Tech Industry Trends & Hypes Summarized in One Graph

Tech industry trends follow quite a predictable pattern: there’s that initial rush of hype followed by an inevitable backlash, and then the long slog towards a product that actually works – eventually leading to incredible stuff like the gadgets around us.

Luckily, the folks over at Gartner have given us a roadmap, plotting out the trends of 2014.They’ve been making these for 20 years, and there’s always a lot of guesswork involved, but this one’s particularly useful as a snapshot of the present moment. Speech recognition is just started to pick up and virtual reality decks like the Oculus Rift are getting there. People have finally stopped saying “big data” as much but “internet of things” is still on the rise.

Artificial intelligence as well as NLP (natural language processing) is still on the to-do list with people expecting some major breakthroughs in the respective fields sometime soon. 3D printing has started to cool off but you can expect it to be a house hold name pretty soon replacing normal printers in every home with full fledged multi-purpose 3D printers.

Thankfully smart robots, biochips and neuro-business will likely take another decade or so. The closest we are to achieving Terminator’s Skynet is, well, Google, who by the way is working on these very fields.

So what do you think about these tech trends? Comment below!