a special English series called "Ask Amber" hosted by Amber Scorah. The series answered listeners' questions about China and discussed unique aspects of Chinese culture and customs which foreigners may not be aware of. ChinesePod describes Amber as a "pioneer" for developing this new lesson style. ChinesePod was previously based on a 'freemium' business model similar to English as a Second Language Podcast; in 2011 it became necessary to purchase a package in order to access the lesson material. Before September 2008, all levels of audio lessons were available for free. They were irrevocably released under a Creative Commons license, so anyone who downloaded them could freely share them, but they are no longer freely downloadable from ChinesePod. The Internet Archive crawled the site at the end of 2007 but did not make the MP3 files available. ChinesePod was acquired by Bigfoot Ventures in January 2012. In 2014, Fiona Tian was brought on, initially as a guest host on the Jenny Zhu Podcast, but later coming on full-time to work on upcoming video projects. In early 2015, Jenny, David and the Shanghai Office stopped producing podcasts, and the new team led by Fiona Tian continued producing podcasts from Taipei, Taiwan. In early 2018, ChinesePod relocated its studios to Hong Kong. References Chinese-language education 2005 podcast debuts Educational podcasts