By Healthcare Facilities Today

Every year, Silicon Valley creates new buzzwords to make its startup founders, corporate spokespeople, and “thought leaders” feel like they’re doing something important, according to an article on the MedCity News website.

“Jumping in on buzzwords shows we’re insiders to memes or movements that might be at the early stages of a surge, serving as a badge that we’re in the know and hearing the right things in the right places,” Ellen Leanse, a former senior vice president at communications firm Eastwick and head of global marketing at Google Enterprise, said in the article.

"After scanning recent news releases and consulting our followers on Twitter, here are the buzzwords we expect to take off in 2014. We hope you’ll avoid using them; we’ll certainly do our best," wrote blogger Christina Farr.

‘Growth hacker’

Marketing folk at startups are increasingly using this term to describe their work. It’s intended to differentiate them from more traditional marketers. We understand the reasoning, but it’s still one of those startup terms that makes us cringe every time we hear it.

‘nth screen’

A venture firm called Foundation Capital sent us a list of buzzword predictions, which include some horrors like “mobile-born” and “peer-to-peer education.” But “nth screen” particularly stood out, as it’s a term we’ve heard bandied about by some of the big players for a few years.

“Ephemeral sharing”

Snapchat raised a gargantuan amount of funding this year for its application, which sends photos and video messages that disappear after viewing. Snapchat’s appeal for teens and preteens, in particular, is its lack of permanence. You won’t need to worry that awkward or embarrassing photos will turn up again; they only appear for a matter of seconds. Snapchat recently said that is now processing upward of 350 million messages a day.

‘Hyperdata’

It’s really a toss-up whether big data’s next incarnation will be “small data” or “hyperdata.” It really could go either way. We bet that “hyperdata” will take off, as Silicon Valley is obsessed with the term “hyper.” It makes everything sound cooler than it actually is (“hyperlocal” and “hyperconnected” were omnipresent in 2013).

Read the article.