Top 5 Tech Stories of 2016

2016 was a year that saw both steady progress and revolutionary leaps in the tech sector. The Internet of Things came into its own, augmented reality changed the visual landscape of cities, and cognitive computing became a force that is impossible to ignore.

Here are our picks for the top 5 tech stories of 2016:

1) The IoT

Companies such as Uber began capitalizing on the connected “things” of the Internet of Things in a major way: as a “service enabler,” Uber used connectivity to create profits out of pre-existing products and needs.

Connecting drivers and passengers (and, very soon, driverless cars) has also created a data gold mine that app developer partners are eager to access.

The logic was simple. Uber didn’t build cars or phones. It connected things people already owned, a smartphone in a rider’s pocket and a car in a driver’s driveway, and charged for matching them up. Every trip also produced data about where people go and when, which is valuable to mapping, restaurant and travel apps.

The driverless part took longer than many expected in 2016. In December 2020, Uber agreed to sell its self-driving unit, the Advanced Technologies Group, to the start-up Aurora. The deal valued the unit at $4 billion, down from $7.25 billion the year before, and Uber took a 26% stake in Aurora as part of it. Uber still wanted driverless cars on its network, it just stopped trying to build them all itself.

2) Blockchain

The visibility of the blockchain skyrocketed, and its transformative impact on the economy became clear.

By decentralizing records of exchanges of value, the blockchain has forced traditional banking institutions to take fintech seriously, and has created enormous opportunity for startups.

At its simplest, a blockchain is a shared record of transactions that many computers keep copies of. Because no single party controls it, changing past entries is very hard, which is why it appealed to anyone who moves money or needs a trusted record.

The road since then has been bumpy, with boom years, crashes and plenty of failed projects. But the link to mainstream finance that looked new in 2016 did arrive. On January 10, 2024, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved 11 spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, from firms including BlackRock, Fidelity and Franklin Templeton. Ordinary investors could now buy Bitcoin exposure through a regular brokerage account.

3) Cognitive and AI

College students created an open-source AI in a day and a half to combat fake news on Facebook. Not only did this elevate the visibility of cognitive and artificial intelligence, it was a direct example of how technology can be applied to pressing social needs.

The project, called FiB, was built at a hackathon at Princeton University. It was a Chrome extension that checked the credibility of articles posted on Facebook and labelled them “verified” or “non-verified,” and it suggested more credible sources when a story didn’t check out.

It was a small project, but it pointed at a problem that only got bigger. Checking what’s true online is still one of the hardest jobs for AI, and the tools that generate convincing text and images have improved far faster than the tools that spot fakes.

4) The Cloud

Development began to migrate to the cloud, signalling the inevitable democratization of development. Defying the previous expectation that cloud-based development limits flexibility in favour of shareability and scalability, developers began to turn to established services such as GitHub, Docker, and Atlassian JIRA, which have already made collective coding a practical reality.

The biggest proof of how much those tools mattered came two years later. Microsoft bought GitHub in a $7.5 billion all-stock deal that closed on October 26, 2018. It was a clear sign of how central shared, cloud-hosted code had become to the way software gets built.

5) AR

How could we do a 2016 tech roundup without mentioning Pokémon GO? Proving that the line between games and serious technological evolution is a blurry one, the hit AR app showed enterprise, industry, and developers that people are ready to embrace augmented reality.

The game got people walking around their neighbourhoods looking for creatures that appeared on their phone screens over the real world. That was the lesson for everyone else: AR worked best when it ran on a phone people already carried, not on special hardware.

Pokémon GO is still going. In March 2025, its developer Niantic agreed to sell the game, along with the rest of its games business, to Monopoly Go maker Scopely in a deal valued at $3.5 billion.

What These Stories Tell Us Now

Looking back, the 2016 list holds up well. None of these trends turned out to be a fad, but almost all of them took longer and looked different than the excitement of the time suggested. Driverless rides didn’t arrive “very soon,” blockchain’s mainstream moment came through regulated funds rather than replacing banks, and AR’s biggest hit was still a game.

That’s a useful way to read any year-end list of predictions. The direction is often right. The timing and the business model are where most of the surprises are.