M and I have got to be the two most expensive letters in the world. Together, they cost $3.6 million, and if you’re Chinese, you’ll know who the owner of these letters are.

Directly translated, the word “Xiaomi” means “little rice”, or millet-apparently it has to do with the Buddhist phrase “A single grain of rice of a Buddhist is as great as a mountain.” MI stands for Mobile Internet or Mission Impossible, depending on how you look at it. Oh, and the company’s mascot is this cute little bunny.

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From millet to rice

In 2009, fustrated at the limited functionality of Android, former Kingsoft CEO Lei Jun founded Xiaomi (for non-Chinese speakers, its Shao-mi) to provide software that was easy to use but was still feature-rich. The team behind the skin MIUI (a play on the words Me-You-I) has often been likened to iOS (Jun even goes as far to call the iPhone “the best phone in the world”)...

Lots of films are made to appear as realistic as possible. Gravity was made very meticulously (the crew had to invent a Lightbox in order to replicate the lighting conditions in space), so detailed that although most of the film was made from CGI, nobody could tell that it was filmed inside a studio. It just looked so real. Same goes to Life of Pi. Despite the fact that most of the film was filmed inside the world’s largest wave tank, and the fact that the main actor didn’t know how to swim, and that the animals used in the film weren’t actually on the set, the whole thing looked very real. Its not just sci-fi films either. The Wolf of Wall Street, that wasn’t a big adventure film, but the visual effects were “almost perfectly seamless” as well. Even television shows are cashing in on this.

Which brings me on to Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. Because this isn’t a film where...

NB: The contents of this blog post are only my personal opinions.
EDIT: Updated with thoughts on the Galaxy S5.

Phonsie. That’s what my colleague calls her phone. I suppose this is understandable. After all, we spend almost every aspect of our lives with our phones, so we naturally form this intimate relationship with them. However, this doesn’t happen if a phone is poorly designed. In order to evoke intimacy between itself and its owner, a phone has to be brilliant. And phones don’t get any more successful (in terms of sales) than the iPhone.

The reason why Apple is so successful is because they genuinely care about their customers. They’re passionate about their products. Every little detail has been meticulously considered in order to provide the best user experience possible (click that link if you don’t know what I’m talking about). Their attention to detail is simply...