Is This Megatrend The Biggest Of 2008? The Decade? The Future?
It seems like every single day I’m seeing stories about robots on sites like Digg, BoingBoing and Trendhunter. Many variations of robots, not just the traditional humanoid that frequents sci-fi movies and books.
Speaking of movies, over the past decade or two robots were more of a childlike glee much like pirates and ninjas are. The extent of robot info all came from movies: Johnny 5, Star Wars, Transfomers, Terminator, Robocop among many others. This isn’t a fad either, as the new movie WALL-E (Johnny 5 look alike) will likely help skyrocket robots into the top tier of mainstream once again.
But for the past year or so I’ve read many articles of non-conventional robots fulfilling actual needs and doing jobs that humans can’t, or won’t, do. Whether they be important jobs, such as Dextre on the space station, or tedious jobs for the luxurious, like the golf caddy, real robots are being put to actual use.
Doing a search for “robot” on Digg reveals that there have been over 30 articles relating to robots on the FRONT PAGE this month alone. A couple were duplicates, such as WALL-E news, but that’s still one article per day. There have been about 130 articles that made the front page so far this year.
Not convinced with just Digg? Here is a search for “robot” on BoingBoing. Gizmodo has 52 robot related posts in June. 52! Engadget has 8 this month. What do BoingBoing, Gizmodo and Engadget have in common? They are three of the top blogs on the net.
Trendhunter put together a nice list of the Top 30 robots of 2008. Some of these are absolutely amazing. Other recent news has robots exploring antarctica, being romantic interests and girlfriends, and imitating fish.
This, to me, is a megatrend.
With all this said, it’s puzzling to me that the term hasn’t moved up on the Google Trend report.
Robots are steamrolling ahead and there are gobs of opportunity for domainers to speculate in domain names, fully develop or just make mini-sites. Geodomainers have opportunity as well, with names like Geo+Robotics.com and Geo+AI.com.
Is this the biggest trend of 2008? Or even the decade? The future?
What do you think?
Related:Do Technology Trends Have Their Own Hype Cycle?
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3 Responses to “Is This Megatrend The Biggest Of 2008? The Decade? The Future?”
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Absolutely! (Along with Nano-tech, and the “green” industry.)
It’s hard to argue against the mainstreaming of the green industry in 2008. I guess I chose robots because the green industry is heavily tied into robotics as well.
I have a half-written post about nanotech too. I’m seeing it hit all the big sites like Digg.
Thanks for the comment Chris.
I hope you are right. I figured the same thing about 3 years ago and scooped up 60 or so robots and robotics geo-generics like “canadarobots.com”, “londonrobots.com”, “australiarobotics.com”, etc.
You have to think that it won’t be all that long before the robotics industry is maybe the biggest industry that there is.