I’ve been a gadget geek for years, and as I was thinking about my purchase behavior and how this population impacts the mass market, I realized that Gadget Geeks follow a very distinctive pattern.
As a device manufacturer (and I believe this also applies to innovative services with a different timing) it’s really important to make sure that you take the most out of our first advocates in the device’s life and help Gadget Geeks reach that Peak of Excitement and stay there as long as you can.

The whole first month from the pre-launch and early sneak peeks seeds to the gadget blogs all the way through to the Peak of Excitement, Gadget geeks will be strong advocates for your new device and will create buzz and product awareness.
Gadget Geeks have an underlying strong brand fidelity that especially impact the decisions he takes when reaching the “Plateau of Reluctance” but until they get there, they will be open to using about anything else that promises more.

This statement :

Virtual Reality is so 2008 – 2009 hype is Augmented Reality

sounds awfully wrong and yet it’s something I’m witnessing a lot lately, and I’m feeling uncomfortable about this.
I feel that this kind of hype is only dictated by communication agencies to have their clients make their way to the headlines. It has never had any real bound to the business side of the technology being used as hype vector.
For instance in 2006 there was a huge hype around Second Life and web3D but it’s only now that we start understanding how we can use this as a productivity tool and actually make money out of it in both business and personal use cases. Yet the hype created by the agencies has had a negative effect on the technology that has been soon perceived as outdated and useless.

The same thing is going on about Augmented Reality, it’s being pushed to create funky user interactions for brands and yet no real use case gets out of those trials. Even worse the whole creation chain of augmented reality content (i.e. stamping somehow real “things”, and associating them with 3D content) is far from being ready.

Somehow I feel like there are already so many mature use cases that could be used to value existing technologies (such as advergames web, mobile or console-based) and that haven’t yet been explored to their full potential that I feel like going to the next hype is somehow pointless… and from an end-user prospective it’s just trash-communication where you enjoy being part of a “premiere” but 5 mins later you get bored and trash the application away without creating any bound with the brand.