Chen, wearing jeans and a dress shirt and a head of spiky hair, was speaking in a lecture on Monday at Seoul National University, where he talked about the website's evolution for about half an hour.

"I conceived of YouTube as a place more than just a video-creating site, where a user could show what they created to people all over the world," the 30-year-old tech whiz said.

Steve Chen, a co-founder of YouTube, poses with a monitor showing singer and producer Park Jin-young and girl band Wonder Girls after a video chat on Monday. Chen was at the office of Google Korea in Seoul, while Park and the Wonder Girls were in the U.S.

YouTube was hatched in February 2005 in an apartment in San Francisco, where Chen and Chad Hurley, coworkers at another company, burned the midnight oil coding what would become the world's largest video-sharing website.

From 2005 until 2007, an average of 10 hours of video clips were uploaded to the website every minute, Chen said. In 2006, the two sold their creation to Google, the world's largest Internet company, for US$1.65 billion.

Chen said that YouTube's accessibility, enabling its wide adoption, and its expandability, enabling a variety of different uses, are what YouTube is pursuing and what the company is most proud of. Users can access the site for video content that they created themselves at any place, and use it as a communication tool by editing and changing clips in myriad ways.

"To keep up with the mobile trend, we're working to improve YouTube's connectability with other devices such as mobile phones, notebook computers and PDAs," Chen said.

(englishnews@chosun.com )