WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

The shift to digital channels is happening at the speed of “a decade in days.” Our research suggests that the change will be sticky: a majority of consumer categories will continue to project more growth in e-commerce than in other channels over the next several years.

The trends in this report — while buttressed by data and evidence — are meant to shake our faith in steady trend lines. They point to areas where conditions are ripe for discontinuity and disruption. This report asks us, in effect, to “watch these spaces,” and expect to see surprises and opportunities. In that spirit, here are 14 tech trends that deserve close attention in the first year of the 2020s

What’s next for wellness? Our analysts identified 18 of the biggest wellness trends to watch in 2019, from wellness tourism to boutique meditation.

Automation will eliminate jobs but it will also create them. Here are 21 jobs that will exist in the future.

Welcome to the world of mindfulness and wellness apps. In the past year or so, investors have backed more than 20 startups developing apps and tools aimed at promoting mindfulness, happiness, and other desirable mental states. To date, these companies have raised more than $150 million, according to Crunchbase data. Several of the largest rounds have been in recent months, with the vast majority of funding going to California-based startups.

Singularity University has been talking about purpose for some time now. They describe a focus that is audaciously big and aspirational, causing significant transformation to an Industry, community, or the planet. There is a clear “why” behind the work being done, something that unites and inspires action. They call this a Massive Transformative Purpose.

Scientists developed a stretchable electronic sensor that looks like a temporary tattoo.

The CB Insights artificial intelligence deals tracker looks at top AI deals across industries.

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.

Over 100 million Americans suffer from chronic pain. SnowWorld attempted to divert a patient’s attention from the pain they were experiencing, and into a magical world that saw them flying through a virtual canyon while throwing snowballs at penguins and snowmen. It’s early, but according to Quartz, others have had similar success: the Pain Studies Lab at Simon Fraser University in Canada, Virtual Reality Medical Center in San Diego, and others have all reported significant improvement for patients using VR simulations to treat pain.

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 …

Microsoft was granted a patent for augmented reality glasses that track when and what you eat.

Tiny bursts of electrical stimulation could help users feel walls and spaces in VR. Lopes and his team found that they could use the wearer’s own muscles against them, artificially creating a counter force, or the feeling of resistance to a physical object, by triggering the opposing muscles. The same setup can also enable the wearer to “hold” a large cube in virtual reality or press a virtual button–while using only a small wearable device hooked up to electrodes that are stuck to the user’s skin.

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.

The watch collects your heart rate and rhythms, but it only tells you the time and date.

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

The worldwide wearables market reached a new all-time high as shipments reached 33.9 million units in the fourth quarter of 2016 (4Q16), growing 16.9% year over year. Shipments for the entire year grew 25% as new vendors entered the market and previous champions refreshed their product lineups. The year came to a close with 102.4 million devices shipped.

The US Department of Homeland Security used software to scan social media accounts of people visiting America, but it didn't work properly.

Under President Obama, the government considered asking people to voluntarily submit social media profiles, but since the election of President Trump the scheme may become mandatory and more invasive.

The new boss of the US Department of Homeland Security, John Kelly, has said that such checks should be mandatory and travelers should also be forced to provide passwords and banking records. This may take weeks or months, he said, but people will just have to wait before visiting this shining city on the hill.

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.

The majority of adults in a new survey by the Pew Research Center feel that their privacy is being challenged along such core dimensions as the security of their personal information and their ability to retain confidentiality.

When Americans are asked what comes to mind when they hear the word “privacy,” there are patterns to their answers. When responses are grouped into themes, the largest block of answers ties to concepts of security, safety, and protection. For many others, notions of secrecy and keeping things “hidden” are top of mind when thinking about privacy.

Mozilla’s new open source initiative to document and explain what’s happening to the health of the Internet. Combining research from multiple sources, we collect data on five key topics and offer a brief overview of each.

This post explores the pyramid of digital needs. Based on personal experience and observations, I describe what this hierarchy may be composed of, map technologies that support them, and offer an initial analysis of the impact on individuals and businesses.