Locals at the southern tip of Texas took in an otherworldly sight on Thursday night: A giant mirror-polished machine roared to life near a beach, and through a cloud of orange smoke, rose six stories into the sky, hovered, and then gently landed.

Though the launch lasted less than a minute, the late-night spectacle was the first true flight of SpaceX's Starhopper rocket ship. It represents a key step in company founder Elon Musk's quest to send people to the moon and Mars, though Starhopper isn't designed to fly into space. Instead, it's a test bed for technologies that could eventually power a much larger and more powerful launch system known as Starship.

Though it was difficult to see the hop through the smoke, Starhopper appeared to move, and Musk confirmed on Twitter that the flight was "successful." The launch did appear to start a brush fire that was still being contained nearly a half hour after the launch (at the time of writing).

Musk envisions Starship as a nearly 400-foot-tall, fully reusable system that can ferry about 100 people and more than 100 tons of cargo at a time to Mars.

Starhopper, meanwhile, stands more than 60 feet tall and about 30 feet wide, has three landing legs, and is made out of stainless steel. It uses one Raptor rocket engine; a full-scale Starship headed for deep space could use more than 40.

Read more: How SpaceX's new Starship launch system compares to NASA's towering moon rockets

Musk's eventual goal is for Starship to be capable of launching and landing many times with little to no refurbishment required. This, he says, may reduce launch costs by 100- to 1,000-fold compared to traditional, single-use rockets.

"Full and rapid reusability is the holy grail of access to space and is a fundamental step towards it, without which we cannot become a multi-planet species," Musk recently told Time's Jeffrey Kluger in an interview for CBS Sunday Morning. "We cannot have a base on the moon, we cannot have a city on Mars without full and rapid reusability."

But getting to that stage will likely require years of testing, and Wednesday's launch was a crucial first step.

A hard-won hop-and-hover flight

SpaceX's Starhopper rocket ship prototype sits on a launch pad in south Texas in July 2019.SpaceX via dearMoon

SpaceX began constructing Starhopper near Boca Chica Village, Texas around November 2018. Musk showed off the vehicle in January, and then SpaceX launched it on its first "hops" (as Musk calls them) in early April.

Those initial tests anchored the rocket ship to the ground via huge chains on its legs, so Starhopper lifted no more than a few feet into the air.

On Wednesday, there was a failed launch attempt around 8:32 p.m. ET (7:32 p.m. CT). Just seconds after ignition, the vehicle's engine abruptly shut down. The launch on Thursday, however, was deemed a success.

"It appears as though we have had an abort on today's test," Kate Tice, certification engineer at SpaceX, said during a live broadcast. "As you can see there, the vehicle did not lift off."

But SpaceX rallied and tried again on Thursday.

Amid a blast of sand and rocket-engine exhaust, Starhopper flew about about 65 feet (20 meters) into the air at around 11:45 p.m. ET (10:45 p.m. CT). It then hovered for a moment, traversed sideways, and touched down on a concrete landing pad a few hundred feet away.

The whole flight lasted roughly 20 seconds and appeared to be successful, based on a flight plan that Muk described earlier this month.

The videos below, from a live broadcast recorded by Tim Dodd, who runs the Everyday Astronaut channel on YouTube and LabPadre, run by a group of locals, shows the entire launch from start to finish.

Thursday's flight showed that SpaceX has successfully developed a new rocket engine capable of powering, maneuvering, and landing a large spaceship. Critically, the engine burned liquid methane, which makes up most natural gas on Earth and is also a fuel Musk hopes to manufacture on Mars.

What's in store for Starhopper and Starship

SpaceX's current government license permits the company to launch experimental vehicles like Starhopper on flights lasting no more than six minutes and up to a maximum altitude of 3.1 miles (5 kilometers).

However, the company is now building a roughly 180-foot-tall (55-meter-tall) prototype, called Starship Mark 1, which Musk says could fly from Texas or Florida in two to three months and reach orbit by the end of the year.

A comparison of SpaceX and NASA rocket systems. Yutong Yuan/Samantha Lee/Business Insider

Musk tweeted in March that SpaceX is "working on regulatory approval" for orbital flights of those prototypes, which will have three Raptor engines each instead of one.

SpaceX plans to launch a full-scale Starship before the end of 2020. Then sometime in 2021, Musk says, the company may trying landing a full-scale, uncrewed Starship on the moon (perhaps as a bold demonstration to NASA).

Around 2023, SpaceX plans to launch Starship's first human passengers, a Japanese billionaire and his hand-picked crew of artists, on a voyage around the moon.

An illustration of SpaceX's Starship vehicle on the surface of the moon, with Earth in the distance.Elon Musk/SpaceX via Twitter

SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell has reportedly said the company hopes to send its first uncrewed payloads to Mars by 2024. Following that, perhaps in 2026, SpaceX may try to put boots on the red planet.

