Cloud awareness high, most prepared to pay, says Funambol

People’s awareness of cloud services is high and intent to store one’s virtual goods in a digital locker is on the rise, according to a new survey by Silicon Valley-based cloud sync service Funambol.
With Forrester Research reporting that the personal cloud will be a $12 billion market in the United States alone by 2016, translating to a $35 billion to $40 billion global market, companies dabbling in the space can expect much more than just a silver lining over the next few years.
To gauge consumer interest in cloud services today, however, Funambol decided to randomly sample people from its corporate email list, gleaning 232 respondents from 49 countries, of which we’re assured less than five were current users of Funambol’s service.
Though the demographics were skewed toward men in their mid 30s, the results were impressive nonetheless.
A full 80% of respondents said they had heard of the terms personal cloud or digital locker, while 90% were aware of what those services can generally do.
Indeed, 76% said they already used some form of cloud service – with Facebook and Google Inc. the most popular to date. Three-fourths of respondents added that they regularly accessed these services on both PCs and mobile devices, while 47% said they used Dropbox on both PCs and mobile devices too.
Amazon’s Cloud drive and Apple’s MobileMe service received rather low scores in comparison – 20% and 24% respectively – though this was attributed to the newness of Amazon’s service and the relatively few number of iPhone users in the overall population.
While 89% said they stored their virtual goods in the cloud for increased ease of access to it across mobile devices, 71% said a primary motivation was backup and 48% said they liked cloud services for the ability to share content with other people.
When asked what they would store in a personal cloud, 88% said contacts, 85% said files, 80% said calendar 69% said pictures, 68% said email and 47% said e-books. A less specific 37% said they would store as much of their digital data and media as possible in the cloud, including health records.
Despite the level of media buzz about cloud privacy concerns, the hype doesn’t seem to have hit potential consumers, with only 2% of respondents saying they would not use a personal cloud service in the future based on security concerns.
Some, however, are being selective about the amount of data they would put up into the online ether, with 32% saying they expect to keep half of their data there, 26% saying a quarter and 23% saying 75% of all their digital treasures. Only 12% said they would want to keep all of their data in the cloud.
In terms of importance to consumers when choosing a cloud to put their virtual goods into, 75% said security was important, 71% pointed to device compatibility, 59% highlighted ease-of-use, 55% said wireless access and 53% said syncing all types of data and cost-effective or free use.
For those willing to actually pay for cloud services (67%) the most popular price point seemed to center around $5 per month for around 50 GB.
33% said they would not pay for personal cloud services .
Meanwhile, 72% said they would like to a cloud for both work and personal  use, while just 26% said personal use only.