Slick New Web Apps From Youku Entice You to Study, Then Party

Youku (NYSE:YOKU), China’s biggest online video site, has today launched two new web apps on its platform. One is an impressive virtual classroom where you can view the lecture’s slides and make notes all on the same page; the other is a party-oriented music-video feature where you can easily make playlists or sing along to the lyrics.

The diverse and slick-looking web apps – called Youku Classroom and Youku Music Box (pictured above), respectively – have been made by the Youku Labs division and incorporate some social media elements as well.

Back to School

The virtual Classroom web app is really neat, and gives you a dynamic interface that allows you to watch lectures from, say, Yale whilst also seeing the actual slides, reading the subtitles, making notes, and even tweeting about it on Sina Weibo.

The circular icon in the middle (pictured above) allows you to switch the panes around – without disturbing the playing of the video – so that you could make the slides or the notes larger.

The sizeable library of lectures and debates that feeds into this new web app is at the Youku Edu page, which features open courses from some of the UK and US’ top seats of learning, such as Cambridge and Harvard.

Youku.FM

On a lighter note, the second new offering today is a stripped-down video jukebox – dubbed Music Box – that scraps all the ads and clutter of the usual Youku interface and replaces it with just one video and an ancillary panel where you can assemble ad hoc playlists, or view the lyrics (on some tracks) for a bit of karaoke action.

Youku says that logged-in users will also see the benefit of the Music Box web app learning your musical tastes so that it’ll offer up music that’s more suited to your tastes. All the music videos come from the already huge collection that’s on the site.

Give the two Youku Labs apps a try – here’s the Classroom, and click here for the Music Box.