The hype around blockchain will continue to weaken in 2017, something we already started to notice in the second half of this year. There is a growing realization that blockchain applications are more complex than the oversimplified view presented to the masses over the last few years.

2016 may have been an ugly year in many ways, but at least ransomware hadn’t yet become the scourge it will be in 2017. It will feature wildly successful, widely-reported ransomware attacks on famous celebrities, large government institutions, huge corporations, and millions of consumers.

Next year’s developments in the cloud space will create unprecedented opportunities for service providers and SMB customers. Service providers will be able to grow their business by packaging and reselling ISV hosted services through existing channel ecosystems, without any capital investment. This will also open new opportunities for SMBs, who will continue replacing in-house IT infrastructure with cloud-based services, taking advantage of the Opex model of service consumption.

Holiday headlines have dominated the news cycle over the last few weeks, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the world stopped. Tech trends are constantly evolving, cybercriminals are finding new ways to wreak havoc, and innovations are paving the way to our technological future. We searched through this week’s biggest tech stories to bring you the ones we found most interesting. Did you catch them all?