Hey there, I am Jatin Shah. This is my personal blog. Over here, I will write about my hobbies, interests and other things that pique my curiosity. You can email me

“What do you want to run for this year, Joe?”
“Treasurer”
“But you cannot even add!”
“I did not say I wanted to run for assistant treasurer.”

Eddy Cue

Excellent profile of Eddy Cue (h/t Daring Fireball). My favorite part is the quote by Chris Castle (an attorney involved in the negotiations for music labels):

“You haven’t lived until Steve Jobs has called you a primitive thinker.”

Apple TV might be a billion dollar business

Five million Apple TVs per year is a half-billion dollar hobby. As such it quintupled from the first year (calendar 2007). 

The value for hardware is, of course, only a part of the story. It is accounted for as part of peripherals revenue and amounts to 18% of total peripherals revenues. Last May I estimated that the installed base of Apple TVs was 10 million. I’d estimate current total to be closer to 12 million. Assuming $10/month in content sales per Apple TV results in $1.4 billion of which 30% might be retained by Apple as revenue (agency fee).

The yearly revenue thus could be as high as $900 million. Therefore it seems plausible that Apple TV is on the verge of being a billion dollar business.

What would be considered as a huge success and a successful franchise for another company is just a hobby for Apple. 

Pinterest-ization of e-commerce

Om Malik quoting Michael Williams of the influential menswear blog, A Continuous Lean:

“Online shopping continues to become more of a rich experience, and the structure and set up of Tumblr and Pinterest lend themselves well to the development of shopping sites. I also think that customers are more open to a visual shopping experience, and it seems like the back end technology can better support those types of experiences at this point.”

Amazon has some very expensive acquisitions in its future.

Great South Korean investment ideas from Chan Lee of Petra Capital Management.

Steve Jobs in an old BBC program about NeXT:

“More important than building a product, we are in the process of architecting a company that will hopefully be much more incredible than sum of its parts. And the cumulative effort of approximately 20,000 decisions that we are all going to make over next 2 years are going to define what our company is.

And one of the things that made Apple great is that from early days it was built from the heart, not by somebody who came in and said I know how to build a company. It was built from the heart. Now unfortunately, we did not always use our heads. Now we can do better in many respects because we are wiser and smarter. And one my largest wishes is that we build NeXT from our heart. And people who are coming to work for us, buying our products or want to sell us things feel that. That we are doing this because we have a passion about it. We are doing this because we really care about the higher education process.”