While many were anxiously awaiting the results of the Iowa caucuses yesterday, tech 
media were caught up in another drama. They were buzzing about $793 million funding for Magic Leap, a secretive startup now valued at $4B.
The back and forth was about what Magic Leap will deliver, and whether they’ll live up to the hype – see the following tweets:
Magic Leap’s strategy is apparently to hype itself like Segway did back in the day. https://t.co/56oWTKMHIf this is a bad strategy.
— Dieter Bohn (@backlon) February 2, 2016
Magic leap raises a ton of money, still have no clue what it doeshttps://t.co/Ps79Yc4KbB
— ಠ_ಠ (@MikeIsaac) February 2, 2016
Just means you’re getting old. https://t.co/LVPHuKC4WP
— Arik Hesseldahl (@ahess247) February 2, 2016
This is how Gizmag described Magic Leap:
“… it appears to [create] the illusion of 3D objects in the user’s field of vision…. Magic Leap’s device … beams a digital light field onto the user’s retinas.”
That actually does sound very cool. But language geek that I am, I latched onto the words some articles used to describe the technology: “mixed reality”.
Ahhh, reality used to be so – um, real – and much simpler. These days we have many flavors: virtual, augmented, and now mixed.
That is great, but if you work in tech PR, you should avoid another kind of reality: distorted.
Distorted reality is when companies exaggerate. I always say “promise less, deliver more”, but the following articles detail journalists’ frustrations about overstated capabilities in cloud services and DevOps.
The Register: Whew! How to tell if a DevOps biz is peddling a load of manure
Wall Street Journal: When it Comes to Tech Services, Cloud can be a Nebulous Term
