China's 'Mark Zuckerbergs' find fortune, fame

BEIJING - Starting businesses in their teenage, some young Chinese Internet entrepreneurs have turned their sharp business acumen and creativity into fortune and fame.

From "storm" to "cloud"

27-year-old Gu Zhicheng is the CEO of Kanbox, a leading cloud storage and sharing service provider in China. In the year 2000, when he was just 15, he set up a popular BBS, and after one year the site was receiving an average of over 200,000 hits everyday.

Four years later, Gu developed the Storm Player, one of the most popular multimedia players in China, along with a friend whom he had only met on an on-line forum.

The two lived in different cities, and didn't even meet in person until several years later, after the Storm Player had became a national hit - having been downloaded and installed over 50 million times in China

"Initially I developed the software only for personal use," Gu told Xinhua. "Back then few media player softwares were compatible with various video formats, so I wanted to create one".

As the number of users continued to rise, Gu and his partner found it increasingly overwhelming to run the software by themselves. So in 2007, they sold the product.

Although the deal made Gu a multimillionaire, he still kept his entrepreneurial spirit and since then, has devoted himself to cloud storage service in China.

"The other day, we had a discussion about whether we should work 14 or 16 hours a day. Everyone adopts a round-the-clock work style as second nature. We're happy to be pioneers in the cloud storage service.

"The Internet is one of the few business arenas where we can start from zero and still achieve success at an early age," he said.

Gu is also expecting a boom in online storage services in China, as the number of the country's mobile web users continues to soar.