There have been a lot of press talking about China's new regulation
that only state-owned or state-controlled companies can render online
video. This regulation is published by Ministry of Information
Industry (MII) and China's State Administration of Radio, Film and
Television (SARFT), and it has taken effect since January 31, 2008.
The very latest rumour is that Tudou, the No.1 Chinese video-sharing
site will be punished,and the punishment might be a Shutdown. It is
quite shocking, isn't?
That the reason that I have searched over the sites
,looking for if someone who cares about education and culture. So now
I am very happy to
be on behalf of our site to seek your attention and perhaps some talks
later.I find my
server is not able to send u email in chinese. Please check out my
chinese doc attaced
with this letter.
www.ecpod.com is still at beta stage and we are almost ready for
official launch. To give you a
bit more information about us ? ECpod began as an idea about 1.5 years
ago, initially simply as a website for learning mandarin. It took us 3
months to launch. The feedback was good, but not great from members,
friends and the occasional googlers.. We found that members (who are
mostly teachers and students) wanted a bilingual platform to learn and
teach each other both mandarin and english. These 2 represent the
most
widely spoken languages in the world.
Then students told us they wanted a fun learning website and would
prefer
to watch videos produced by other members rather than professional
clips
done by our company. They wanted to feel they were watching real
people
who chose the topics they wanted to teach, rather than yet another
teaching site copied from a textbook ? they had enough textbooks. And,
because they wanted a say in what content material was taught, they
wanted
to do some of the teaching themselves. Hence, we refocused our in-
house
language tutors ? instead of creating most of the material, they
instead
vet the material created by our members. We even welcome mistakes and
colloquialisms in the contributed clips ? it gives a more genuine,
warm
feeling that everyone is learning from everyone else ? and we include
a
note in the transcript with the correction, of course.
After watching a video, members who have questions (ie: say they
watched a
clip filmed in a Chinese village and they want to try to find the
village
on a map) can drop the Producer an email asking for more
information?.One
contributor filmed himself cooking lunch in his kitchen and we
received
questions about the condiments he used. Another contributor emailed us
saying while on a flight from Hong Kong to Beijing a stewardess asked
him
"are you Warwick from ECpod?" We had a few wild guesses from
foreigners
when a Chinese mother sent in a clip of her children playing with
loaches
in a bowl. A retired high school Chemistry teacher brought his video
camera to the lab where he used to work, to film himself talking about
the
equipment in the lab and another contributor took his camera and his
wife
to the nearby market. These clips were also very well received by our
foreign members. We even have teachers offering their online tutoring
service to students on ECpod (an arrangement between teacher and
student
which ECpod is not involved in and for which ECpod allows for free, in
the
interests of encouraging as diverse a selection of contributors as
possible.)
The main mandarin video contributors are native speakers from China.
This
tends to appeal to foreigners hoping to learn not just the Chinese
language, but its culture as well. Some have even told us they want to
learn "proper Chinese," the way it is spoken in China, rather than
outside
China. In turn they also post English clips. We like to think our site
promotes "cultural exchange." Sometimes we receive emails about the
"backdrop" in some video clips ? some of the home videos are literally
done in the contributor's home and we realize that mundane every day
activities in one part of the world can be interesting in another part
of
the world. Some members use our site to make friends and contacts.
Our final stage to the website is to offer this site in Mandarin as
well.
We are currently doing the mandarin translation. Once that is ready
(in
the next 2 weeks), we will purchase overseas bandwidth ? that is to
speed
up the video streaming on our site. (You will probably notice that the
speed of video now is still slow). This problem will be solved once
we
purchase overseas bandwidth. But we wouldn't do it now before the
site is
100% ready as bandwidth is really costly.
We will not be redeveloping this site, but will add more features
going
forward. In the last 3 months of our soft launch, we gathered
feedback as
to what other features members would like (for eg: live chat) and we
will
continue to improve as we go.
You are probably wondering why are we offering all these services for
free, who the people are behind the scenes. ECpod does not intend to
charge any subscription fee to members to use this website in the
foreseeable future. All current features on the site are free and we
intend to make future features free as well. We created the site as a
learning tool for ourselves initially and when it became popular with
members we decided to put in money to develop more features and create
an
ECpod community. We hope to recover our costs via advertising,
therefore
it is in our best interests to make it free and user-friendly so more
users are attracted to the site. More hits make the site more
appealing to
advertisers. And more members make our own learning process more
colorful
as well.
Our team includes friends who are school teachers, university
students from Hong Kong University, a consultant, a re****ter, 2
secondary
school students (both 15 years old) and some mandarin specialists
based in
China to vet the contributions. It's a team of 19 people at the
moment.
I wish the letter is not so long for you ...I hope you could visit
www.ecpod.com , and have a look on how we look like and how we have
changing to helping our members , I will be happy if you have further
enquiry about ecpod , then you may email me:)
Thanks in advance for your help. We really hope ECpod will become a
strong
platform for members to learn language, exchange cultures, make
friends
and find students online. I hope you can join us as a member too.
Thanks.
--
Lan Kwai Fong
www.ecpod.com
http://ecpod.wordpress.com/about/
|
