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.
Longview IoT Boosts Energy and Wireless Efficiency
Some of the biggest challenges slowing down the adoption of IoT are security, efficient battery usage and optimized wireless communications.One company has...
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Hallmark's Simple, Inexpensive Way to Boost Customer Satisfaction
In an effort to boost margins, companies often push more users to automated solutions such as FAQs, chatbots, voice bots and anything...
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Huawei Places the World's First 5G VoNR Video Call
Huawei recently completed the world's first voice over NR (VoNR) call. The voice and video call service was made using two Huawei...
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IGEL Advances Future of Work
IGEL is a provider of a next-gen edge OS for cloud workspaces. The company’s software products include IGEL OS, IGEL UD Pocket (UDP) and Universal...
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Tata Communications and Cisco Collaborate on SD-WAN
Tata Communications and Cisco have extended their partnership to enable enterprises to transform their legacy network to a customized and secure multi-cloud...
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How to Win the 50-Year-Old China Trade War
Today and this week in-fact is historic - the left and right in the U.S. agree that we have a major trade...
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Extreme Elements Enables The Autonomous Enterprise
Extreme Networks just announced Extreme Elements which in-turn enables the autonomous network and subsequently the autonomous enterprise. In a dynamic webinar, Dan...
Full Story »Separation of Mobile Cloud Church and State (aka Personal and Work Data): A Double-Edged Sword
April 23, 2013An important challenge, as well as opportunity, facing providers of personal cloud services is the separation of personal and work data. This has cropped up in mainstream media lately with articles such as this on NBCNews: Use your personal phone for work email? Your company might take it.
As a company that has wirelessly stored and synced people's 'personal information management' data (aka PIM data -- contacts, calendars, tasks and notes) for 10+ years, and synced files and rich media for several more, this topic has come to our attention many times, but it is now more pertinent than ever.
Personal Cloud Tipping Point?
March 4, 2013I've seen signs in February that indicate that personal clouds are nearing a tipping point -- consider:
1. Gartner Personal Cloud Report. Gartner published a report in February entitled, 'Market Trends: CSPs Face Competition From OTT Providers in the Personal Cloud'.
Monetizing Personal Clouds -- You Get What You Pay For
January 29, 2013Personal cloud services that primarily offer storage are quickly becoming a dime a dozen. Further, as the cost of storage continues to drop, providers are giving away more free storage. While a typical amount of free storage is now 5G, in a few rare cases, companies offer 50G. It would not be surprising if the typical amount of free storage significantly increases soon as the battle for users intensifies.
The Real Potential of Personal Clouds, circa 2013
January 3, 2013I considered titling this, the 'Time Value of Content', but decided against it as I thought it might be good if someone actually read it
Over the holidays, I reflected on the true potential of personal clouds. Often, when you work with something every day, you take it for granted and get too close so that you stop viewing things as most people would. When this happens, it is often good to take a step back for a fresh look.
Carrier Cloud Trends in 2013
January 2, 2013As 2013 dawns with the world still spinning and the U.S. not falling off a cliff, this is an opportune time to take a fresh look at the future of personal clouds A few trends have emerged recently that are setting the stage for carrier cloud adoption in 2013.
Types of Carriers Offering Personal Clouds
A leading mobile analyst recently predicted that many operators in 2013 must choose between being a 'digital lifestyle' or a low cost provider.
The 3 Ps of Personal Clouds: Promises, Pitfalls and Problems
November 20, 2012In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I learned three interesting things this week about personal clouds that I thought were worth sharing.
First, I saw the results of a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) survey of consumers on their views towards personal clouds. Here is a summary of the key results from my perspective:
Although this survey focused more on storing commercial content (such as music and movies) in a personal cloud rather than user generated content, its results were very consistent with a similar survey that we conducted earlier this year (that was more about user generated content).
The ABCs (and Ds) of Personal Clouds (and some tips for Halloween)
October 27, 2012In discussing personal clouds with many people for awhile, it's become clear to me that a lot of people still do not really 'get' them.
For example, I often ask iPhone users if they use iCloud. This is typically met with a quizzical look and a response such as, 'I think I have iCloud, it's on my phone, it's for backup, right?'.
iCloud does backup but it also does a lot more.
Why Store Your Music in the Cloud?
October 8, 2012I have been using a new feature of the Funambol OneMediaHub solution, which is storing music in a personal cloud for playback across mobile devices and computers. Once your music is in your personal cloud, it is automatically and wirelessly synced across your devices, such as phones, tablets and computers that are linked to your cloud. It is sort of like iTunes and the cloud except that it is your own cloud, it works with all of your brands of devices, and you don't need to buy music from any one source.
As music can be instrumental (sorry for the pun) to people's digital lives, like other digital content such as photos, videos, documents, contacts and calendars, it makes sense that music should also be in your cloud.
Personal Clouds as Ubiquitous as Voicemail But Much More Critical
September 27, 2012The other day, I was speaking with an executive at a mobile operator who had several million users about deploying their own branded personal cloud service.
His main question was, when we deploy a personal cloud service, what percent of customers are likely to use it. He was interested in understanding this given the competitive landscape such as Apple iCloud, Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive and Dropbox who offer free personal cloud storage. Why would a mobile operator's subscriber use their personal cloud service versus one of these?
The 'Social' Personal Cloud aka the Family Cloud
September 25, 2012Our 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.
