Type of site Social network service Slogan(s) Share Your World Headquarters Hong Kong Founded 2007 | Available in English Website ECPod.com Motto Share Your World | |
Owner Kings Lai, Warren Hui, Fu ShouBing Key people Kings Lai, Warren Hui, Fu ShouBing | ||
ECPod.com is a social networking website to connect with China, created in 2007 by a group of young entrepreneurs in Hong Kong. ECPod is also a community portal for people to share videos.
History
ECPod was first launched in June 2007 as a language learning website. ECPod stands for "English Chinese Podcast" where members come together to post home videos of themselves teaching English and Chinese. At the early stage, ECPod was paying a rate of USD1.20 or RMB10 per video clip for members to upload their videos. Response was overwhelming and after just 2 months, ECPod had to stop paying for videos due to budget constraint. However, membership swelled to 5,000 by August 2007 and members continue to upload home-made videos for no pay as the community grew stronger.
By December 2007, membership reached 20,000 and members started to experience a slowdown in server response time when using the website. This is due to lack of bandwidth for users outside of Hong Kong. The founders of ECPod started to look for potential investors in early 2008 and managed to attract a private angel investor in Hong Kong. ECPod received its first investment of US$150,000 in March 2008.
From the period of April 2008 to May 2008, ECPod ran a survey with its members to see what new features are required for an initiative to redevelop the website beyond a language learning portal. With the survey results and the investment money, ECPod contracted a team of 4 programmers from VHost Network and 1 web designer in Hong Kong to start the development of ECPod phase II. The web designer was a 15-year-old high school student Warren Hui from South Island School, Hong Kong.
The new Phase II development of ECPod uses AJAX (programming) techniques and is geared towards a platform to connect China and the world – beyond language exchange. The new website (with limited features) is officially launched in beta on 16 October 2008.