Inside the hype

Do you remember Joost, Pownce, Friendfeed, diaspora, Oink, Google Buzz, Google Wave, Color, Hashable, Poken, App.net, Gowalla, Quote.fm, Empire Avenue, Highlight, Secret, Frontback, Ello, Meerkat or Peach? All these are names of online services that at one point in the past enjoyed a short moment or fame within parts of the tech and startup community (some of them only locally). Most of them don’t exist anymore today, because the sudden adoption and attention by tech geeks was not followed by sustained user growth past the fickle group of early adopters.

I had to think of this reoccurring phenomenon when I this morning stumbled upon a video showing the Silicon Valley-based blogger and evangelist Robert Scoble raving over an upcoming Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality technology by a company called Meta, which he called “the most important product since the Apple II”. He compared the technology to Magic Leap, a secretive startup from Florida that managed to score about $1.4 billlion (!) for its yet to be released Augmented Reality product. According to Scoble, Magic Leap might be undervalued. Continue Reading