free egg, anyone?

by cynthia yoo | April 13, 2008 at 04:20 pm

1279 views | 0 Recommendations | 11 comments

I’ve found a cool new Korean video-sharing site.

It’s called ‘free egg’ an ambitious new company jointly owned by JoongAng Ilbo and alticast. JoongAng Ilbo is a top Korean news outlet and alticast is a market leader in providing MHP solutions for digital interactive TV, using open standards technologies. It’s a mouthful, but basically, they provide the tech services for video-sharing sites, including SEO and data mining solutions.

The site itself is pretty. It’s also fast and provides HD-quality videos. Impressive.

I’m a sucker for fun but semi-useless tools like free egg’s tag-cloud. A work colleague poo-poo’ed it, saying it was a waste of time. But part of the fun of Youtube and other sites are the recommended postings and related tags, right? (Well, that’s true as long as they’re smart and find you what you didn’t even realize you were looking for.)

Since I can’t join (membership is restricted to Korean nationals and foreigners with visas) I can’t examine the networking functions too closely but it wasn’t the online SNS that caught my attention.

It was the offline services that stood out.

free egg has built a “UCC Factory” where members can go to shoot videos, edit them and share them online. You can take a virtual tour through the four-story building here.

Having a cool office where the public can come and work on their videos is part of their CI-corporate identity/branding to differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack.

free egg wants to provide online video-creation/editing services to its users. Kinda like a one-stop shop or the Konglish “NONE Stop” service as they call it.

free egg runs counter to the advice given by Chinese media experts on their burgeoning video-sharing market: make it simple, faster, easier, and take out the frills!

It shows you the difference between China’s young market and Korea’s mature one. Korean online services are full of frills and whistles (ah the freedom of mixing metaphors in bloggrammar).

Koreans are different too in that their online communities do like to meet offline. When I discussed the free egg “UCC Factory” and offline meets to a colleague, he joked, “Why meet at all! The whole point of online groups is that you never have to meet these people!”

Oh and why is it called free egg?

Google or Wiki egg of Columbus. There’s your answer and the brand mythology behind free egg.

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T altered art

at 18:46 on April 13th, 2008

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Alauda_arvensis_nest_2_beentree.jpg
public domain image use enjoy the free egg use

T altered art has contributed a photo to this story.

freerangestock

at 19:01 on April 13th, 2008

It's an egg, what can I say. This and thousands of other free stock photos can be downloaded for free at http://www.freerangestock.com

freerangestock has contributed a photo to this story.

cherylplatt57

at 19:24 on April 13th, 2008

I raise a variety of different breeds of hens and currently have about 130 hens. I have 300 eggs in an incubator, so I will be having more eggs by next year! I am collecting about 95 eggs a day. My hens are free range and happy :))). Cheryl

cherylplatt57 has contributed a photo to this story.

bunnygirl

at 21:55 on April 13th, 2008

These are our free range eggs. We have about 20 hens and they lay roughly 60 or so eggs a week. Not much but it's more than enough for our needs.

bunnygirl has contributed a photo to this story.

ellierichellie

at 02:52 on April 14th, 2008

blogged at www.ellierichellie.blogspot.com. Cage free and colored on a rainy morning out at the Oregon Coast.

ellierichellie has contributed a photo to this story.

7thswan

at 04:00 on April 14th, 2008

A Friend never had a Free Range Egg, I thought a pic. would help show the diffrence.

7thswan has contributed a photo to this story.

doriswilson

at 06:14 on April 14th, 2008

Free range fresh eggs from 'The Browns' Nanaimo, BC

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breeze

at 09:47 on April 14th, 2008

Hi,It's really funny post.

I think we want to express never-stop service, not one-stop.

I'm Freeegg CTO.

If you want to know more about freeegg, feel free contact me.

thanks.

Daria.Varriale

at 14:10 on April 14th, 2008

Virtual eggs in the 3D online community Second Life.

Daria.Varriale has contributed a photo to this story.

Harold Oh

at 17:39 on April 14th, 2008

Thank you for your interest and posting.

I have not expected that our service can be remarked from overseas.

I am a marketing manager of FreeEgg Corp. who is responsible for overseas business.

Our service is not completed but has been in progress to launch more impressive, useful and convenient services. I am going to let you know them when we have changes.

Our brand, "Free Egg(or freeegg)" means something free, flexbile and creative such as 'free mental', 'free style', 'creative idea', as well as the meaning is from the Egg of Columbus.

"UCC factory" is a kind of studio located in Hongdae which is a famous area for clubs, bands and various cultures in Seoul. The goal of UCC factory is to provide the infrastructure such as online platform, studios(including chroma-key), machines, human resources and so on for general people to make UCC videos easily and comfortably.

Please ask me if you have any more questions anytime you want. Thanks. ;-)

cynthia yoo

at 20:50 on April 14th, 2008

안녕하세요~~It's great to hear from you, I'm surprised you found us~~I do find your site and the UCC Factory concept quite cool. And you picked a cool spot in Hongdae as well. I found the list of "channels" on your site rather funny, how did you come up with them?