Technology - Google News

Elon Musk could learn a lesson from Henry Ford: One person can't run a car company
Fitbit's Charge 3 adds a better screen, swim tracking, and smartwatch-style features
New Leaks Reveal Nvidia RTX 2070 Quicker Than GTX 1080: 40% Quicker Than 1070

Elon Musk could learn a lesson from Henry Ford: One person can't run a car company

Posted: 20 Aug 2018 07:15 AM PDT

Henry Ford's experiences in the early days of running the family's fledgling car company serve as a lesson from history for troubled Tesla founder Elon Musk, according to someone who has studied both operations closely.

With the electric car marker's shares tumbling and questions being posed about Musk's erratic behavior over the past several months, Christopher Whalen, author of 2017's "Ford Men: From Inspiration to Enterprise," said there are important points to learn from the auto pioneer's early days.

"Musk is no Henry Ford, but TSLA is the latest case in point to the lesson that solitary leaders often fail," Whalen, a credit analyst and head of Whalen Global Advisors, wrote in an online post Monday. "No matter how brilliant or inspired, most of us need the moderation and help of business partners, directors and investors to make an enterprise succeed and endure."

Just as Ford and his vision needed James Couzens to run the business side of his company, so does Musk need a steady hand to help in the management of his company, which has faced a severe backlog in orders and a suffocating debt load that has some investors questioning its valuation, Whalen added.

Musk hasn't helped his own case, either, most recently drawing regulatory scrutiny for posting on Twitter that he was pondering taking the company private for $420 a share. He insisted he had a buyer but has not provided any further details.

Last week, he gave The New York Times an in-depth interview that further alarmed investors about his mental state. Several months back, Musk engaged in a rancorous exchange with analysts, saying they were posing "boring, bonehead questions."

"The most recent outburst by Musk about a fictional going private transaction illustrates that the reputation of a successful inventor may not necessarily translate into business acumen," Whalen wrote. "Visionaries such as Musk and GM founder William Durant, on the other hand, are showmen. They are great at building new businesses so long as they are spending someone else's money."

Tesla shares have fallen more than 14 percent over the past five days as the questions over Tesla's leadership have escalated. Company officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Whalen said the company faces "a very nasty dilemma."

"In order to make TSLA a functioning car manufacturer, CEO Musk must bring in some operators before he burns out or worse," he wrote. "But to do so means destroying the techno hype that has fueled TSLA's forward equity valuation, enabling Musk to burn through billions in debt and equity capital based upon a promise of 'green' transportation."

Whalen compared the situation to Ford's close friend, Thomas Edison, who first had the vision for an electric car. Even Edison, he said, needed help.

"Merely being brilliant and having a vision of the future was not enough," Whalen said. "Musk has defined a market for electric cars and created a brand, but the better part of valor may be to declare success and sell his creation to a larger global manufacturer."

Click here to read Whalen's full post.

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Fitbit's Charge 3 adds a better screen, swim tracking, and smartwatch-style features

Posted: 20 Aug 2018 06:00 AM PDT

It may feel like all the attention is on full-fledged smartwatches these days — devices like the Apple Watch, Galaxy Watch, and Fitbit's own Ionic and Versa watches — but the popular fitness company hasn't forgotten about its fitness trackers yet. Today, Fitbit is announcing (as the leaks predicted) the Fitbit Charge 3, the latest update to the company's Charge line of trackers.

At first glance, the Charge 3 looks pretty similar to the Charge 2: there's a vertical black-and-white screen, and the overall shape and size are pretty much the same. But a closer look shows that Fitbit has completely overhauled the Charge 3 with a new aluminum body and Gorilla Glass 3 screen borrowed from the Versa line. The display is now a touchscreen with support for grayscale colors (in addition to just plain black and white) along with 40 percent more active screen area than the Charge 2.

The Charge 3 is water resistant (up to 50 meters) and now offers swim tracking in addition to the other forms of exercise that Fitbit has offered in the past. Fitbit has also upgraded the heart rate sensor for better accuracy and added the same SpO2 (or oxygen saturation) sensor found on its smartwatches. Crucially, the Charge 3 now offers up to seven days of battery life on a single charge (up from five days on the Charge 2).

