12 million unique visitors per month is a lot.
Far from Silicon Valley, tech industry finds an oracle
His website, AnandTech.com ..... At age 30, Shimpi is courted by technology executives and followed by Wall Street analysts keen to hear his well-informed product views. He briefs Intel executives, dines with Asian PC executives and commands a loyal following of tech enthusiasts, with AnandTech.com drawing 12 million unique visitors per month. ...... His workbench at his home in Raleigh is cluttered with high-end storage drives, laptops and recently released tablets, one of them playing a Harry Potter movie in an endless loop. A storage room is filled with hundreds of other products shipped to him over the years, and he says UPS drops more gear off almost every day. ..... benchmark reviews, focusing strictly on performance data ..... Shimpi's data, painstakingly collected using proprietary tests he has developed over the years. .... "We have known Anand for a long time," Jonney Shih, chairman of the big Taiwanese computer-maker Asus .... the chips, touch screens and batteries in the latest tablets and smarpthones ...... a large, specialized audience of cutting edge techies ...... The Harry Potter movie playing over and over on a Google Nexus 7 tablet was part of a test to document its battery life. ..... carries out measurements several times for each device, with the results feeding spreadsheets with thousands of data points ..... Chip executives .. ship them samples of their new products, often ahead of their release ...... frequent travels .... standard tests established over a decade ago .... Soon after his start in high school building PCs for students and faculty at Saint Augustine's College in Raleigh, where his father taught computer science, Shimpi created a website and started writing about components. He quickly gained a following with a rapidly growing niche of PC enthusiasts. .... deliberately maintains a distance between his personal life and the tech world, even if that means frequent, long flights to Silicon Valley to visit chip execs. .... He takes phone calls from investors who pay him for his advice and spends more and more time hunkered down with design engineers. But Shimpi says his main focus will remain AnandTech's readers - the sort of tech fans who spend hours reading up on new products before deciding which to buy.
