digibyte - Gartner Hype Cycle 2014 and its 2000 digital business technologies

It's the 20th anniversary of the Gartner Hype Cycle - what did we do without it? - and the focus is of course on the digital business and the 2,000 technologies, grouped into 119 areas, that you need to get there. New Hype Cycles this year include Digital Workplace, Connected Homes, Enterprise Mobile Security, 3D Printing and Smart Machines.

Gartner's road map to digital business is made up of 6 models -  analog, web, e-business, digital marketing, digital business, autonomous - with the focus this year on the last three.

• Digital Marketing tech includes: Software-Defined Anything; Volumetric and Holographic Displays; Neurobusiness; Data Science; Prescriptive Analytics; Complex Event Processing; Big Data; In-Memory DBMS; Content Analytics; Hybrid Cloud Computing; Gamification; Augmented Reality; Cloud Computing; NFC; Virtual Reality; Gesture Control; In-Memory Analytics; Activity Streams; Speech Recognition.
• Digital Business tech includes: Bioacoustic Sensing; Digital Security; Smart Workspace; Connected Home; 3D Bioprinting Systems; Affective Computing; Speech-to-Speech Translation; Internet of Things; Cryptocurrencies; Wearable User Interfaces; Consumer 3D Printing; Machine-to-Machine Communication Services; Mobile Health Monitoring; Enterprise 3D Printing; 3D Scanners; Consumer Telematics.
• Autonomous stage tech include:   Virtual Personal Assistants; Human Augmentation; Brain-Computer Interface; Quantum Computing; Smart Robots; Biochips; Smart Advisors; Autonomous Vehicles; Natural-Language Question Answering.

My take

Is it that time of the year again? Doesn't time fly? Gartner positions the Hype Cycle as a useful tool to for enterprises to:

identify which technologies are emerging and use the concept of digital business transformation to identify which business trends may result.

Maybe yes, maybe not. But it's a report that marketers and product managers across myriad industry sectors will seize upon and whose findings will appear on a million Powerpoint slides over the next 12 months, so get used to it.