Boldly go where no one has gone before…

I am sure all of you came across these nice little cloud icons when people post, blog or talk about cloud storages like Dropbox, iCloud or Google Drive. 

Let us zoom out to the bigger cloud of stars in the galaxy…
What are the trends, which new problems arise, and where does the adventure go?

Beam me up, Scotty! 

Sunny skies for cloud storage market

Recently i stumbled upon some interesting figures about consumer adoption of cloud storages.

An almost new market with about 150m users in 2011 exploded to 500m users to be expected by the end of 2012 reaching 1.5 billion in 2017.

So who are the players in that cloud storage market?

There are the BIG ones with different focus:

Dropbox - the first mover - Storage and Backup

Google Drive - the add on - accomplishes GDocs

iCloud - invented their own universe - buy more devices, do not care about files

Box - focus is everything - Enterprise (no, not the space ship)

Skydrive  - the later the guests - Nokia denied the existence of the Smartphone market, Microsoft finally agreed that cloud storage could be one

Yousendit - the first who discovered the ones left behind. The Emailers

and of course there are others like Amazon or Salesforce and everyday a new star is born and the market became crowded. Some people are already talking about upcoming consolidation. 

Is backup, storage and syncing really that exciting to attract hundreds of millions of venture capital?

The herd is following the big trends.

Mobile - Social - Cloud

Mobile is all about devices - always online.

Social is about sharing - but is this already really a seamless experience?

Cloud is not only storage - it is about cloud services including Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Google Plus, Evernote, Flickr etc.

And content is rocketing in terms of number of files, filesize and traffic.
Photos became the new words, and videos become the new photos 

So the picture is even bigger then the few clouds in the sky taking care about storage.

Let us zoom out

These three trends tell us that we need. More devices to be always and everywhere up to date, having our friends in the palm of our hand to share things we come accross.

But that causes a big pain for all of us.

Sharing is not seamless and social is not really social.

Today there are about 3 billion people online.
All are using different services. You can only share things seamless when you use the same service as your friends do or you are forced to sign up everyday for another new service. Of course many would say all of my friends are on Facebook.
Yes but what about your family?

Or think about working with different people on projects. You have to agree on the tools first. The choice is either all on the same ‘planet’ or send tons of emails.

So sharing is seamless and social is social - but FOR MEMBERS ONLY!

And i am not talking about hundreds of millions of people still only know how to send or receive emails. Are they living behind the moon? How can they be connected to us - seamlessly.

We asked some of the users of our first product the Wappwolf Automator what they are really missing today in this context and the results of that survey were leading us the way to build a new layer on top of the cloud services.

Here are some quotes of our survey:

* As a teacher I like to use Dropbox, no matter what my students are using to receive my assignments.

* As a student I like to use Dropbox, no matter what other students are using to receive my files.

* Personally Dropbox is perfect for me but family and friends prefer Facebook.
I could share pictures with my favorite tool, Facebook, and it would not matter to me if my friends and family have a Facebook account, or not.

* I love to share with friends and family, but they use Facebook, G+, Tumblr, Posterous, as well as a few others and I find myself duplicating things or just not bothering to share….

* I would be able to use a service that I am comfortable with and my friends and family and co-workers can use a service they are familiar and comfortable with. No need for any of us to register for or learn a new service is a big plus!

* As a supervisor, I would like to be able to share documents with everyone no matter what their preferred service is.

* I use Dropbox mostly, having the option to put files in a designated folder and then having the files forwarded to friends on different services would be great!!

Happy Beaming - I see you on the other side of the galaxy :-)

Harald Weiss
Cofounder 

Sit back and relax - Watch our Prezi about iBeam.it (click on the picture)