WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

The most anticipated slide deck of the year is here. Key takeaways:

• Global smartphone growth is slowing: Smartphone shipments grew 3 percent year over year last year, versus 10 percent the year before. This is in addition to continued slowing internet growth, which Meeker discussed last year.
• Voice is beginning to replace typing in online queries. Twenty percent of mobile queries were made via voice in 2016, while accuracy is now about 95 percent.
• In 10 years, Netflix went from 0 to more than 30 percent of home entertainment revenue in the U.S. This is happening while TV viewership continues to decline.
• Entrepreneurs are often fans of gaming, Meeker said, quoting Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and Mark Zuckerberg. Global interactive gaming is becoming mainstream, with 2.6 billion gamers in 2017 versus 100 million in 1995. Global gaming revenue is estimated to be around $100 billion in 2016, and China is now the top market for interactive gaming.
• China remains a fascinating market, with huge growth in mobile services and payments and services like on-demand bike sharing. (More here: The highlights of Meeker's China slides.)
• While internet growth is slowing globally, that’s not the case in India, the fastest growing large economy. The number of internet users in India grew more than 28 percent in 2016. That’s only 27 percent online penetration, which means there’s lots of room for internet usership to grow. Mobile internet usage is growing as the cost of bandwidth declines. (More here: The highlights of Meeker's India slides.)
• In the U.S. in 2016, 60 percent of the most highly valued tech companies were founded by first- or second-generation Americans and are responsible for 1.5 million employees. Those companies include tech titans Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook.
• Healthcare: Wearables are gaining adoption with about 25 percent of Americans owning one, up 12 percent from 2016. Leading tech brands are well-positioned in the digital health market, with 60 percent of consumers willing to share their health data with the likes of Google in 2016.

A study published today suggests your Apple Watch could help detect and track serious heart conditions. According to CNET, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco worked with the app Cardiogram on the Health eHeart study, gathering cardiovascular data from 6,158 people who used Apple Watches. They tested whether the watches were able to …

Alphabet’s artificial intelligence outfit, DeepMind, plans to build a blockchain-style system that will carefully track how every shred of patient data is used. The company, which is rapidly expanding its health-care initiatives, has announced that it will build a tool that it calls Verifiable Data Audit during the course of this year. The idea: allow hospitals, and potentially even patients, to see exactly who is using health-care records, and for what purpose. By logging how every piece of patient data is used, the company hopes to leave behind an indelible audit trail.

100 million rides and runs, 220 billion data points visualizing the best roads and trails worldwide.

With the explosive growth of online activity and social media around the world, the massive amount of real-time data created directly by populations of interest has become an increasingly attractive and fruitful source for analysis. Despite the limitation that social media users in the United States are not a random sample of the US population [7], there is a wealth of information in these data sets and uneven sampling can often be accommodated.

Indeed, online activity is now considered by many to be a promising data source for detecting health conditions [8, 9] and gathering public health information [10, 11], and within the last decade, researchers have constructed a range of public-health instruments with varying degrees of success.

Fine-tuning these algorithms is key to improving large-scale analysis of social media, whether the goal is to measure the caloric content of a tweet or to find the next developing news story. These technologies represent new ways of finding and understanding the conversations we're having as a country -- chatter that is increasingly moving online.

Explore the fitness and workout trends of Fitbit users, and get exercise advice from the experts in this comprehensive, interactive infographic. At Fitbit, we geek out about workouts. Feast your fitness-loving eyes on the first ever Fitbit Health & Activity Index that identifies some of the most popular activities, shifts in workout trends, and ways to stay motivated.

Instead of staying up binging on House of Cards, celebrate sleep week by pledging to go to bed early. It'll help your body and mind get the sleep it needs.