Xiaomi just spent $3.6 million on two letters (Qz)

Quartz has reported before on the global ambitions of Asian smartphone manufacturers, especially Xiaomi. Yesterday, the company made another move to help it expand: It changed its web address from xiaomi.com to mi.com. That may seem pretty shallow, but Xiaomi thinks the move has real value—$3.6 million of value, according to a number being  reported by China Daily.

+

Now, we at qz.com should know a thing or two about two-letter domain names—in fact, we catalogued them all last year—and we can tell you that $3.6 million is a pretty staggering amount. Indeed, it’s a staggering amount for any domain name. The biggest domain name purchase this year, before Xiaomi’s, was whisky.com, which went for $3.1 million, according to DN Journal. According to our survey last year, mi.com was a “parked” domain, meaning that its website didn’t feature any content.

+

Xiaomi’s willingness to spend big on a couple of measly letters has a sensible explanation. For one thing, $3.6 million isn’t going to ruin Xiaomi, which has at least $360 million in funding, according to startup site Crunchbase. More importantly, a big obstacle to Xiaomi’s international expansion is its very name, which not everyone might know how to pronounce. (It’s “shao-mi”, where the “shao” rhymes with “cow.”) Mi, on the other hand, is simpler and friendlier. And Xiaomi appears to have dropped the “Xiao-” from its English-language branding altogether: Apart from the copyright notice, the word “Xiaomi” does not appear on the mi.com homepage. Everything else, from the MIUI operating system to the Redmi phone, and from Mi TV to Mi Bunnies (don’t ask), is simply, well, Mi.This week, a small gang of pirates armed with a gun and a machete attacked an oil tanker off of the western coast of Malaysia, stealing diesel from the ship and kidnapping three crew members.

+

The kidnapping is the latest sign that although piracy on the high seas is down globally, it is getting worse in some pockets of the world—including increasingly crucial shipping routes in East Asia like the Malacca Straits, where the attacked oil tanker was traveling. The straits accounts for the majority of goods and oil shipped to and from China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

+

In 2013, there were 264 actual and attempted attacks on ships, down 11% from 2012 and 41% from 2011 when Somali pirates were at their most active. (A fall in Somali attacks accounts for much of the recent decline.) But over half of the incidents that did happen last year were in East Asia, mainly Southeast Asia, where such attacks have been steadily ticking upwards over the past few years.

All css and css3 for css tools and css3 tools with css code generator and css3 code generator. All css generator and css3 generator for css button gerator and css3 button generator, css gradient generator and css3 gradient generator, css menu maker and css menu maker, css button maker and css3 button maker other help css editor and css3 editor.