.com and TranslucentGoggles.com were available, I picked them up.
Surface Computers started hitting the news last year where Microsoft announced a division dedicated to bringing these to the masses. Surface computers can recognize things you set on top of them, such as paint brushes, your finger, plates, whatever. They are aiming at hotels, retail establishments, restaurants and public entertainment venues.
Cloud Computing is one of the more popular tech trends at the moment. “Cloud” confuses people; just think of it as “Internet Computing” or “Online Computing.” It’s a combination of many internet technologies, but mostly software as a service and web 2.0. Your G-mail, a place where you store your emails online, is a perfect example of cloud computing.
3D Printing has actually been around a long time, but recently has been picking up steam. Personally, I find it boring and almost totally useless. At least so far…
Microblogging is a huge trend right now, thanks largely to Twitter and partly to Pownce. Some businesses are catching on and using microblogging and instant messaging to communicate in the workplace. Large social networks, like Facebook and LinkedIn, have incorporated microblogging into their platforms.
Green IT is the practice of using computer resources efficiently.
Of course, this is just one company’s point of view. But I still find it quite interesting and full of material that I can research and find domain names.
Are there any technologies that you think they left out? If so, where would you put them on the hype cycle?
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Social Trendcasting Site Is Great Tool For Domainers
Ran across a nifty site today; I have no idea how it slipped by me. It’s called Edopter.com and they brand it as social trendcasting. You are able to browse and follow trends, even submitting some yourself (requires free registration). As a member, you can comment on submitted trends and even help hype them. You are given credit for discovering trends and can give credit to others.
The popularity of a trend can rise and fall, and it will show you the difference from the previous weeks popularity.
The site does use information that you enter to help define trends. For instance, you enter your date of birth, zip code and gender upon registering. The site will keep track of the trends you submit and support. So if a certain trend is wildly popular among 20-24 year old men, the site will say that.
I spent a good deal browsing the site and found some interesting trends and clever start-ups. A few examples:
- Spikeball - Like volleyball, only different… just $50 and enjoyed by males ages 25 to 30 from Chicago. Being the curious fella that I am, I checked in with Google Trends. The trend report for “Spike Ball” supports this claim. Check out the cities: LA is first, with Chicago second. Pretty neat. (ChicagoSpikeball.com is available Spikeball is the name of a product, not a sport. So it’s trademarked)
- OLED’s - Organic LED’s are more efficient and powerful.
- Coworking - The idea of work-at-home employees getting together in a community area such as a cafe or a shared office.
I even found one related to domaining: Backwards-spelled domain names. Sorry, not sold.
Taking a look at the most popular trends and you will see a watered down list of obvious things like the iPhone, Obama, Apple, Firefox, etc. The real treasure is found from browsing the trends.
Plenty of stuff here for domainers to sniff out. Some of these trends are quite early, which is a great time to get in on it. Let’s go back to the Coworking trend: If people are searching out comfortable places to work, a directory could be worth building. How much competition will you have? LocalCoworking.com is available.
Check the site out, spot anything that has potential?
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Labor Day Recap: Vinyl Wall Art Is Now My Top Search Term
Nice to have a day off! Good luck to people being affected by Gustav today and the upcoming days. Being in Houston, what has happened to New Orleans could just as easily have happened to us.
Back on June 21st, I revisited trends from previous posts to see how they were doing. Well, I’m doing it again. I won’t bore you with a recap of every post, but there are a few I wanted to go over starting with the most important one:
Aug 11th - Vinyl Wall Art
I never would have expected it, but the vinyl wall art post has become my most popular post of all time in just under 3 weeks. Not because domainers love it or are linking to it, but because of loads of organic traffic. Vinyl wall art is my number one search term now, even higher than domain related keywords (geodomains is second, in case you were curious). I suppose that’s kind of embarrassing for a domaining blog to admit.
But I think this shows how hot this trend really is. And to give you an idea of what people are typing to find vinyl wall art (at least the ones that got to my site):
- vinyl wall art
- vinyl wall designs
- vinyl art
- vinyl wall
- vinyl sticker wall art
- uk vinyl wall art
- big wall art
- vinyl people wall art
- vinyl wall art home
- how to make vinyl wall stickers
- vinyl wall art blog
- vinyl wall looks real
- vinyl for wall art
And these are directly related to my suggesting that ’80s vinyl wall decals were going to be a big subniche:
- nes vinyl wall
- star wars vinyl wall decals
- star wars wall vinyl
- wall decal big nickelodeon commercial
- ghostbuster wall art (yea, for real)
- mario vinyl wall art
- andy warhol wall decal (Hate to say it, but I told ya so!)
Yea, people really typed those in to get to my blog. Perhaps I should change my focus? hehe…
If TrendDomaining.com is ranking real high for these keywords and people are clicking on them, then the supply is not meeting the demand. Hint hint.
Aug 14th - Olympics
I said that Michael Phelps could do for swimming what Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods did for basketball and golf, respectively.
Of course, it’s too early to tell. But this NY Times report proves this trend is on the right track. From the article: “I don’t want this sport to be an every-four-years sport,” said Phelps. “In between the four years, there’s really not as much exposure as I’d like.”
Aug 7th - Oil Bubble
Well, on August 7th crude oil was about $118 a barrel. Yesterday, August 31st, it was at $120. Not a burst. But it’s still almost $30 lower than it’s high in July. The price of gasoline has gone down, but it doesn’t seem to reflect the huge drop in crude these past 2 months. That’s because these crude oil barrels are futures; the current price of crude is for Octobers gasoline. So don’t fret, the bubble is bursting, even if the price of gas doesn’t reflect it completely; it should come October. Yes I said “should.” Hurricane Gustav or many other things may have a say in it.
Either way, speculators are moving on to something different. Soon we should start seeing reports of money being pumped into alternative energy like never before.
July 7th - Home Servers and Movies-on-demand Boxes
Of course, not long after I wrote this post, news of a Netflix box hit Yahoo. Genius. Blockbuster announced their kiosk business model, which is identical to Redbox and too little too late. It’s just not enough. Netflix gets it, Blockbuster doesn’t.
Vudu has a sleak new box, but it’s still not comparable to what Netflix has.
I feel that eventually every (fortunate) home will have either a home server, movie box or both.
June 30th - Bamboo
I still think bamboo will be one of the biggest trends of the upcoming decade. It just has so many answers for the world.
Though not a site of authority, here is a post that claims bamboo clothing is the next big eco-trend. Here is another company putting it all in on bamboo clothing.
Bamboo is helping computers go green with ASUS finally rolling out it’s bamboo notebooks, Dell’s Hybrid and SimpleTech releasing these nifty external drives.
Since the post, I was able to pick up a couple decent bamboo names:
- BambooRoofing,com
- ShopBamboo,com
Grab bamboo domains now while they’re cheap.
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