fount is a springhead, an origin; trace is a track, a clue. We chose these two because we believe scattered information should never be an island — follow the traces it leaves and you always return to where it first came from; however faint, it surfaces in the end.
And retrieval is more than “knowing where it is.” We treat every search as an exercise in tracing things to their root and events to their origin: read the name, then the content, then the context, peeling back layers until you see why a document is here and where it leads. Finding order within complexity, seeing the true nature of the faintest detail — investigate things to reach knowledge, follow every thread to its source — this is the backdrop of how Xiangzhi builds products.
That stance of “seeking the source” governs our two products. The desktop retrieval engine Fountrace reads its name as found + trace: files are never lost, only scattered across drives and buried in nested folders until you can’t recall where one sits; following the traces it leaves — name, content, path — you pin down its exact location. The WeChat mini-app Lyricbound · Gift Ledger keeps a trace of every social exchange — who gave, on what occasion, what is owed in return — so each entry is recoverable and grounded. One tends to “documents,” the other to “obligations,” along a single thread: trace the thing to its root, the event to its source. (See Fountrace and Lyricbound · Gift Ledger (in Chinese).)
Xiangzhi Software