During the groundbreaking ceremony for the Boca Chica launch site in September 2014, Musk said, "it could very well be that the first person that departs for another planet could depart from this location."

SoftBank has closed $108 billion for its second Vision Fund — a mega-sized fund that the Japanese giant intends to invest in startups.

Confirming previous reports, the Japanese telecom giant's Vision Fund II counts Apple, Foxconn, and Microsoft as backers from the tech industry, in addition to several international banking partners.

SoftBank's first Vision Fund backed some of the biggest names in tech, including Uber, Slack, and soon-to-be-public WeWork. Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son personally led the $100 billion first fund since its launch in 2017.

According to the release, Mizuho Bank, Sumitomo Mitsui, MUFG Bank, Dai-ichi, Sumitomo Mitsui Trust, SMBC Nikko, Daiwa, National Investment Corporation of National Bank of Kazakhstan, and Standard Chartered Bank are among the banking partners expected to back this new fund.

Read More: SoftBank wants Microsoft to invest in its next VisionFund, and it offered to encourage its startups to ditch Amazon's cloud for Azure

SoftBank itself will also commit $38 billion to the second fund, less than the expected $40 billion that was previously expected.

Goldman Sachs and Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, a sovereign wealth fund, were both backers of SoftBank's first Vision Fund, but were not listed as confirmed backers for Vision Fund II. However, the release only includes companies that have signed on to the fund, and does not exclude others from joining the fund at a later date.

Previous reports indicated that SoftBank was negotiating a deal with Microsoft that included promoting its cloud service Azure over Amazon's Web Services for its portfolio. It's not clear if the finalized deal includes such a provision.

Former Unity Technology VP files lawsuit alleging CEO sexually harassed her

SpaceX is about to launch a stubby steel rocket ship called the Starhopper above the southern tip of Texas.

An attempt this evening would be SpaceX's second in as many days, following a try on Wednesday that engineers cut short right after ignition of Starhopper's single rocket engine.

To make sure everyone can follow SpaceX's flights in Boca Chica, Texas, a group of local residents plans to broadcast the attempt live on YouTube. SpaceX may also post its own live-streaming video closer to the time of the test. (We've embedded video players toward the end of this post and will update them as needed.)

The rocket ship is called Starhopper, and it stands more than 60 feet tall and 30 feet wide. A single Raptor rocket engine is attached to its base, and SpaceX test-fired that engine on July 16. The test was successful, even though it resulted in a big yet brief fireball.

On Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration also issued a flight restriction for airspace over SpaceX's launch pad to "provide a safe environment for rocket launch and recovery."

Road closures for the area outline SpaceX's flight window, and the most recent notices suggest the company will attempt a launch on Thursday between 3 p.m. to 1 a.m. ET (2 p.m. to 1 a.m. CT).

SpaceX will use that protected space to fly the Starhopper vehicle about 65 feet (20 meters) into the air, hover, move sideways, and land back on its launchpad near Boca Chica Beach, according to a tweet from founder Elon Musk.

Read more: Elon Musk's SpaceX is developing giant Mars rockets in a sleepy town in southern Texas. Here's what it's like to visit.

Starhopper isn't designed to fly to orbit; rather, it's designed to test technology for a far larger and more powerful launch vehicle called Starship. That system could stand nearly 400 feet tall and be capable of sending about 100 people and more than 100 tons of cargo to Mars or the moon.

An illustration of SpaceX's upcoming Starship spaceship (left), Super Heavy rocket booster (right), and an integrated Starship-Super Heavy launch system (center).© Kimi TalvitieThe launch system is also being designed for full reusability, which may vastly reduce the cost of accessing space. Other versions could be built to deploy hundreds of satellites at a time or rocket paying passengers halfway around the world in about half an hour.

SpaceX fired up Starhopper for the first time in April. That test secured the rocket ship with giant bike-chain-like tethers on its legs, and the vehicle lifted just a few inches off the ground. A subsequent test lifted it farther, but not by much. This week's test will launch the rocket ship completely untethered.

A SpaceX spokesperson told Business Insider in an email that the hop-and-hover test is "one in a series of tests designed to push the limits of the vehicle as quickly as possible to learn all we can, as fast as we safely can."

The launch is not guaranteed to happen, or even go well, though: "As with all development programs, the schedule can be quite dynamic and subject to change," the spokesperson said.

When a Twitter user asked Musk if there would be livestreaming video of the launch, Musk said "sure." On Wednesday night, SpaceX shared a broadcast recorded from an aerial drone.

The company is likely to follow through again (we'll update this story if it does), but in any case a group of locals has also set up a moderated live feed of Starhopper's launch site.

