US market research firm Gartner announced on March 13, 2012 (local time) that personal cloud service would replace PCs (personal computers) within two years, and that by 2014, cloud services would become an integral part of everyday life with various ...
US market research firm Gartner announced on March 13, 2012 (local time) that personal cloud service would replace PCs (personal computers) within two years, and that by 2014, cloud services would become an integral part of everyday life with various types of digital devices become flexibly available for daily use.
Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to identify the main factors that affect the intentions to use personal cloud services through a review of existing literature, analyze the effects of each factor on the intentions to use personal cloud services, and clarify the effects and interactive relations between such derived factors and their effects on the intention to use personal cloud service.
The factors of this research model focus on TPB, security, core factors, and ubiquity. TPB was mostly used to explain about human behavior understanding and behavioral predictions.
The research model is based on various studies related to TPB(Theory of Planned Behavior) and IDT(Innovation Diffusion Theory). The TPB model is frequently used for prediction of human behavior and most of empirical studies were conducted to explain the prediction of behavior by using TPB model. This study had collected a survey of 239 respondents ; however, only 229 were used into the analysis.
From the 239 surveys collected on subjects of personal cloud services, 229 surveys were valid for analysis. The results of analysis are as follows.
First, TPB model is very useful in explaining the intentions to use personal cloud service. Attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioral controls had significant effects on the intention to use personal cloud service.
Second, relative advantage, compatibility and flow possess a significant effect on use attitudes. However, perceived security was shown to have a significant negative effect on use attitude. On the other hand, ubiquity was shown to have no effect.
Third, relative advantage, compatibility and flow have significant effects on the subjective norm. However, perceived security was shown to have a significant negative effect on subjective norm. On the other hand, was shown to have no effect on subjective norm.
Fourth, only relative advantage was shown to have a significant effect on perceived behavior control.
Fifth, this study explores the moderating effect to take advantage of personal cloud service which is affecting intention to use personal cloud service. The intention to use of personal cloud service can be varied due to experience. There might be some difference of intention to use between personal cloud service user group and personal cloud service non user group.
The implication of the study is not only suggesting the directivity in the research related to personal cloud service, but also finding the factors that may affect the user intention of personal cloud service.