Hal Steger
Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Funambol. 20+ years of marketing & product management experience at high-growth, innovative global software companies.
| This blog is about personal cloud solutions, technology, trends and market developments. Its scope is to comment on and discuss several aspects of personal clouds.
Whatever Happened to Dialogic Boards?
I stopped wearing Dialogic shirts in airports many many years ago, simply because I often got stopped by people who used our...
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ORBCOMM Looks to Become Complete IoT Solutions Service Provider
One of the topics discussed often among communications service providers is whether they want to be relegated to dumb pipes or they...
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Your Phone Just Ate Your Car Key
Are you ready for your new digital future? It’s a great question to ask as the role your mobile phone plays in...
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Doing Business in a Busy, Blurred Environment
Logging on to LinkedIn these days, I have to remind myself that it is in fact LI and not Facebook. The...
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Wireless Carriers Racing to the Bottom
It had to happen eventually - a price war is taking its toll on telecom equipment providers because their customers won't spend...
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SS7 Staying Power
Back in April, I wrote a blog about LTE subscription growth and ended that blog with “by the end of 2020, half of all...
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Channel Partner Enablement Tools
It seems that Channel Enablement is starting to become a thing again. "What is the definition of Channel Partner Enablement? Sometimes...
Full Story »The Business Case Behind OTT Clouds & Impact on Mobile Operators
October 18, 2016I recently became a fan of Hamilton, the Broadway musical. From it, I learned that Alexander Hamilton was one of 3 authors of the Federalist Papers, something I vaguely recalled from history class years ago. The musical said three people agreed to write 25 articles about the new U.S. Constitution.
Funambol Refines Personal Cloud User Experience
October 17, 2016Funambol is excited to announce an important update of its market-leading OneMediaHub white-label personal cloud. OneMediaHub v17.6 refines the personal cloud user experience with these features:
- Auto-generated search suggestions (mobile & web) makes finding things easier
- Redesigned photo & video album covers with new actions (mobile & web)
- Enhanced timeline navigation
- Improved previews of documents & media
- New cloud favorites: mark any photo, video, document or music track as a favorite; view favorite items via search suggestions
- Family tabs: the family space has new tabs for gallery and docs to make it easier to find things
- Numerous other improvements e.g. iOS 10 & Android N support & performance improvements
Try these by downloading the free onemediahub demo app from the app store.
Who provides the most personal clouds worldwide?
June 1, 2016As someone who spends a lot of time with personal clouds, an article in today's New York Times, "Why the World Is Drawing Battle Lines Against American Tech Giants", made me think about the impact on them. The author, Farhad Manjoo, listed several examples of how the "big 5" (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft), who increasingly dominate daily life globally, embody principles in their products that can conflict with the beliefs, laws and politics in many countries. Governments, businesses and people in those countries often feel they have little-to-no recourse, resulting in a backlash against the big 5.
This is a complex situation that will continue a long time.
Classic David vs. Goliath: Operator vs. OTT Personal Clouds
May 13, 2016Who's winning the personal cloud war, over-the-top (OTT) services such as iCloud, Dropbox and Google Drive, or operator clouds?
It is normal to assume it's OTTs, as the sheer volume of news about them dwarfs operator clouds. On a personal level, when's the last time you heard someone say, "I was using the XYZ [operator] cloud"?
Are OTT clouds really dominating personal clouds?
Operator Cloud Churn-Busting: Habit Forming, In a Good Way
May 5, 2016Two large mobile operators recently shared research that showed that their personal clouds significantly reduced churn. This post delves into the dynamics of how operator clouds do this.
Let's start with a description of an operator cloud so we are on the same proverbial page. An operator cloud stores important content from a user's phone - their contacts, photos, videos, music, files and calendar - in the user's personal cloud account.
Just Sayin' - What Cloud Should You Trust With Your Digital Life?
May 4, 2016Two articles related to cloud security caught my attention the past few days.
The first, "Here's How Much People Trust Facebook", showed poll results of 1,000 people regarding their trust in Facebook. 28% said not at all, 34% said not very much, 32% said somewhat and 3% said a lot. The article had a chart about information that adults consider to be the most sensitive and said that much of the content on Facebook lines up with this, including phone conversations, text messages and their location.
New Data Shows Operator Clouds Reduce Churn Much More Than Thought
May 3, 2016For research professionals (and blogging the mantra is 'publish or perish'. Adapted for mobile operators, new research indicates that the mantra should be 'provide a personal cloud or perish'. It turns out that personal clouds are truly the best thing to happen to mobile operators for customer retention since 'fill-in-the-blank' (sliced bread, ice cubes or your favorite invention cliche).
In the past month, two major mobile operators have shared primary research with my company that shows that their personal cloud has reduced their churn much more than expected.
View From The Top - Personal Clouds Are Changing
April 22, 2016Several news items in the past few days could impact personal clouds profoundly - without further ado:
1) The EU charged Google with using Android's market dominance to stifle competition in a way that hurts consumers. The charges stemmed from Google offering favorable financial terms to providers that allowed Google's services and apps, such as Search, to dominate Android devices. The charges are reminiscent of the anti-trust action against Microsoft for favoring Internet Explorer (IE) at the expense of other browsers, which resulted in IE becoming decoupled as the de facto browser on Windows and which opened the door for other browsers (ironically, leading to the rapid rise of Google Chrome).
From Carrier App Bloat to Carrier Cloud Antidote
March 18, 2016A recent New York Times "Tech Fix" article about the new Samsung Galaxy S7, "Samsung's Smartphones Aren't the Problem (Just Prune the Bad Apps)", said the phone's hardware was excellent but it suffered from weak apps. The article started, "PITY the poor Samsung smartphone.", referring to great hardware and poor apps. The suggestion: replace the offending apps, the number one cause of which was carrier app bloat.
Although the article did not mention cloud apps, they are guilty by association.
Why Use Funambol to manage your digital life instead of other clouds?
February 10, 2016Consider the usual consumer cloud alternatives:
- Apple iCloud
- Google with Drive, Photos, Gmail, etc.
- Microsoft OneDrive
- Dropbox
All consumer clouds have strengths and weaknesses. This post describes why someone would want to use Funambol OneMediaHub (OMH) as the repository for all of their digital content i.e. their digital life, instead of other clouds.
Apple iCloud. Why use a confusing cloud that mainly supports one brand of devices?
