Our company works with many large mobile service providers around the world who collectively have billions of mobile end users. The fact that our software addresses a potential market of billions of people truly gets our 'juices boiling'. How many other software solutions or tech products have an addressable market of billions of people? Aside from Facebook and a handful of others, barely any.

Given that 'social' is perhaps the dominant tech trend of the past few years, with Facebook and LinkedIn growing like weeds and going public, and enterprise stalwarts such as SalesForce and Oracle introducing enterprise social solutions, we are often asked about the intersection of 'social' and the personal cloud.

At first glance, the social personal cloud might seem like an oxymoron. Isn't the personal cloud supposed to be the ultimate private repository of one's digital content, beyond the bounds of social networks? Where people store their digital assets and are not be worried that they are mined for advertising? To suggest that there be a significant 'social' component to private data may be paramount to heresy.

As the company pioneering mobile cloud sync and the personal cloud for practically longer than anyone, it is abundantly clear that there is indeed a very large and distinct social opportunity for personal clouds, as depicted below.

The chart shows that people have digital content that as previously discussed, is continuously growing and becoming more fragmented, particularly as their number of mobile devices grows. Some of this content is social in nature, such as photos for sharing e.g. at a party or other gathering. Another percent of people's digital content is transitory and throwaway, with a limited shelf-life, such as one's calendar appointments (who wants to remember past dental appointments for all of eternity?).

This leaves the green portion of the pie chart, which represents the digital content that is long-lasting and permanent -- vacation photos, purchased content such as music and important text messages. Are people going to store all of these in a social network? While some people may be ok with this, the vast majority are not, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which are privacy concerns (as validated by the 92% who responded in a recent daily poll on Yahoo! Finance).

The place to store this private and permanent content is a personal cloud. But just because this content is in a personal cloud, it does not mean that people do not want to share some of it. One particularly interesting case is families. The use cases for family sharing are many, but consider a simple, obvious one. A household goes on a trip and collectively takes a bunch of photos on their mobile phones and tablets. They'd like to easily share these with each other, but they don't want to post all of them on a social network or photo site. The purpose is not sharing with people outside the family, it is preservation for periodic viewing down the road.

There is a fairly large class of digital assets that is similar and are unique to households. It is not hard to imagine what these are. What may be less obvious is that this social aspect of personal clouds can be readily and uniquely offered by one group of companies in the world today, mobile operators. Unlike other entities, operators already offer shared mobile plans for households and are starting to offer personal clouds. They are probably the logical entity to extend these to family clouds.

Do you think there is a need for family clouds and are mobile operators suited to offer them?