Let’s continue our impromptu Asian theme for today, and move from South Korea’s Samsung to China’s Xiaomi. “China’s Xiaomi Technology is a fairy tale for nerdy entrepreneurs. Less than three years after its founding, the smartphone maker is valued at $4 billion and evokes Apple-like adoration from its fans, some of whom are desperate enough to skip work for a shot at buying the latest product the day it goes on sale.”
What is especially interesting about this company is their business model.
They modify Android with specific partner services to generate revenue from those services rather than from the sales of the hardware itself.
So they get a cut from the sale of whatever product you buy using the bundled shopping, the media you buy on the bundled media app, and so on.
It’s essentially the same model is using with the Kindle.
I thought they just used MIUI as their UI, but after a quick googling, I saw that they developed MIUI, which uses Cyanogen at its core, and later made available to the public to translate and port to other devices. Very interesting. I would love if any Android OEM would use Cyanogen as their stock android OS.
kristoph suggested…
And it seems to be the same system being used by HTC on their phones (htcapps) and also by SONY on their Xperia Play phone with its PlayStation Mobile store.
As cool as Xiaomi’s MIUI offering is, let’s not think that they’re doing anything particularly new. Everyone has their hands out these days…
Bundled shopping is the IE browser bar of the ’10s…
–bornagainpenguin
Great, just what we needed – another Apple. Oh well, just as long as they don’t start trying to sue people over basic geometric shapes.
Just to point this out and as a bit of Language usage trivia for Thom.. to a British English speaker, “Asian” means “from the sub continent of India and surrounding associated territories, (incl. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Goa, Sri Lanka and Kashmir.)” We’d never normally use “Asian” to mean Korean, Chinese or Japanese. We’d either qualify it with “South East Asian”, use a more specific term like “Oriental” or use a less accurate term such as “Chinese”. I think it’s only the Australians and North Americans that use the term Asian to always mean “Oriental”. We have always had a greater affinity to India (yeah, let’s not dwell on why) and there are a lot more Asian’s (our usage) in the UK than Asians (US usage), and there is a stronger cultural influence on the UK from India than the far East (though some would argue the toss over how much.)
Edited 2012-12-11 10:54 UTC
Being Asian, and American, we tend to use it speaking as a Continent. Like Europe, Asia, Africa, etc. We differentiate just as the British, however, I’d say we tend more toward continents vs regions.