Into the Trough: BitCoin, Machine Learning, Social Analytics

Into the trough of disillusionment with the hyped technologies!

The canary in the coal mine for me, with respect to BitCoin, is this post. Look, nobody has enjoyed more popcorn around BitCoin than I have. From Coinye to Dogecoin, crypto-currencies have delivered the lulz. Do I believe there’s a slope of enlightenment for crypto-currency? Absolutely. Do I believe that’s imminent? Nope. Banks are apex ruminants. The lessons from BitCoin have to be fully digested before something really good comes out of it.

Machine learning. Huge potential and the best is yet to come. The first wave around machine learning gave us Netflix and Amazon. And then the bloom came off the rose a bit. And now there’s deep learning and we’re getting driverless cars and very rapid image processing. It’s intriguing, isn’t? I think we’re getting deep into the trough given some of the systems integration issues we’re getting into. The web stack is choking on it. Enterprise stacks are choking on it. Social institutions are quite frankly having none of it. There’s a lot of hard, rather unsexy, unsung, work left between here and wide adoption. I think that’s fine and exciting. But we’re getting deep into the trough.

Social analytics. A Top 10 strategic technology in 2011. Utterly ruined by the AOLification of earned media platforms. To an extent, I think it had to be taken over by the PR guys and trivialized for awhile. And it’s not as though any of the incumbent social networks are terribly excited to share data and improve the collective intelligence with the strivers. The Internet has a great track record of knocking down walled gardens. AOL ended. I think the best is yet to come from the analytics of social. And maybe that trend has already started with the humbling of Twitter.

Three great technologies. Three great troughs.