Software park a magnet for IT firms

The service turned out to be a big success and laid the foundations for Li's second adventure. The first adventure convinced Li that cloud computing storage has great potential, but to convince ordinary users to turn to the service, service providers have to overcome security and privacy issues.

This idea is the basis for the birth of xcloud, an application that converts personal computers into personal data storage devices.

But Li was not the only person to come up with this idea. When the beta version of the xcloud went online in June 2012, Li found eight similar pieces of software in existence.

Under great pressure, he and his colleagues improved the software to make it more user-friendly. When the second version came out in August, the global number of users jumped from a few thousand to 100,000. By last October, xcloud had a million users.

Besides collecting fees from iOS users, mostly in Europe and the United States, Li's software could also generate a profit from allowing a network-attached storage (NAS) hardware producer to pre-install his software in their NAS.

"When household users use our product for a while, they realize it is much more economical to use NAS instead of PC. Then they turn to NAS. This is why NAS producers would pay us," Li said.

Li noted that one of the convenience aspects of being in Tianfu Software Park is that he can exchange ideas with other start-ups gathered there.

The park routinely holds seminars and offers a low-cost coffee bar for their gatherings. For example, by exchanging ideas with people from camera application companies, Li said he would develop xcloud in a way that enables users to store pictures taken with their smartphones in their PCs.