The market research group Gartner just published its most recent “Technology Hype Cycle” analysis on emerging technologies that will determine and shape the future of business and applications. We all know that everyone has to conceive Web2.0 as the next big thing in making money so that’s why it’s in that report I guess. Gartner classifies the Web2.0 hype to be currently at the peak of inflated expectations in the hype cycle (which means this thing will drop soon before its about to make money). But that’s less important to me.
Gartner also mentions the “Real World Web” and some currently top-notch “Applications Architecture”. Interesting to me is that here “location aware techologies” and “applications” and “sensor mesh networks” are ranked as being through the hype. What does it tell us? That it is more or less making its way to the market? Nah… ten years, at least, for sensor mesh networks in the mainstream market. I’d say ten years, at least, even for the not so mainstream market… I haven’t seen the full report but the press release just mentions some “fragmented market” and “few [industry] standards”.
That’s just half of the truth. Sure, sensor mesh network components – I prefer wireless sensor network – are available, cheap and working. On their own. As far as I have been told, the whole thing scales up to a hundred nodes. This is not, what a wireless sensor network is meant to be about – we want thousands, tens of thousands of nodes. And the networks don’t scale there because computer science and research (not the industry) still hasn’t found a solution for letting these networks
- administrate themselves,
- organize themselves, and
- perform the networks tasks distributedly by themselves
in an energy efficient way. I’d honestly be surprised if some company comes up with a solution, because this is still fundamental research. But hey… that’s why I’m writing this :) I wonder whether market analysts can look beyond markets…
Dirk's Metric/k 