Sweden climbed to No. 2 and Finland cracked into the top five of the 2017 Bloomberg Innovation Index, which scores economies using factors including research and development spending and the concentration of high-tech public companies.

According to the IDC WW Quarterly Cloud Infrastructure Tracker, IT infrastructure spending (server, disk storage, and Ethernet switch) for public and private cloud in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) grew 19.5% year on year to reach $1.5 billion in revenue in the third quarter of 2016.

Chinese smartphone and tablet maker Huawei revealed its expected 2016 annual performance figures. For 2016, they predict sales revenue of 178 billion CYN, 42% up from a year ago, achieving steady revenue growth for the fifth consecutive year.

According to a new forecast from the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, total spending on IT infrastructure products (server, enterprise storage, and Ethernet switches) for deployment in cloud environments will increase by 18.2% in 2017 to reach $44.2 billion. Of this amount, the majority (61.2%) will be done by public cloud datacenters, while off-premises private cloud environments will contribute 14.6% of spending.

Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $3.5 trillion in 2017, a 2.7 percent increase from 2016, according to Gartner. However, this growth rate is down from earlier projections of 3 percent.

EMEA purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA) vendor revenues declined 9% year over year to reach $195 million in the third quarter of 2016, according to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Tracker. Capacity shipped for 3Q16 totaled 237PB, an increase of 23% from 3Q15.

Worldwide PC shipments totaled 72.6 million units in the fourth quarter of 2016, a 3.7 percent decline from the fourth quarter of 2015, according to preliminary results by Gartner. For the year, 2016 PC shipments totaled 269.7 million units, a 6.2 percent decline from 2015. PC shipments have declined annually since 2012.

Worldwide spending on robotics and related services will more than double by 2020, growing from $91.5 billion in 2016 to more than $188 billion in 2020, according to the newly updated Worldwide Commercial Robotics Spending Guide from IDC. In addition to spending data on robotic systems, system hardware, software, robotics-related services, and after-market robotics hardware, the robotics spending guide now includes data on commercial purchase of drones and after-market drone hardware.

U.K. tech companies raised more capital than any other European country in 2016, while SoftBank’s acquisition of ARM helped Britain achieve a record year for tech deals, Bloomberg reports commenting a survey conducted by the U.K. capital’s promotional company, London & Partners.

Worldwide shipments of traditional PCs (Desktop, Notebook, and Workstation) totaled 70.2 million units in the fourth quarter of 2016, posting a year-on-year decline of 1.5%, according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. The results continued the recent trend of stabilizing growth, which has been in decline since 2012.

New data from Juniper Research has found that smart home hardware and service take-up in entertainment, automation, healthcare and connected devices is set to drive revenues from $83 billion in 2017 to $195 billion by 2021.

A new study from IDC highlights IT spending trends by size class in Western Europe. The study, Western Europe SMB IT Spending Forecast, 2016–2020, shows that IT spending in Western European SMBs will exceed $130 billion by 2020. The SMB segment represents a third of the total IT market, despite the relative fragility of smaller companies and their relatively small IT budgets.

Programmatic is a game-changing technology in the advertising industry. According to ZenithOptimedia Programmatic Marketing Forecasts, it will grow by an astounding 31% in 2017, and that’s faster than social media (25%) and online video (20%).

The rapid pace of technological and societal change has given government CIOs a new sense of urgency and a willingness to experiment with smart city and open data initiatives, according to Gartner. If managed effectively, this shift will position governments at the core of technological innovation in society.

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker, the worldwide converged systems market increased revenue 1.7% year over year to $2.6 billion during the third quarter of 2016 (3Q16). The market consumed 1.4 exabytes of new storage capacity during the quarter, which was up a moderate 12.5% compared to the same period a year ago.

Consumer spending on digital devices, services, and content will reach $3.4 trillion worldwide in 2020, rising 4.7% annually from 2015, according to a new forecast from IDC. The forecast is from a newly launched research program, Consumer Spending Priorities: Tech and Services, which provides a holistic view of consumer spending across all goods and services.

American President-elect Donald Trump won’t end the onslaught of posts on Twitter that fed his unconventional campaign, even after taking on the formalized duties of the Oval Office later this month, according to Bloomberg.

The Middle East and Africa (MEA) enterprise infrastructure market, which covers servers and external storage, suffered a 7% year-on-year decline in value to total $581 million in Q3 2016, according to the latest Quarterly Server and Disk Storage Systems Tracker from IDC. This decline is in line with IDC's previous forecast, which factored in the unstable political and economic environment currently characterizing the MEA region.

Organizations spend an average of 5.6 percent of the overall IT budget on IT security and risk management, according to the most recent IT Key Metrics Data from Gartner. However, IT security spending ranges from approximately 1 percent to 13 percent of the IT budget and is potentially a misleading indicator of program success, analysts said.

Worldwide factory revenue for the high performance computing (HPC) technical server market grew by 3.9% to $2.8 billion in the third quarter of 2016, compared with $2.7 billion in the prior-year third quarter. Revenue for the first three quarters of 2016 totaled $8.1 billion, up 3.4% from the $7.8 billion total for the same period last year, according to new data from IDC Worldwide High-Performance Technical Server Q View.

Children who chat on social media suffer the consequences, according to Bloomberg. Kids who spend more time chatting on social websites feel reduced satisfaction about all parts of their lives except for their friendships, research from the British Institute of Labor Economics shows.

Consumer confidence is ending the year on a largely positive note, according to GfK. Economic expectations have increased slightly, while income expectations have seen significant growth. In contrast, propensity to buy has suffered moderate losses. The overall consumer climate index is forecasting 9.9 points for the first month of next year, after a figure of 9.8 points in December.

Advances in various technologies will drive users to interact with their smartphones in more intuitive ways, said Gartner. They predicts that, by 2019, 20 percent of all user interactions with the smartphone will take place via virtual personal assistants (VPAs).

Smartphones offering resistance against water damage and other liquids grew 45.2% year on year in the first nine months of 2016 in Western Europe, while shipments of non-water–resistant smartphones declined 17% in the same period. Water resistant smartphones reached 22.5 million units in the period to represent 23% of the total number of smartphones shipped in 2016 to date, according to the IDC European Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker.

Latest research from GfK into the UK’s OTT viewing habits has revealed surprisingly low audience numbers on mobile devices. It seems that watching subscription video content on Netflix, Amazon and Now TV is, for now, most definitely an in-home entertainment experience.

Worldwide purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA) factory revenues were down 7.9% year over year, totaling $737.5 million in the third quarter of 2016 (3Q16), according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Tracker. Total PBBA open systems factory revenue decreased 7.2% year over year during the quarter with revenues of $686.1 million.

Smart machines will enter mainstream adoption by 2021, with 30 percent adoption by large companies, according to Gartner. Technologies including cognitive computing, artificial intelligence (AI), intelligent automation, machine learning and deep learning fall under the umbrella term for smart machines.

The Middle East and Africa (MEA) wearables market continued to see steady growth in Q3 2016, according to the latest insights from IDC. MEA wearables market grew 38.3% year on year in Q3 2016 to total approximately 487,000 units.

IDC EMEA Server Tracker shows that in the third quarter of 2016 the EMEA server market reported a year-on-year decline in vendor revenues of 14.3% to $2.6 billion and a YoY decrease of 7.2% in units shipped to just over 500,000.

In 2017, nearly 60% of the US population will be digital banking users, according to eMarketer’s new forecast. Some 150.7 million adults will access their bank, credit card, or brokerage accounts at least once a month via digital channels.