"MediaHub differs from other cloud offerings in three important respects: 1) it is white label, so that companies can promote their own brand, 2) it supports cross-brand devices (e.g. iPhones, Androids, BlackBerries, Symbian phones and tablets), and 3) it is based on open source." -- Amit Chawla, CEO, Funambol
Apple iCloud has received a lot of attention since it was announced. It syncs a user's PC, Mac and Apple iOS mobile devices such the iPod touch, iPhone and iPad. But, it won't extend sync services to non-Apple mobile devices like those based on Android, Windows Phone or RIM BlackBerry.
If you're a consumer or enterprise user who uses a mobile device from someone other than Apple, you can't use iCloud. Instead, you have to find another way to keep your information in-sync between your mobile devices.
There are a number of companies that offer a partial solution to the problem providing, say, sync of your contacts and calendar across all of your mobile devices. However, Funambol (a MobileTrax client) has solved the cloud synchronization and streaming service problem for all popular devices including PC, Macs and all mobile devices including Apple, Android and BlackBerry (with Windows Phone 7 in the works).
The product is called MediaHub and is a white label service that's sold to wireless operators, handset manufacturers and other mobile companies, so they can offer a rich media cloud and sync service under their own brand. Its advantages to a service provider are increased mobile data plan usage, service stickiness and customer loyalty, greater ARPU, end user peace of mind, and integration with back office systems for rapid time to market. The service provider has the necessary infrastructure in place to more efficiently generate customers which makes growth more productive for Funambol, although they have a consumer portal open to the public to test their platform.
The personal cloud that includes synchronization of a number of different kinds of data and devices is rapidly emerging as a major new category of mobile services. A number of companies are providing personal cloud services including Amazon (Cloud Drive), Apple (iCloud), Dropbox, Funambol (MediaHub), Google (Gmail and Docs) and Microsoft (SkyDrive), but only Funambol offers a solution that offers the same level of services and synchronization as iCloud for all mobile devices and OS platforms. Here is a comparison of these services.
You can see from the diagram that synchronization with the cloud includes a number of data types including contacts, calendar, tasks, notes, email, files, music, pictures, video and other rich media. The challenge is to enable any device (PC, Mac and different mobile platforms) to create any specific data and then sync it with all the other devices.
This turns out to be a difficult problem as evidenced by the problems Apple had when they introduced MobileMe. For example, you might create a 5MB photo on one device but can only use a smaller version of that image on another (mobile) device. Or, if you have a lot of music on your PC, you may only want to play some of those tunes on your mobile device.
Most providers in the personal cloud space have found it difficult to support multiple mobile platforms (Apple, Android, etc.) as well as multiple data types. The first thing that most vendors do is create a small description of the actual data, e.g. a thumbnail image and name. This is called the meta-data that describes the full information. It is easy to then quickly sync the meta-data to the cloud and then to the respective mobile devices. The cloud service then needs to sync the full information to the device or adjust it for the requirements of that device.
The business models for these new personal cloud services are still developing. Most approach personal cloud services by providing some storage free and selling the user additional storage as it becomes necessary. For example, Dropbox provides 2GB of storage for free and then offers a number of plans for additional storage ranging from $99/year for 50GB and $199/year for 100GB. Most people today with a notebook and a digital camera will have many hundreds of gigabytes of music, photos and videos, so users won't be able to use Dropbox to backup all of the data even though I expect prices for online storage to come down significantly in the next few years.
Theres a major 'land grab' underway by operators and handset makers to offer personal cloud services. There's another 'land grab' underway to provide the same kind of personal cloud services to the enterprise. Each has its own set of marketing opportunities and challenges.
Apple is focused on the consumer and is 'vertically integrated' because they have both the devices (Mac, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch), as well as the operating system (iOS), and now iCloud to provide personal cloud services throughout the Apple ecosystem. The stakes are very large, because once the major personal and enterprise cloud services are determined, it will be very hard for someone to displace the market leader.
The personal cloud market is forcing companies in the mobile industry to decide if they are going to offer their own personal cloud solution or will just support other companies' offerings. For smartphone manufacturers, having a personal cloud service integrated with their handset is now becoming 'table stakes', meaning a requirement to compete with iPhone.
Mobile operators are being forced to decide if they are going to promote their own personal cloud service or, instead, sit back and watch their users grow more dependent on personal clouds from the other companies in the space. The risk of this approach is that it further marginalizes the carriers' control over their subscribers and relegates them to the role of providing the proverbial 'dumb pipe'.
From a user perspective, the choice of which personal cloud to use depends on a number of factors. If you only own Apple devices and content, iCloud may be a terrific choice. If you are a heavy user of Google services such as Gmail, Google Docs and Picasa and have an Android phone, you'll typically need a third party cloud sync service or you'll have to deal with each Google service independently.
For many people (and most enterprises) who have a mix of devices from different vendors and a mix of content from different sources, iCloud, Google and the other clouds operating in silos make it difficult to keep everything in sync.
Funambol MediaHub differs from other cloud offerings in three important respects: 1) it is white label, so that companies can promote their own brand, 2) it supports cross-brand devices (e.g. iPhones, Androids, BlackBerries, Symbian phones and tablets), and 3) it is based on open source. This last aspect allows Funambol's global developer community to help support the latest mobile devices more quickly than proprietary solutions.
It also means that Funambol's mobile company customers get the source code which enables the solution to be fully customized for their needs. Furthermore, country specific customizations, personal privacy and data security related legal requirements necessitate an 'in country' managed cloud solution. For example, in Germany, Malaysia, etc., laws require all data to be kept on servers within the country. This is not something that can be accomplished with many third party cloud services, as their data centers are located in assorted overseas locations. With Funambol's white label solution, companies are completely in control of their personal cloud destiny.
As people get more mobile devices -- the Kindle Fire is a recent case in point of another mobile device -- it is going to be increasingly common for people to find their data and content to be strewn about and fragmented across more devices and places. A solution such as Funambol was designed from the beginning to keep multiple mobile devices in sync and to be data, content and device agnostic.
If you think about how a personal cloud can store both your user-generated content (e.g. your pictures and videos) as well as your commercial content (e.g. your music, movies and TV shows), one digital storage area in the cloud makes it easy to keep your PC, mobile phone, tablet, e-book reader, mp3 player, TV and even your car in sync.
Funambol is gaining major traction in the industry, as several large mobile operators and device manufacturers are rolling out their own branded equivalents of their iCloud-like service based on Funambol. This includes one of the largest Android device makers and a carrier in Southeast Asia with 50M subscribers.
If interested in learning more about the personal cloud and MediaHub, you can try MediaHub at my.funambol.com. And, you can sign up for a free Funambol webinar being held on November 2 at 8:00 am Pacific at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/904923417.
Written By:
J. Gerry Purdy, Ph.D.
Principal Analyst
Mobile & Wireless
MobileTrax LLC
gerry.purdy@mobiletrax.com
404-406-5309
Disclosure Statement: From time to time, I may have a direct or indirect equity position in a company that is mentioned in this column. If that situation happens, then I'll disclose it at that time.
© 2012 Funambol, Inc. All rights reserved.
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