"Cloud" is such a buzz phrase today that it's easy to be overwhelmed by what's really happening on the consumer side. Parks Associates specifies the following requirements for a product or solution to fit in the "personal cloud" category:

• For hardware, appliance, and online solutions, the ability to upload all desired content to remote storage, not just a single-purpose site

• The ability to "push" - or share - only specific folders or files with friends or family

• Remote and ubiquitous access to content from multiple IP-connected devices

• For premium content service cloud offerings, the ability to offer multiple formats or work with hardware with the necessary transcoding capabilities to play content on a wide number of devices

To further complicate this market, there are several different types of consumer cloud solutions...

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