What is "Disruptive Technology"? Disruptive Technology is technology that changes the way people interact and live in an extreme way, whether good or bad. Some of these instances of technology that could be considered would be the telephone, steam engine, the car, and many others. These inventions helped change the way people have lived and interacted. For example, the telephone changed at what speed people could communicate messages at. Instead of sending a message and waiting for it to be delivered, people could now just pick up the phone and call someone within minutes and deliver the message.
The iPhone is a device that has been designed that could be considered disruptive technology. The iPhone introduced many different ways that one could use a phone. The addition of the touchscreen and full mobile web browser made it possible and easier to do more than just talk and text on our mobile devices. The iPad came a few years after the introduction of the first iPhone. Like the iPhone the iPad changed modern computing, especially in the laptop and desktop computer areas. It propelled tablet computing forward. While these two devices have been around for awhile and been considering disruptive technology things have progressed further into a new category called Wearable Technology. Once again, like the iPhone and iPad, wearable technology is changing the way people interact with technology. Things like Google Glass and smartwatches are changing how we connect to the internet and receive our information. Google Glass allows us to receive our information in the real world in front of us. If a person needs directions, they can now have it overlaid in the real world in front of their eyes. With smartwatches if a person receives a call, email, or text message a notification gets sent to the watch on our wrists and there is no need to even bring out the phone from the pocket.With some watches a person can even reply and answer a phone call on the watch.
A new market and category that is making itself more and more known is called "The Internet of Things". This includes devices that connected together that keep us informed. For example, refrigerators will eventually all be able to let us know when out milk is spoiled or when we run out of eggs. When this becomes more mainstream is will change the way we live. It will afford us all the opportunity not to have to manually keep track of out refrigerator inventory. Think of this, imagine a person gets up at 7am to get ready for work Monday through Friday. A typical routine could be to get up and out of bed, go downstairs to the kitchen and make coffee and while that brews take a shower and get ready for the day. When all ready that person goes and grabs a cup of coffee and sits down and relaxes before heading off to work. With the internet of things many of these tasks could be automated and many more. Imagine that same routine but when that person gets out of their bed their house and objects are connected in a way that allows the bed to notice it is 7am on a Tuesday morning and its user has sat up and gotten out of bed due to the difference in weight. The bed then sends a signal to the coffee maker to start the coffee without the interaction of the user to go downstairs and start it manually. The user then goes straight to the shower and gets ready and goes on with their day. Perhaps they have other devices that ready the news upon the user pouring their coffee or device that starts their car based on time and temperature so that their car is started for them when they have to leave at 8:30am and even warmed up in the winter if the temperature is known to be at a certain threshold.