With the development of 3G technology in the world's biggest cell phone market, Chinese telecom operators and cell phone manufacturers are competing for the tech-savvy users and software developers alike.

Thirty-five-year-old Zhu Lianxing is a prime example. When the founder of 139.me, a leading software development team in Baoding, a prefecture-level city in Hebei Province, went to an Apple's iPhone Developer Program in June 2008, there were only about 1,500 software applications at the time, he said.

"I realized it might be an opportunity," he said in his current office located in the Zhongguancun area of Beijing.

Zhu, who graduated from Hebei University, formed a team of four developers when he came back from Apple's iPhone program and still remembers their first work, Love Forecaster. "It's a simple application used for predicting women's menstrual cycles," he said.

Since then Zhu's team has developed more than 30 applications from games to interpreters such as Colorful Aquarium, Water Cube and Abc Interpreter.

Feeding fish and a business

"Our most popular work is Colorful Aquarium, a fish feeding simulator on iPhone and iTouch. It was released last June and has had more than 1.5 million downloads around the world," Zhu said. "We recently designed a new version for iPad, which will be officially released this Saturday."

His team has grown from four to more than 20 full-time staff, and Zhu moved his headquarters from Baoding to Beijing January 1.

"There are more software talents and business opportunities in Beijing. It's a new start," he said.

Zhu said their team's income comes mainly from application sales at the online Apple App Store. Apple keeps 30 percent of its business revenues and gives the rest to developers.

"For example, we charge $3 for Colorful Aquarium, and we can get $2 for each download," he said.

Zhu said most of their earnings come from the United States and Europe. "We design applications in accordance with foreign customers' tastes, because downloads from China account for less than 1 percent of the total," he said.

The competition has become fiercer with a growing number of application developers. Currently there are more than 150,000 applications sold through Apple App.

Zhu said they focus more on analyzing Western customers' interests. "The money isn't coming as easily as before. We need to attract it from an ocean of competing applications."