The personal cloud storage is a service model in which data is maintained, managed and backed up remotely and made available to users over a network protected behind an organization’s firewall
We have seen personal cloud storage services being widely adopted in the offerings of internet companies due to: 1) the potential of ubiquity across computing devices. The convenience of file sync’ing with any device ensures that users can install an app in each and every one of their devices, 2) the opportunity to build service exclusivity. As users store more of their material in one place, the cost of switching service grows. 3) strategic advantage. Cloud storage allows service providers to collect user data (personal preferences, social network behaviors, etc) which are useful for advertisers.
China’s major internet names seemed to have upped their games in the cloud storage space in August alone. Kingsoft announced on August 12 that it will provide 100GB in cloud storage space to users for free. Two days later Qihoo 360 started to give away free cloud storage of as much as 360GB. Baidu then announced during Baidu World Conference a 1 TeraByte space at the price of Rmb 1 for every user.
Despite the ever-growing cloud offerings of the internet names, we believe this is more of a marketing ploy. Considering: 1) generally slow average upload speeds in China (1MB/s, meaning that it would take 24 hours to upload 10GB of data) and 2) the more limited offerings of current mature personal cloud service names (such as Dropbox and Skydrive), we believe in the Game of cloud storage size is less crucial than other often more neglected factors such as privacy protection, data synching and sharing, and device compatibility.
However, what is noteworthy is the fact that Chinese Internet Giants are making in-roads into India like WeChat did with its Mobile Apps. It will be interesting to see how Indians will stick on as Chinese are sticking to domestic platforms [Tencent, Qihoo 360, Baidu, etc while in India the consumers are still relying on American Platforms [Facebook, Google, Gmail, WhatsApp, etc]