Tencent wants to offer 10TB free cloud storage internationally

China’s Tencent, one of the largest internet companies in the world, has announced that it will offer an international version of its cloud storage platform next year. In addition, a user gets up to 10TB of free storage. There will also be a photo service in a few weeks.

Peter Zheng, responsible for Tencent’s social media arm, recently revealed at an MIT meeting that his company will start offering its cloud storage service internationally early next year. Currently, the service can only be accessed via a site with text in Mandarin, but soon the service should also be available in English, so reports PandoDaily.

Tencent initially offers a user 1TB of storage, but as the user stores more data, the total storage capacity can grow to a maximum of 10TB. These storage options should also apply to the international version of the cloud storage service. Zheng also said that the data of international users will most likely be stored on servers outside of China. Tencent would already store data from its messaging app WeChat on servers in the US and Southeast Asia. This should prevent censorship by the Chinese government.

The Chinese internet conglomerate, which ranks in the top five largest internet companies in the world, also plans to launch its Story Camera photo service in the US in a few weeks. Story Camera would currently process more photos in China than Facebook. With WeChat and its social networking service Qzone added together, Tencent would process more than 400 million photos per day, compared to 350 million photos for Facebook.

Tencent would have made the necessary adjustments to the Story Camera app. For example, the photo app for the US market would no longer show an appreciation for the ‘handsomeness’ of the person being photographed, a feature that would be very popular in China but probably not well received in the US. The design has also been completely overhauled, because Western users would like a more ‘clean’ interface.