Wow, the new iPad announcement (I guess I can’t say iPad 3) and the related discussions are building the groundswell around the post-PC era and driving the need for the personal cloud.

Whether you call it post-PC or PC-plus (we’re excited about Windows 8, too), the point is the computer is now just one of many connected devices people use.

Some quick facts for perspective:

• Apple reported 315M iOS devices have been sold — over half of those in the last year, and 20% in Q4. The rate is increasing.
• Google reports more than 300M Android devices sold. Also at an increasing rate, now 850K Android activations per day.
• Last month we learned that smart phones outsold PC’s.
• And then we heard tablets are overtaking PC sales, driven largely by the iPad.

And that’s just tablets and smart phones. We’re also seeing innovative new devices like our partner FXI’s Cotton Candy, Seagate’s advancements in WiFi storage, the growth in NAS, smart TV’s, telematics and more.

Back to the new iPad announcement, Apple emphasized that iPad users will create more on the iPad; it’s not just a consumption device, as some people perceive — making it a viable alternative to the traditional PC. Indeed tablets are commanding more and more share of computing time. People are carrying their iPads out of the living room and bringing them to the work place.

It all heightens the need to have our own content easily accessible from any of our devices.

The personal cloud is the answer. Our stuff is all over the place, we’re amassing huge content libraries, cloud services won’t be the main storage. The smart solution is to connect distributed storage securely peer-to-peer (“file virtualization” for the techie readers). Sure a user or IT manager might decide to centralize on a NAS – or even cloud storage (we’re not completely bucking that trend, just think it’s cost-prohibitive and inefficient). The point is it doesn’t matter where our files are, we should be able to always access them from any of our chosen devices – irrespective of operating system: Mac, iOS, Windows, Android, Linux.

That’s the new expectation, and that’s Polkast’s vision.