Watch Starhopper's biggest hop attempt yet on YouTube

Maria Pointer, who lives near SpaceX's Texas launch site, said she teamed up with fellow local Louis Balderas to create the two-camera broadcast below, which runs nearly 24 hours a day.

The LabPadre video feed has one camera that can rotate 360 degrees and is on the Pointers' property; it shows the launchpad from about 1.8 miles away (though it has a powerful zoom). The second camera is on top of a building in South Padre Island, nearly 6 miles away from SpaceX's launchpad.

Pointer told Business Insider that the feed's slogan was "showing the valley to the future" because "kids in Brownsville need to see what's going on" at SpaceX's launch site.

The cameras often switch between views, show live weather and launchpad conditions, and display other information.

As another option, Tim Dodd, who runs the Everyday Astronaut channel on YouTube, is also live-streaming a view of the launch site (below).

Both feeds showed Starhopper's test-firing and subsequent fireball last week. Musk said the flames were caused by methane fuel that leaked.

But because Starhopper is made of a rugged stainless steel similar to the kind used in pots and pans, the accident caused "no major damage," he said.

"Big advantage of being made of high strength stainless steel: not bothered by a little heat!" Musk added.

What time SpaceX may try again to launch Starhopper

If the activities and timeline of Wednesday's attempt are any indication, SpaceX will likely try again to fly Starhopper sometime after 6:02 p.m. ET. That's when the company is supposed to launch an uncrewed cargo spaceship for NASA from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Called Commercial Resupply Services-18 (CRS-18), the rocket was supposed to lift off on Wednesday, too, though 1,000 miles away in Florida. Poor weather conditions foiled that launch attempt, so now SpaceX will try again today to launch that mission.

Since tracking antennas for CRS-18 are located in Boca Chica, Texas, SpaceX will likely focus its resources on that mission first — then get back to Starhopper's test flight an hour or two after a liftoff or scrub.

This story has been updated with new information. It was originally published on July 16, 2019.

Intel is essentially giving its technology away in selling its failing smartphone modem chip business to Apple for $1 billion, but the chip giant had no choice in order to get rid of a thorn in its side, analysts say.

"At $1 billion, they are basically giving the IP away," Bernstein Research analyst Stacy Rasgon told Business Insider. Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives echoed this view in a note to clients: "The $1 billion is below the 'few billions' that were initially contemplated."

Under the agreement, Apple will acquire the majority of Intel's smartphone modem business. About 2,200 Intel employees will join Apple, as well as intellectual property, equipment and leases. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year.

Analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group said Intel found itself in a a "horrid bargaining position," against Apple, at a time when the chip giant is also struggling to regain its footing in other key arenas, particularly the data center market.

The big problem: Intel's smartphone modems simply weren't seen as being on the same par as those from Qualcomm and other smartphone component manufacturers. A lack of customers led to a big drag on the business, with Intel finally deciding to cut its losses and get out of the business earlier this year.

Ives said Intel's smartphone modem chip business "was at one point losing roughly $1 billion annually."

So when Apple came calling, Intel likely felt forced to enter into a deal — even if the price was lower than what executives and analysts alike were looking for. Still, the short-term frustration of taking a suboptimal deal may fade with the freedom that comes with removing this metaphorical albatross from around its neck.

"Intel's probably happy just to get out of it," Ragson said.

'No clear path to profitability'

The sale ends months of speculation on the future of that business after Intel surprised the tech world in April with word that it was getting out of the 5G smartphone-modem business. "It has become apparent that there is no clear path to profitability and positive returns," Intel CEO Bob Swan said then.

It was a stunning move from a dominant player in the chip industry, which is also known as a major technology powerhouse.

The announcement also turned the spotlight on Swan's background. He took over as full-time CEO only in January after serving as interim chief after the sudden departure of ex-CEO Brian Krzanich last year. Unlike most of Intel's past CEOs, Swan, who used to be Intel's chief financial officer, has a background is in finance, not technology.

However, some analysts have noted that Intel's problems emerged long before Swan took over, which caused the chip giant to fall behind in an important market, as it struggled to adapt to a changing tech landscape.

With the PC market shrinking, Intel has focused more on the more lucrative datacenter market. But it has recently wrestled with a slump in that market. Intel also has struggled with production issues and stiffer competition from rivals AMD and Nvidia. The sudden leadership change also didn't help.

"Intel is digging itself out of the hole … and this is part of that process," Enderle told Business Insider. "Now that Intel really doesn't have an interest in this space it makes sense to sell it."

Savings from the sale

And Apple was widely seen by analysts as the logical buyer. Buying the Intel business is key to Apple's 5G strategy, Ives said: "This a clear 'doubling down" on 5G which remains at the centerpiece of the company's smartphone future with these chip assets giving Apple further control over its supply chain and core chip design."

For Intel, the sale could give make it more profitable in 2020, Ives added.

In fact, on a call with analysts on Thursday, Intel also said it expects even bigger savings from the transaction. "We are now expecting 2019 savings from our modem exit to rise to approximately $400 to $500 million dollars from our earlier estimates of $200 to $300M dollars," Chief Financial Officer George Davis said.

Still, despite the bargain price, "Intel will be stronger after this is done and from their perspective, that'll be a good thing," Enderle said.

Got a tip about Intel, Apple or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., message him on Twitter@benpimentel. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

The Amazon Web Services cloud business continues to be a major source of growth, as its revenue jumped up 37% from this time last year — Amazon announced on Thursday that AWS did $8.38 billion in its most recent quarter, up from $6.1 billion a year ago.

That's impressive, but there are reasons for AWS to hold off on popping the champagne: Not only did that revenue figure miss Wall Street targets of $8.5 billion, but it's also the lowest quarterly growth rate that AWS has shown in more than 5 years.

That being said, Amazon senior vice president and CFO Brian Olsavsky said on the earnings call that AWS saw a year-over-year growth in run rate from $24 billion to $33 billion. He says that $9 billion increase is second only to the fourth quarter of last year in Amazon's history.

"We're seeing a pick up from customers and their usage, their increased pace of enterprise migration, increased adoption of our services, especially our machine learning services," Olsavsky said on the call. "And continually, again, AWS is being chosen as a partner to many companies because of our leadership position both in technology, our vibrant partner ecosystem and also the stronger security that we offer."

The previous quarter, AWS jumped 42% year-over-year in net sales, which was itself down from 45% in the quarter before. That makes this the second quarter in a row where AWS saw a slowdown in sales growth. Since the first quarter of 2017, AWS had grown at an annual clip of between 40 and 50%. This was the first quarter since at least 2013 that AWS grew at an annual rate of less than 40%.

It's not immediately clear what caused this relative slowdown, but it's entirely possible that it's simply because AWS, which leads the cloud computing market, is so big that it's hard to keep up that pace of aggressive growth.

Still, AWS comprised of more than two-thirds of the company's operating income in the quarter, reflecting the massive size of the business.

Overall, Amazon's profit this quarter and projected operating income for next quarter was shy of Wall Street's expectations.

Read more: Amazon's Q2 misses on the bottom line, and it warned its profit will disappoint again in Q3

In comparison, Google Cloud announced Thursday that it was on an $8 billion annual revenue run rate, a measure of the revenue it expects to generate over the next year if current conditions hold steady.

For its part, Microsoft said at its own earnings last week that its cloud Azure grew 64% from the previous year, although it did not break out specific revenue numbers. However, it did say that its Commercial Cloud revenue, which cuts across product likes like Office 365 and the Azure cloud, was $11 billion in its most recent quarter.

Campaign workers for the 2020 US presidential hopefuls are expensing plenty of Uber and Lyft rides as their bosses canvass the company in hopes of securing the Democratic nomination for commander-in-chief.

In total, the leading 20 candidates have spent $87,631 on the two main ride-hailing services this year, according to spending data from the Federal Election Commission analyzed by Business Insider.

California Sen. Kamala Harris's campaign handily outspent the rest of the pack, expensing 81 Uber and 73 Lyft rides in the first six months of 2019, totaling $8,835 and $5,873, respectively.

Campaigns are averaging about $4,800 each on the apps, with the front-runners all spending near $10,000 for rides in the filing period.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who was been outspoken in her support of a driver strike in March, had the third-most Uber and Lyft expenses, the data shows, with Andrew Yang only slightly ahead.

Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke and billionaire activist Tim Steyer notably had no expenses reported for Uber or Lyft rides. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, meanwhile, spent just $921 on Lyft rides, and nothing with Uber.

It's important to remember that many candidates did not kick off their campaigns until the second quarter was already well underway, and so many amounts could rise quickly when the candidates file their third-quarter reports in August.

Here's how the candidates rank, without those who haven't filed any disbursements to Uber and Lyft:

Recent reports have suggested that YouTube's dominance in internet video is eroding, but Google leadership quashed those claims during parent company Alphabet's second-quarter earnings on Thursday.

The company stuck to its convention and didn't break out YouTube's revenues separately, but said that regulatory and advertiser scrutiny had not affected YouTube's earnings.

"YouTube revenue growth was strong in the first quarter, and again strong here in the second quarter," Google parent Alphabet's CFO Ruth Porat said during the company's earnings call. She said the video giant was the second largest driver of revenue growth across Alphabet.

Alphabet exceeded analyst expectations, reporting total revenues of $38.9 billion, up 19% year-on-year, driven by mobile search, YouTube and Cloud.

