Xiaomi’s Android ROM MIUI has claimed over 17 million users, with a versatile ecosystem of app store, game center, themes, xiaomi store, music, videos and reading. With a Xiaomi account, users can purchase virtual products and value-added services through Alipay, Tenpay or mobile prepaid cards.
Recently Hong Feng, co-founder and VP of Xiaomi Tech revealed that the company has bolder planning on various life services, and the Xiao TV Box is just the very first attempt. (In late 2012, Xiaomi launched this inexpensive device allowing users to stream internet videos onto TV and run Android apps.)
Hong said that in the past year Xiaomi’s focus had been on the set up of the whole ecosystem, including promoting the app store, game center and developing the version 5. This year as everything comes to the right track gradually, the effort would shift to the bonding between users’ life and the phone service.
So the first novel move is the NFC payment, which was proposed by Lei Jun, co-founder and CEO. Currently this new service is available on the model of Xiaomi 2A. The vision behind this is the phone could enables different kinds of functions such as the entrance badge for offices. Hong said if this mobile entrance badge system worked, staff would just need to swipe their phones when entering the offices. According to his research, companies working on the entrance badge system across the country mainly(80%) base in Shenzhen and the number is not big, which means it’s possible for Xiaomi’s new tech to cover the whole nation.
The updated revenue distribution of MIUI said that 60% comes from games, and app store, browser(paid search + paid links/display ads), themes, reading and cloud service account for the left part.
