How strong a rival will China’s Tencent be compared to U.S.-based Internet companies and the other competitors found in Asia?

An answer may come soon as Tencent is poised to launch the worldwide version of a free 10TB storage service in 2014. Data found worldwide will likely be stored on servers outside of China, too. WeChat, the company’s messaging app, which has 100 million users outside of China, already uses servers in the United States and in Southeast Asia.

Also, a photo-sharing app, called Story Camera, will soon be offered by Tencent in the United States – in a matter of weeks – maybe even two to three weeks from now. Users of Story Camera can take a photograph then place info on the image. In addition, its facial recognition technology will provide a “beauty” or “handsomeness” rank of the person in the photo.

Peter Zheng, vice president of Tencent’s social network group, announced the new offerings during a recent speech at MIT’s (News - Alert) China Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum.

Also, users who register for Tencent’s QQ accounts can download a “mobile cloud app score 1TB of gratis space, which will balloon closer to 10TB as needed,” Engadget said.

Pando Daily also reported that Tencent – by opting for global servers – could “protect user data from the prying eyes of the Chinese government, which has a penchant for censorship.”

The November announcement follows an August announcement when Tencent said it would provide ten times the free cloud storage offered by Baidu and Qihoo 360.

In addition, WeChat will soon get an improved design, Pando Daily reported.

Some 400 million photos are uploaded to Tencent’s mobile platforms daily – such as WeChat and the Qzone social network, Zheng said in the MIT speech. That contrasts to some 350 million photos uploaded to Facebook (News - Alert) daily, and 55 million photos uploaded to Instagram daily. Also, Snapchat sees 350 million “snaps” daily.

When considering the success of Tencent, Thomas Krafft wrote on Pando Daily how “Facebook acquired a billion users the old fashioned way - building a good product people could choose to use, or not. Tencent acquired a billion users because the Chinese government has outlawed, and will put its citizens in prison for accessing, most foreign domains and services. Tencent's entire existence came from the fact that Chinese are not allowed to use services built by anyone other than China.”