Since its inception, Pogoplug has focused its platform on the notion that the majority of personally owned content will reside in the home or office, safe and sound on a PC or separately-purchased USB disk drive. Thus, our position on accessing, streaming and sharing content has always been, and remains, that a personal cloud service that Internet-enables this content without relocating it will represent the bulk of personal content that is available online.

Cloud zealots believe in a religion whereby all online content (commercial and personal) will be uploaded to a third-party data center and made accessible through a service. In the early days, there was a rumor of the Messiah GDrive that would one day make its appearance and provide unlimited free online storage to the world. Earlier this year, the prophecy unfolded in a slightly different form with the introduction of Amazon's Cloud Drive and Google's Music offerings, both which are limited in capacity and require ongoing fees.

Earlier this week, the world eagerly anticipated Steve Jobs' announcements at Apple's WWDC event. With the name iCloud pre-disclosed, most industry pundits, including myself, expected YACS (yet-another-cloud-service) with the bonus twist of a streamable music locker. In fact, what was announced was much more profound; Apple actually went in a completely new direction, defining cloud storage as online data that is free, limited, and temporal in nature. As such, Apple relegates the cloud to providing a temporary home for personally-owned content as it migrates to various personal ecosystem devices, e.g., mobile phones and computers. Since the only device with "real" storage is a computer or networked disk appliance, Apple's position affirms our original thesis that personal content will ultimately go home and the personal cloud is here to stay-and rapidly grow.

At Pogoplug, we're wildly excited about Apple's plans for iCloud and the future of iOS. Apple is going to make sure that personal content gets safely home and Pogoplug is going to make it accessible from anywhere on the Internet with no fees or limits.

Daniel Putterman
Co-founder and CEO
Pogoplug