When Instagram went to 15-second video clips, Vine was slow to respond: 6 seconds pushed celebrities (and advertisers) away. Vine was a $30M experiment that succeeded as a demonstration prototype and a lighthouse to competitors. The richest technology companies will be the most aggressive, even though Apple was relatively quiet in 2016. The hot targets will be AR/VR infrastructure and content companies, IOT technology companies and companies with significant intellectual property in machine learning and automated reasoning. While M&A activity by the technology giants in 2016 was much lower than 2013 and 2014, 2017 will bounce back with some truly huge deals.

Source: Forbes January 18, 2017 01:52 UTC