Five hyped technologies: disruptive or not?

What is a disruptive technology? Obvious examples would include the internet generally and the web specifically, smartphones and tablets more recently and, of course, the cloud. The one thing that all these technologies has in common is that they came along and threw a proverbial spanner in the works, challenging and changing the way we do business, creating new markets and threatening the established players. That's what we mean by “disruptive”. Spotting emerging technologies that are likely to bring web or smartphone levels of disruption into our lives over the next few years isn’t as easy as you might imagine. That's not stopped people trying, and even mooting that certain tech advances are already disruptive. Here we take a reality check on the potential of five much-hyped technologies.