Hal Steger : Thinking Out Cloud
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.

May 2013

You are browsing the archive for May 2013.

Beginning of the End for the Personal Cloud Freemium Model?

May 31, 2013

If you missed it, the Flickr photo sharing service announced this week that it is now giving users one terabyte of free storage. Their website says this is equal to about 500,000 high res photos - wow!

Depending on your perspective, you might view this as a great pr stunt, a bold move to attract or retain users, or a desperate move to carve out a meaningful and permanent niche in a crowded space.

It does raise a strategic question for the personal cloud industry, which is whether the 'great free terabyte giveaway' is just the first of many services to give away all of the storage that users are likely to ever need, or might this be the last?

Personal Cloud Market Map 2013

May 21, 2013

My company spends a lot of time talking to people about the personal cloud space, including industry analysts, executives, users and many others. A common question is, "what is the personal cloud market, exactly?". For people who do not follow the industry closely, it can be confusing, given the  multitude of companies and offerings in the market.

To simplify things, we often draw a 'market map' that resembles the following:

Operator Clouds: It's The User Experience...

May 2, 2013

At the risk of dating myself as well as using a semi-crass word, one phrase comes to mind in light of the recent launch of a major U.S. carrier cloud.

"It's the economy, stupid"

Except in this case, it would be: