Software park a magnet for IT firms

Youngsters realize entrepreneurial dreams in the southwestern city

More than 80 millions users! This is what Gu Rui and his "camera360" achieved in just two years.

Over the past few years, Camera360, a camera application for the Android system that enable users to adjust and improve photos taken with their mobile phones, has grown to be China's most popular camera application.

More than 60 percent of camera360's users are in China, according to Gu, chief marketing officer of Pinguo Digital Entertainment, the company that originated the product. Based on the number of smartphone users in China - 330 million by the third quarter of 2012 - around 15 percent of China's smartphone users have installed the application on their phones.

What is much less known is the birthplace of the camera360 and Pinguo - Chengdu. But to Gu and many other young people who aspired to launch ventures in the digital age, the southwestern metropolis has increasingly become a magnet for them.

Like Gu, Li Cheng, a technology enthusiast who has years of experience in the IT business, also realized his entrepreneurial dream in Chengdu.

After the failure of his first venture, Li left Shanghai for Chengdu. His first venture in Chengdu is a cloud computing system that provides data storage services to enterprises. Combining the hardware of a Taiwan company with the software developed by his own team, they managed to offer enterprises a service that was cheaper than that provided by cloud storage service giants such as IBM and HP.