Personal Cloud is probably the most misused term in the internet now. Every sundry public cloud storage offerings like Dropbox, Google Drive and others are masquerading themselves as Personal Clouds. Remember. It is their Personal Cloud. Not Yours. They can kick out, block or shutdown anybody at anytime. They determine how much storage you can use and have complete right to track and catalog your data.

We are one of the earliest companies who have used the term -“Personal Cloud” back in 2009 to put forth our vision. We cannot sit idle and watch the misappropriation of term and vision that we have fought for over many years.

In real sense, the word personal means “of, affecting, or belonging to a particular person rather than to anyone else”. So Personal Cloud means a cloud that is owned by you. not by others.

Like Codd’s 12 rules of database, which he put together to prevent his vision of the relational database being diluted by vendors, We are putting together our 10 rules of Personal Cloud.

Rule 1: The Personal Cloud system should run on the device owned or fully controlled by the end user. Rule 2: The Owner of Personal Cloud system should have complete ownership, rights of content he/she can put in the Personal Cloud System Rule 3: The Owner of Personal Cloud system should have complete independence of content he/she can put in the Personal Cloud System Rule 4: The Personal Cloud System (the app and the data) should be completely Local. The system should be accessible even if there is no internet. Rule 5: The Personal Cloud System should not snoop or alter the end user content either manually or in an automated fashion Rule 6: The Personal Cloud System should not pose any storage limits and should be accessible from anywhere. Rule 7: The owner should be able to stop or shutdown the Personal Cloud system anytime. Rule 8: The Personal Cloud System should be cross platform and run on all the popular desktop (Windows, Mac and Linux) OSes. Rule 9: The Personal Cloud System should have clients or be accessible from all the popular mobile OSes (iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows and others). Rule 10: The Personal Cloud System should run on from low to high end computing devices (Routers, NAS to PCs and Servers) and varied chipset platforms (ARM, MIPS, X86 and others).

If you are a user check whether your beloved service checks all of the rules here and if you are a vendor make sure you comply to all of the rules here before calling yourself as Personal Cloud.