Opening paragraphs.......................

A couple of years ago, while I was doing some work at NYU's Shanghai campus, I got lost on the subway.  As a New Yorker, it takes a lot to make me feel like a country mouse, but at triple the population of my hometown,  Shanghai does it.  Even though the Shanghai subway system is amazingly well-provisioned with directions in English, I got out at the wrong stop.  I didn't figure this out right away, because the subway exited into a mall, just like at my stop, and Shanghai has so many malls - 36 million square feet of retail space will be built this year - it can be hard to tell one from another.
      Walking in a daze through a vast collection of hallways and shops, I did the very thing people who build confusing malls wanted me to do:  I slowed down and started looking around, whereupon I noticed a booth selling mobile phones, a thing I happened to need at the time.  I saw a particularly nice one, all black, rounded sides, quite stylish, whose logo read Mi3.  I decided that a Mi3 would be as good a phone as any, so the vendor and I did that curious pointing and gesturing thing people do when transacting with no common language except money, and ten minutes later, I had my phone.
      There is not much a middle-aged guy can do to seem au courant to eighteen-year-olds, but that phone did it.  For the next several days on campus, whenever I needed to do anything on my phone, one of the Chinese students would ask, "Where did you get that?"  Not, "What kind of phone is that?" - they all recognized it.  The Mi3 was a huge hit for Xiaomi, the startup that made it, selling faster than the company could produce them.  I had managed to get my hands on a phone so popular, the company couldn't always keep up with demand, making me briefly the envy of teenagers (not a familiar feeling, before or since).

-Clay Shirky,  Little Rice:  Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream