For the general consumer, the cloud is moving from hype to reality.
A new survey from Funambol shows there is serious interest in personal clouds (i.e. digital lockers), but they must be private, secure and support the mobile devices that the respondents own. Three of every four people (75 percent) surveyed have plans to use a personal cloud for digital data and media storage, and two-thirds (67 percent) said they would pay for the service. The largest percentage of respondents said $5 would be the right price for access.
"The survey results have been eye opening by providing substantial detail about user expectations," said Amit Chawla, Funambol CEO. “We are pleased to share the survey findings to help advance the adoption of personal clouds."
Other findings include: 88 percent plan to store contacts in the cloud, 85 percent said files, 80 percent said calendar, 69 percent said photos; 81 percent plan to store between one-quarter and three-quarters of their data in the cloud, while 12 percent plan to store all of it; 72 percent said they would use it for both business and personal use, 26 percent said only for personal use; and 30 percent said they would buy commercial content for their personal cloud, while 51 percent said they might.
"The survey results indicate that there is a large untapped market for digital locker services, which complements Forrester Research’s recent estimate that the personal cloud market would reach $12B in the U.S. by 2016," said Hal Steger, Funambol VP of Marketing. “This also shows that the market, driven by several trends, including the rapid proliferation of mobile devices, and new industry offerings, such as Apple iCloud and Funambol MediaHub, is not just hype."
Several tech and retail giants, including Apple and Amazon, have already either launched or weighed in with big plans for offering personal cloud services.
Funambol queried 232 people in 49 countries for the report.