YouTube has come under fire from advertisers whose ads have repeatedly ended up next to unsavory content. It is also facing regulatory scrutiny, with the Justice Department opening up an investigation into Google's market power and the Federal Trade Commission reportedly considering asking YouTube to disable ads against kids content, Axios reported.

Google's core advertising business also bounced back. After a bad miss in the previous quarter, ad revenue grew over 16% from the same period the year prior, beating analysts' predictions of just over 15% growth. Porat attributed that to direct-reponse advertising becoming more key in recent quarters.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai also said that YouTube continues to be an important investment, having seen strong growth in several areas.

He said that creators were continuing to flock to YouTube, and that channels with more than 1 million subscribers had grown by 75% year on year. He also pointed out new monetization products like SuperChat, Channel Memberships and Merch, which he said had allowed "thousands of channels" to double their total monthly revenue.

He also said YouTube was building momentum with its subscription services — YouTube Music and YouTube Premium — which are now available in over 60 countries, up from five markets at the start of 2018.

Microsoft is a bona-fide cloud computing giant these days.

While it is still considered the second-place player in terms of market share against leader Amazon Web Services, most large companies today are using more than one cloud provider.

And when they do, the most common combination is AWS and Azure (although, as we previously reported, the distant number-three Google Cloud is just starting to show up in that mix a bit).

Read: There's a growing list of signs that new CEO Thomas Kurian is starting to make Google Cloud more successful with big companies

Microsoft is particularly winning business from its own enormous cadre of enterprise customers — the companies that already use its Office software, Windows Server, databases, Active Directory or other popular products designed for corporations and other large entities, according to market research giant Gartner.

The company is doing a good job convincing its customers to move their Microsoft-related IT apps and data to Microsoft's cloud, and once there getting customers to try more of its cloud services.

Gartner particularly praises Microsoft for its Internet of Things (IoT) cloud, where the data from sensors embedded on lots of devices can be tracked and analyzed. And Gartner applauds Microsoft Azure for its open arms towards partners, even those that have historically been competitors. Azure has brought in Red Hat, VMware, NetApp, Cray Computer, and a lot of open source software to its cloud.

But Gartner has dinged Microsoft Azure's overall standing in the market this year. While it's still ranked as the number-two player, the market researcher has downgraded Microsoft as farther behind AWS this year than last.

The downtime problem

Top among Gartner's criticisms is too much downtime.

"Microsoft Azure's reliability issues continue to be a challenge for customers, largely as a result of Azure's growing pains. Since September 2018, Azure has had multiple service-impacting incidents, including significant outages involving Azure Active Directory. The nature of many of these outages is such that customers had no controls in order to mitigate the downtime," the report says.

Read more: Market researcher Gartner has 3 warnings for Amazon cloud customers: Beware of prices, new features, and Amazon's competitive behavior

For instance, in May, Azure had a global outage that lasted nearly two hours. In February, Microsoft accidentally deleted some database records as part of a mass outage. It later restored nearly all the deleted records.

Azure's reputation for outages has grown so serious that earlier this month, a top Microsoft exec publicly promised changes in the engineering team to improve the situation. He also apologized for three big outages that occurred since September, including the one in May.

More expensive than anticipated

But Gartner has found another interesting problem, with some Azure customers complaining about cloud projects that take too long to implement and run over-budget. This is intriguing because cloud computing has historically been hailed as the faster, less expensive alternative than classic IT, where companies buy the software and hardware and hire consultants to help them with custom coding and installation.

(Those classic enormous projects were renowned for running past deadlines and budgets and generating their fare share of lawsuits by frustrated customers.)

Gartner points fingers as Microsoft's overzealous Azure sales teams, who are creating "unreasonably high expectations for customers."

The market researcher says this has downstream consequences because customers "frequently lament the quality of Microsoft technical support." They also aren't happy when their costs for technical support increase. Ergo, "this negatively impacts customer satisfaction, and slows Azure adoption and therefore customer spending," Gartner says.

Now read: Microsoft chairman John Thompson explains why CEO Satya Nadella is poised to win the cloud wars

Despite these growing pains and the kick in the shin from Gartner, there are a lot of indications that Microsoft Azure is queued up for a big growth spurt.

As we previously reported, a lot of Microsoft's customers are being force to give up old versions of Windows, as well as old versions of its database, as support for these software products end. And Microsoft's salesforce and partners will be offering good deals to jump to the Azure as part their upgrade.

That's all good news for Microsoft, especially given that Azure growth is showing signs of decelerating— though that may just be a function of maturity, and experts don't seem especially worried about it.

A Microsoft spokesperson tells us, "While Gartner continues to recognize Azure as a leader in the IaaS market, we believe our execution capabilities exceed Gartner's current assessment. Azure continues to invest in adding new features, functionality, and services to help our customers make the most of their digital transformation. We're making tremendous progress in even further increasing the reliability of our platform."

Image via Getty Images / Andrey Suslov

In 2003, Garmin produced the first wrist-worn GPS unit designed specifically for runners: the Forerunner 101. Dozens of technological generations and improved models later, the very latest watch with Garmin's running technology is the Forerunner 935.

We had competitive distance runner Ted Westbrook put the Forerunner 935 and Running Dynamics Pod to the test. Starting with the Forerunner 205, Ted has over a dozen years of experience using GPS running watches to reach his mileage goals and keep him within his goal paces.

After three months and more than 1,000 miles of running — both in training and in races — Ted told us that the Forerunner 935 is "far and away the best training tool I have ever used." Below, we will take a closer at Ted's experiences with this excellent device.

Specs

The Forerunner 935 is a mid-sized watch for the average man and a large watch for the average woman. It is, however, lightweight (49 grams), comfortable to wear, and absolutely packed with technology. The band, which is made of a slightly stretchy rubberized plastic, is an improvement in comfort over its predecessor, the 920XT. It also looks nice in the dark gray color. The face is protected by tempered glass that is very scratch-resistant — another substantial improvement over the 920XT. The watch has an incredible battery life of up to 24 hours with GPS enabled.

In addition to providing real-time feedback like pace and distance, the 935 can do a host of other things. Integrated into the back of the watch is an optical heart rate monitor that works remarkably well and very quickly, allowing you to glance down and get a useful indication of how hard you are working. Many runners can benefit from setting target heart rates, particularly for easy-effort runs where the goal is active recovery and not to over-stress the body.

Garmin

The 935 is also waterproof to 5 ATM and has a mode entirely devoted to swimming. The watch will even keep stroke counts. The watch is also great as a cycling computer, with devoted outdoor and indoor cycling modes and the ability to connect to ANT+ bike speed and cadence modules. There is even a dedicated triathlon mode that tracks each leg, providing custom information for each sport, along with transition times.

There is a built-in barometric altimeter to provide irrefutable scientific confirmation that your last run was hillier and more extreme than your friend's last run, or that your combined elevation gains for the last year would get you to the International Space Station (unlike your Florida-based flatlander friends).

Set-up process

Setting up the Forerunner 935 was easy and fast. The Garmin Connect app walks you through the setup, and the settings are imported to the watch through Bluetooth. You can count on it taking you five minutes or less to get up and running, longer if you need to download the Connect app and set up an account.

Special features

You can connect the Running Dynamics Pod sensor to your Forerunner to get more data on your running form. Amazon

The Garmin Forerunner 935 collects and displays data. Generally, while running, you'll want it to show three or four different parameters at a time so each is readable. For instance, you might want lap pace, distance, and heart rate on one page. The 935 allows great customization so that you can move your chosen parameters to where you want to see them and add or remove data screens.

Ted loved this functionality: "I have one screen that I use most of the time and a second that is available at the push of a button for data that is more specific to running interval workouts, like lap time and lap distance. Customization is easy and intuitive."

Accessories can push the 935's limits further. Add the Running Dynamics Pod, which is a tiny sensor that attaches to the back of one's shorts, and the watch provides data like vertical oscillation (how high you're bouncing between steps), ground contact time, and left-to-right ground contact time balance. With the addition of a downloadable app, the Pod also allows the unit to display the newest single metric being used by coaches: power in watts. All of these can be used to help fine-tune your running form for better efficiency.

Whether on an indoor track, treadmill, or running at breakneck pace through the Mall of America, the watch maintains solid functionality indoors, through indoor running modes that use the watch's precise accelerometers to estimate pace and distance. While generally less accurate than GPS is outdoors, Ted confirmed on indoor tracks that the non-GPS mode still gives data that is accurate to within 2-3%, which is remarkably good.

Read more: The best fitness trackers you can buy

Many of the 935's advanced features are more accessible post-run through the Garmin Connect system, which is available as a mobile device app and a web interface. This is where the 935 is unique. It allows a serious runner to truly geek out on data analytics while enjoying a post-run beer in the supine position.

The 935 takes heart rate, pace, and distance data and makes magic with it. Armed with information about your height, weight, age, sex, maximum heart rate, and the exercise data it collected, it can estimate your VO2max and lactate threshold — the two most important metrics of running fitness and potential. It can also tell you how stressful your run was for your anaerobic and aerobic systems on scales of 0 to 5.

Taking data over time into account, the 935 and Garmin Connect can give indications of whether your training overall is productive or unproductive through the Training Status feature.

Cons to consider

Garmin/Facebook

Many, if not all, of the advanced training functions of the 935 and Garmin Connect rely on assumptions and formulae that aren't always going to produce accurate results. At one point, the Race Predictor feature of the 935, relying on calculations of VO2max from Ted's running and personal data, predicted that he could run a marathon in two hours and 28 minutes. Ted told us, "This was flattering but about 7% faster than reality." VO2max can only truly be measured in a lab environment.

By the same token, even the formulae are subject to user-induced error. For example, it is important to have accurate weight data. Ted shared with us a recent experience where the watch told him that his lactate threshold pace had worsened by a few seconds per mile after a moderate run while pushing his baby daughter in a running stroller on hilly terrain. "The watch just can't correct for that added effort," Ted said. "It can only assume you're having a bad day or are getting old, which I am not."

With all of the advanced data available — that's potentially most useful for high-mileage competitive distance runners who are out on the pavement or track every day — it's fair to question whether a new or occasional runner should go for a lower-shelf model than the $499.99 Forerunner 935.

While the answer could depend on one's budget and just how much of a runner they want to be, new runners are likely to appreciate just how well the 935 does the basics of near-instant GPS acquisition, pace, distance, and heart rate, and the more advanced data analytics would still be there when the runner wants them. A beginner isn't going to outgrow the 935, and the basics are intuitive enough in use that they won't intimidate anyone who is used to dealing with smartphones. The 935 is an investment that pays dividends in fitness motivation and hardcore data.

The bottom line

Overall, caveats notwithstanding, the 935 is the running geek's dream come true. It works in competition and training, plus it gives a huge array of analytics to inform your training approach. We asked Ted if he would continue to use the 935 once done testing it. He said, "Most certainly. And, I would buy another if this one got lost."

Pros: Long battery life, waterproof, durable glass face, built-in barometer and thermometer, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections, and the ability to measure more metrics than we can list here

Cons: Expensive, reduced GPS accuracy when running on a track, built-in thermometer only measures temperature right above your skin

Buy the Garmin Forerunner 935 Running GPS Watch on Amazon for $494

Buy the Garmin Forerunner 935 Running GPS Watch on Garmin for $499.99

Buy the Garmin Running Dynamics Pod on Amazon for $68.50

Buy the Garmin Bike Speed Sensor and Cadence Sensor $59

Marketers may increasingly see Amazon as a threat to the duopoly of Facebook and Google, but Amazon's growth rate is slowing down.

Amazon reported $3 billion in "other" revenue during the second quarter of 2019, which is primarily advertising, a 37% year-over-year increase. To compare, Amazon's growth rate during the second quarter of 2018 was 64%.

Amazon's ad growth has slowly dropped over the past year. Amazon made $2.7 billion in ad revenue in the first quarter, a 34% year-over-year increase. In the fourth quarter of 2018, Amazon made $3.4 billion, a 97% year-over-year gain.

An Amazon spokesperson said the wide gap in ad growth rates from last year to this year stems from an accounting change that Amazon rolled out last year, resulting in a one-time boost. After adjusting for the accounting change, Amazon's fourth quarter growth rate was 38%.

According to eMarketer, Amazon's ad business is expected to make $11.33 billion this year, up from $10 billion last year. That still trails Facebook, which reported $16.6 billion in ad revenue during the second quarter alone, and Google's parent company Alphabet, which reported $32.6 billion in the same period.

Amazon's ad business is comprised of ad formats including sponsored products and sponsored brands on Amazon's website and a programmatic arm that places display ads on publishers' sites and Amazon's video properties. Amazon doesn't break out revenue by ad format, but new research from Merkle suggests that most of its ad revenue is going towards a sponsored products format that displays an image of a product in search results or on product pages.

Read more: Inside Amazon's growing ad business: Everything we know about how the e-commerce giant is making inroads with marketers

Merkle reported that 86% of clients' spend on Amazon's non-display inventory went towards sponsored brands in the second quarter, up 12% year-over-year.

There are signs that Amazon is building its programmatic advertising arm. In May, the e-commerce giant agreed to acquire Sizmek's ad server and Dynamic Creative Optimization tools to compete with Google in ad-tech. Amazon is also hiring for a "stealth advertising" engineering team that's aimed at programmatic advertising for gaming.

During the earnings call, head of investor relations, Dave Fildes, suggested that Sizmek's business and clients will stay the same under Amazon's ownership.

"Customers are going to be able to use those proven products and services," he said. "We're looking forward to working with that team."

Amazon also is spending more on its own advertising, spending $8 billion in the first half of the year, up from $5.6 billion in the year-ago period.

A lot of that went into promoting its annual Prime Day, according to research firm Kantar and ads-tracking firm MediaRadar.

Read more: Amazon is pumping money into Google to promote Prime Day, and it could be a brilliant way to also boost Amazon's own ad business

According to Kantar, Amazon spent $13.2 million on TV ads from July 1 to 16, incuding $8.1 million to promote Prime Day. The company spent another $5.9 billion on digital advertising that promoted Prime Day.

MediaRadar found that Amazon's ad spending rose 28% year over year in the second quarter.

Google Cloud reached an annual revenue run rate of over $8 billion, Google announced Thursday after announcing its quarterly earnings. Annual run rate is a measure of how much revenue the business will generate in the next year, assuming that everything about the business stays the same.

The Google Cloud business includes Google Cloud Platform, its rival to the market-leading Amazon Web Services, and G Suite, which competes with Microsoft Office. This $8 billion run rate figure is the first hint we've gotten about Google Cloud revenue since February of 2018, when Google said it was a $1 billion-per-quarter business.

On the earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai also reinforced Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's previously announced plan to increase Google Cloud's sales and go-to-market strategy by taking pages from the book of Oracle, Kurian's previous employer.

"We continue to build our world class Cloud team to help support our customers and expand the business, and are looking to triple our salesforce over the next few years," Pichai said on the call.

Read more: The new CEO of Google Cloud explains the updated master plan for taking on Amazon Web Services

Pichai said on the earnings call that customers are turning to Google Cloud because of its reliability and uptime, flexibility, data management and analytics features, and artificial intelligence.

Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat said on the earnings call that Google Cloud was the company's third largest driver of revenue growth for Alphabet overall — behind search ads and YouTube — and it was the largest driver within its Other Revenues segment.

Alphabet beat Wall Street's expectations on Thursday with a net revenue of $31.7 billion, and after the bell, its stock rose 8%.

Just April, Google Cloud announced Anthos, which allows customers to run their applications and data not only on Google Cloud, but also private data centers and even rival clouds. Google also recently built three new data centers and launched a cloud region in Japan. It plans to build an additional cloud region in Las Vegas.

Diving deep into Africa’s blossoming tech scene

Master & Dynamic has been one of the most interesting headphone companies over the past few years. Its headphones are beautifully designed, sound great, and offer a ton of features. However, the company's headphones are quite expensive. Luckily, Master & Dynamic's MW60 wireless over-ear headphones are on sale for $170 off at Best Buy and $150 off at Amazon.

The Master & Dynamic MW60 headphones have a lot going for them. They have a classic over-ear design, with subtle silver accents and leather earcups. The silver and black leather pair is the only one that's $170 off at Best Buy — the other colors are only about $10 off.

On Amazon, every colorway is on sale, but the discount is only $150 off. However, if you want a different color, the extra $20 might be worth it to you.

Design aside, these headphones sound awesome. The headphones have a nice, rounded bass, along with well-tuned mids that offer plenty of warmth, and a ton of detail and clarity in the high-end. If you're a music lover, these headphones are a great choice.

Between their awesome design and excellent sound, these are easily some of our favorite wireless headphones. At this price, they're an even better buy than normal, and they're much more accessible.

Get the black and silver Master & Dynamic MW60 headphones at Best Buy, $279.98 (originally $449.98) [You save $170]

Get any color of Master & Dynamic MW60 headphones on Amazon, $399 (originally $549) [You save $150]

Zipping is one of the oldest, most commonly used methods for compressing files. It's used to save space and transmit them more quickly.

In fact, it's so common that zip compression and decompression is built into Windows. Here is how to zip files, plus two methods for unzipping them.

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

Windows 10 Home (From $129.99 on Amazon)

How to zip files in Windows 10

1. Put all the files you want to zip in the same location, such as the same folder.

2. Select all the files. An easy way to do this is to drag a selection box around them with the mouse pointer.

3. Right-click one of the selected files.

4. In the drop-down menu, choose "Send to" and then click "Compressed (zipped) folder."

To zip one or more files, right click and choose "Send to… Compressed (zipped) folder." Dave Johnson/Business Insider

5. A new zip file will appear in the same folder. You can identify a zip file visually because the icon has a zipper on it.

How to unzip files in Windows 10 with drag-and-drop

1. Double-click the zip file you want to unzip. You can identify a zip file visually because the icon has a zipper on it.

You can identify a zip file by its signature zipper. Dave Johnson/Business Insider

2. The zip file will open a folder, showing you the individual files inside.

3. Select all the files, or just the ones you want to use, and drag them out of the folder to another location on your computer. You can drag them into a folder or place them on the desktop.

To unzip files, drag them out of the zip folder. Dave Johnson/Business Insider

The files have now been unzipped and can be used normally. You can now delete the zip file, if there's nothing left in there that you want.

How to unzip files in Windows 10 with the zip wizard

1. Right-click the zip file. In the drop-down menu, click "Extract All…" The zip wizard will appear.

Right click the zip file to open the zip wizard. Dave Johnson/Business Insider

2. If you want to unzip the files to a different folder, click "Browse…" and choose a location.

3. Click "Extract" and the files will be unzipped and copied to the folder indicated.

You can unzip files with one click after launching the wizard. Dave Johnson/Business Insider