#zeitgeist2016

It is the last week of 2016, time to tell the stories of the year ending.

Questions and Choices

It was a year of questions. It was a year of choices.

It was a year dominated by politics and many of the choices citizens made surprised analysts. The US chose Trump over Clinton. The Philippines chose Duterte over Roxas and Poe. Great Britain chose to leave the EU.

The elections in the US and the Philippines created rifts among friends and family. As the dust settled, emotions continued to run high and in both countries, the verbal battle continues to be waged.

As a result of a March 2016 decision of the International Olympic Committee, the Refugee Olympic Team composed of ten refugees competed as independent participants in the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.  It is a sign of the magnitude of the refugee crisis that a Syrian refugee, Ibrahim Al-Hussein, was asked to carry the Olympic flame through the Eleonas refugee and migrant camp in Greece as part of the 2016 torch relay. The International Crisis Group reports that the total number of international refugees now stands at 65 million. It is a crisis of global proportions with no clear solution in sight. Technology

It was a year of technology.

On July 11, 7-11 announced its first commercial drone delivery. The delivery included a chicken sandwich, donuts, coffee, candy and Slurpees and was delivered to a residence in Reno, Nevada. But that wasn’t the exciting news. The real news is that 7-11, who partnered with start-up drone maker Flirtey, announced that, in November, it made 77 drone deliveries as part of its delivery pilot in Reno. This is the first regular drone delivery service to operate in the United States and is a slap in the face to Amazon, which announced its own drone delivery system, Prime Air, in 2014 and only made its first delivery in December to a customer in the UK countryside.

Much less technologically inspiring but certainly more popular, Niantic partnered with Nintendo to release the year’s most explosive gaming app. Pokemon Go. Arguably one of the most successful mobile game launches of all time, the game was downloaded over 100 million times in less than a month.

On the commercial front, Alibaba paid USD 1 billion for a controlling stake in Lazada, the dominant online retailer in Southeast Asia. Alibaba announced that revenues for its biggest single day sale of the year, Singles day which occurs on November 11, was USD 17.73 billion, a 32% increase over 2015. By contrast, total US consumer spending from Thanksgiving day through Cyber Monday was USD 12.8 billion. A report by Marcia Kaplan on practicalecommerce.com points out that online shoppers for the period outnumbered actual store shoppers 108.5 million to 99 million.

VR gear became more wildly available but the technology still has to find a truly commercially successful application. More companies announced interest in self-driving cars.

But perhaps the most interesting tech story for the year, is as much a surprise as the outcome of the US elections, Nokia researchers announced that it had demonstrated internet speeds of one terabit per second, approximately 1000 times faster than Google Fiber, the current fastest provider in the United States.

Loss and Redemption

This year, the world lost artists, leaders, and pioneers. The world of entertainment lost Gene Wilder, loved by entire generations for his role as Willy Wonka; Alan Rickman probably best known to the younger generation as the actor who played Severus Snape in the Harry Potter movies. Florence Henderson, the mother in the long-running TV series, The Brady Bunch, and    Zsa Zsa Gabor.

We lost musical geniuses this year: David Bowie and Prince, both musical icons. In the last few weeks of the year, George Michael joined the list of those we lost.

This year, we lost astronaut John Glenn, author Harper Lee (To kill a mockingbird), legendary boxer Muhammad Ali, golfer Arnold Palmer, former Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro, former Israeli Shimon Peres, former US first lady Nancy Reagan, and Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

Disasters, both natural and manmade continued to plague the world. From typhoons to earthquakes, terrorist attacks to war, the toll in property, lives and human suffering continued to mount. But across the world, men and women rose to the challenge, finding ways to survive, helping in the face of struggle.

In the business world, one of the most interesting stories is one of redemption. In 2013, Nokia announced the sale of its mobile phone business to Microsoft. It seemed a dark day for Nokia. What many people did not know at the time was that this sale was one of the steps in a long struggle to reshape Nokia. What many perhaps did not know is that Nokia parlayed its acquisition of Alcaltel Lucent to rebuild itself into one of the world’s largest telecom network service providers.

In July of 2015, Microsoft wrote off USD 7.6 billion related to the Nokia acquisition, which was its venture into the world of mobile hardware. In May of this year, Nokia announced the return of Nokia to the smartphone market via a licensing agreement to HMD Global, which has also agreed to acquire use of the Nokia brand from Microsoft. In an interview with McKinsey, published December 2016, Nokia’s chairman, RIsto Siilasmaa, pointed out how much Nokia’s fortunes have changed, from an enterprise value of USD 1.5 billion in mid-2012 to its current enterprise value of USD 30 billion.

So that was 2016, a year of surprises and challenges, a year of change but a also a year of inspiration and redemption.

Have a great 2017 everyone!

First published 28 December 2016 by The Standard  in the column Integrations by Maria Elena “Maya” Baltazar Herrera.