Technology is growing fast. From Drone to Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality, people have high expectations for cutting-edge technologies. But people do wonder whether the technology is going to be applied to real life, or just a wonderful illusion. More importantly, what is the next big thing?

The Hype Cycle may give us the answer. The Hype Cycle is created by an information technology research firm, Gartner. It aims to provide a graphical presentation of the maturity for cutting-edge technologies. More importantly, the graph also provides insights on the business potential of the technology.

The Hype Cycle gives insight to relationships between people’s expectation and time. According to the previous research, Gartner divides the Hype Cycle into five parts: Innovation Trigger, Peak of Inflated Expectations, Trough of Disillusionment, Slope of Enlightenment and Plateau of Productivity. Although I was neither involved in the research and I don’t know how Gartner gather data and evaluate each technology, the general trend is intuitive. When the new technology comes out, even though it was just a prototype, people are hyped about it. Thus, the expectation goes up. However, as the technology development, the general public may lose some interest.

Within many technologies, I want to pay more attention to two technologies that receive the most expectation and the least expectation: Autonomous Vehicles and Cryptocurrency Exchange.

Autonomous Vehicles:

It has been well-known that Google has been developing the self driving vehicle. Despite the few minor accidents this year, Google’s self-driving car project is fairly successful. However, comparing to its competitors, Google’s self-driving car project still has a long way to go in order to push it to the market.

As Google is slowly making process with autonomous cars, people almost forgot Uber is also working on autonomous cars. And Uber is surprisingly moving faster than Google. On August 18th, Uber announced its first self-driving car will start picking up passengers later this month. Uber will deploy 100 modified Volvo XC90s on the road. These vehicles are equipped with self-driving equipment. Though the vehicles are not yet completely self-driving. Each vehicle will be assigned with an engineer, who can make actions for emergency situation.

I guess it is a bad news for Uber drivers...

Cryptocurrency:

Cryptocurrency is a virtual exchange currency using cryptography to secure the transactions and to control the creation of additional units of the currency. Bitcoin is the most famous cryptocurrency. Bitcoin was written in code and was designed to have 21 million bitcoins in total. Every 210,000 blocks mined that reward will be cut in half. When people validates and secures the transaction data, as known as mining blocks, they will receive bitcoins as rewards. Originally, “miners” are rewarded 50 bitcoins per “block”.

As the a forerunner in cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin has a big news recently. July 9th is the halvening for Bitcoin. What it means is that the reward for mining a block was cut from 25 bitcoins to 12.5 bitcoins. As bitcoin is becoming harder to mine, the price stays fairly stable, as 1 bitcoin to $572.98 dollars.

There are many emerging technologies we should anticipate for 2017. With those technologies, we are making the world a better place.