Industry veteran John McCrea sees 2012 as transformational for the personal cloud. He laid out his expectations in an interview with SiliconANGLE Editor-in-Chief Mark Hopkins and in a post on his blog, therealmccrea.com.

McCrea’s forecast is based mostly on the premise that the four major trends in this space will converge into a single megatrend, which will in turn open up a whole new world of opportunities on both the consumer and vendor trends. The four component trends he mentioned include the cloud, mobile, the expanding array of connected devices and social media. His particular take on the cloud caught my eye.

“What’s exciting about cloud computing in the consumer landscape is its duality: not just all of your data and content “up there,” safe, secure, and accessible to you anywhere/anytime; but also an ever-growing mountain of data about you and your usage of any given service. Together these lay the foundation for “Personalization 2.0,” a complete rethinking of what service means.”

McCrea sees this extending into the three other areas in 2012. Increased personalization and cloud sync will increase the capabilities of handsets, creating what he called a “device-based form of your identity” that will offer more functionality. This will also apply to connected devices: new technologies will enable smaller and smaller products to serve in a growing number of roles, such as cloud -based health monitoring.

The social aspect will act as the driver behind these trends, becoming an enabler of all that built up consumer demand.

These four factors will combine to become McCrea’s Pervasive Personal Cloud: the next generation of cloud services that leverages big data and mobility to expand user experience into new dimensions. Vendors will be competing in new ways – trying to lure in customers to use their services, or trying to become a middle man within an ecosystem of providers.