If you wanted to predict the Next Big Thing, the Long Nose theory suggests that you don’t need to look in top-secret corporate innovation labs or in the latest scientific literature.

No, you look in the world around you. You go “prospecting and mining” — and see what tools are already being eagerly used in areas that lie just outside the mainstream. Those are the technologies that are being stress-tested to the point where they’re ripe to become a mass phenomenon. And you look for something that has that element of “surprising obviousness.”

The long nose of tech shows that it is under the radar, out of the mainstream for years, even decades, until the technology is refined and then mass-adopted.

The X-axis is time; the Y-axis is adoption. During the long period when the technology is being refined, it’s not very widespread. Th...