The physical button on the Charge 2 has also been replaced with a new "inductive button" that's similar to the fake home button on Apple's more recent iPhones. There are no moving parts, and the tactile "press" has been replaced by haptic feedback. Fitbit says that the change to the inductive button helped save room on the inside of the device for more battery and sensors while also making it easier to waterproof the device.

There's still no GPS on the Charge 3, a decision Fitbit notes was an intentional trade-off for the improved design, price, and battery life. The company pointed out that the population of people who run without their phones is still relatively small.

But the Charge 3 isn't just an aesthetic redesign: Fitbit is also adding several new fitness features that have trickled down from its smartwatches to make the Charge 3 more useful. Similar to the Versa, the clock face now has an option to swipe to the dashboard where users see stats like current step count, active minutes exercised, calories burned, and more.

There's a new goal-based exercise mode, which lets you set specific calorie, time, or distance goals ahead of your workout and then track them over the course of your exercise. Fitbit is also bringing in the run detect feature from its smartwatches, which can automatically start and stop tracking runs without having to manually select them.

Additionally, Fitbit is continuing to blur the line between its trackers and its smartwatches with smartphone notifications on the Charge 3, marking the company's first tracker to get the feature. You'll be able to see app notifications, calls, calendar, and texts on your Charge 3. (Users will be able to filter out by app what shows up.) You'll also be able to accept or reject calls, and Android users will get the option to quickly reply to messages with canned responses.

There are also several new apps on the Charge 3, including alarms, timer, weather, calendar, and Fitbit's leaderboard. Additional "popular brand apps" with selected partners are planned for the future, too, although the company didn't have any information to share on that count yet.

The Charge 3 will come in two models: a $149.95 Core version and a $169.95 Special Edition that features NFC and supports Fitbit Pay for payments. For now, there are two color options available: a graphite tracker with a black band and a rose gold device with a lighter gray band (The special edition model will come with an additional band in the box.)

Fitbit is offering preorders for the Charge 3 from its website beginning today, and it hits stores sometime in October.

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New Leaks Reveal Nvidia RTX 2070 Quicker Than GTX 1080: 40% Quicker Than 1070

Posted: 20 Aug 2018 07:45 AM PDT

While all eyes have been on the new RTX 2080-series from Nvidia, widely expected to be announced this week at Germany's Gamecom event, details of the RTX 2070 - the replacement for the popular GTX 1070, have surfaced. Specifically, we now have numbers for the memory and CUDA core count, although the TDP remains a complete mystery albeit likely to be around 180W.

	RTX 2080 Ti	RTX 2080	GTX 1080 Ti	GTX 1080	RTX 2070	GTX 1070
Memory	11GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	11GB GDDR5X	8GB GDDR5X	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR5
CUDA Cores	4352	2944	3584	2560	2304	1920
Memory interface	352-bit	256-bit	352-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit
TDP	285W	285W	250W	180W	180W	150W

Details leaked to YouTube channel AdoredTV apparently from an Nvidia source, claim to show that the RTX 2070 will be 40% faster than the GTX 1070 and 17% quicker than the current GTX 1080 too - both feats that will delight gamers although much rests on pricing, which is less certain at the moment. Unlike previous generations, though, Nvidia's new cards appear to be getting more power hungry. It's likely the RTX 2070 will have a similar TDP to the RTX 2080 at 180W, which is 30W or so more than the GTX 1070 and GTX 970. Looking further back, the GTX 770 had a TDP of 230W, so we've been on a consistent downward trend until now. This looks set to result in larger coolers as I mentioned in my first article here and also discussed in more detail by Jason Evangelho here.

Despite early rumors pointing at a 7GB card with the RTX 2070, the latest information shows it actually has the same 8GB GDDR6 memory as the RTX 2080, However, the latter has considerably more CUDA cores at 2944 compared to just 2304 for the RTX 2070. That, though, is 20% more than the current GTX 1070 and coupled with new GDDR6 memory, the claims that the RTX 2070 is up to 40% quicker may not be unreasonable. It also looks likely that both the RTX 1070 and RTX 2060 will be on sale late September, early October - later than the new RTX 2080 Ti and 2080.

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