A Cloud Valley company manages people's medical records and helps them book visits to their doctors on mobile handsets.

The city of Beijing claims to boast a half-million young professionals staffing its software and related services. Based on that potential, it has a plan to build a cloud tech industry capable of generating 200 billion yuan ($33 billion) in revenue by 2015, said Vice-Mayor Gou Zhongwen at a meeting in December 2011 in Cloud Valley.

The cloud is where people build dreams. It certainly is for Tian Suning (Edward Tian), chairman and founding partner of CBC, the leading investor in Cloud Valley. The 50-year-old Tian was one of the earliest entrepreneurs in China's Internet age. He has been busy creating new companies and new business models over the past 20 years after he earned his PhD in the United States.

The first company that Tian and his friends created, back in 1993 in the US, is now part of the Nasdaq-listed AsiaInfo-Linkage Inc, a specialist in IT solutions and services.

In 2006, the second company that Tian and his friends built, a telecommunication service provider, was listed in Hong Kong. The company was merged into China Unicom in 2008.

After raising funds for his company CBC and founding Beijing Cloud Valley in 2011, Tian and his team began working with the Shanghai municipal government in developing a Shanghai Cloud Valley.

The purpose is to copy their way of working with the local government in Beijing, or the "(private investment) funds plus base (provided by local government plus industrial cluster" model. That means the government needs to provide offices to the cloud tech companies that are chosen by the venture capital funds (say funds under CBC)

The Shanghai Cloud Valley is in the city's Yangpu district, an area where many of the city's many universities are based, Qin said. It has 15 participating companies.

In 2013, Tian's CBC said it owned three funds, two of them worth $700 million and the third 1.5 billion yuan. They are devoted primarily to companies involved in big data and cloud computing at a time when there were already 22 member companies in Beijing's Cloud Valley, all supported by CBC investment.

Tian apparently wants to make Cloud Valley a brand name. His company (his investment fund) joined other organizations to sponsor an annual Cloud Valley World conference/exhibition for tech companies to learn from each other and for spreading knowledge and inspiration about cloud tech.

The 2013 Cloud Valley World conference was held last week in Beijing. It split its activities between the north and south cloud bases in Beijing.

Young computer engineers from all major technology parks in the country are attracted to the annual Cloud Valley meetings, where one often hears them quote a saying from from Tian, whom they nicknamed China's Mr Cloud, that goes: "Our worst enemy is our lack of imagination."