*By Conor White*
After losing $136 billion in market cap in less than a week, Facebook is looking for ways to reinvigorate its outlook at a time of slowing ad revenue growth, [continued fallout](https://cheddar.com/videos/facebook-stock-crushed-after-disappointing-earnings) from the Cambridge Analytical data privacy scandal, and the [latest revelation](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/us/politics/facebook-political-campaign-midterms.html) Tuesday that it's detected attempts to influence this November's midterm elections.
"It's been a long 2018 for Facebook," said Madison Malone Kircher, an associate editor at New York Magazine. "Which brings us to the one thing Facebook is doing right, and that's the Stories platform. It works really well on Instagram, which Facebook owns, and they've really been trying to push to make it work on Facebook."
Instagram Stories has 400 million daily users, double the number of users of rival Snapchat, and Facebook has been trying to lure advertisers to the Stories platform.
Kircher said in an interview Tuesday with Cheddar that neither of the social media companies has figured out how to make user-generated stories on their platforms profitable.
"Snapchat, which is the creator of this style of posting, has also struggled with it," Kircher said. "They rolled out a new platform called 'Commercials' this week, which is similarly trying to figure out how to sell ads against this style of content."
In the end, Kircher said Facebook can push Stories to advertisers all it wants, but it won't be successful until it's popular with users.
"It's a two-fold problem Facebook has," Kircher said. "One, trying to convince advertisers to buy ads in this space, but first they have to figure out how to get us to use it."
For more on this story, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/facebook-pushing-stories-feature-to-advertisers).
Mark Zuckerberg has both a champion and a critic in Roger McNamee.For some of the formative years in the Facebook CEO's early career, the famed investor served as a mentor. For the past few, McNamee has been a thorn in Zuckerberg’s side. McNamee has said he’s spoken out so strongly against Facebook because he feels "guilty" about the monster he helped to create, and wants to do everything he can to tame it. But he has never called for him to step down. Through McNamee's rose-tinted glasses, with the right mix of moral decision-making and regulation, Facebook can and will finish on the right side of history.
IBM in partnership with its subsidiary, The Weather Company, is using artificial intelligence and predictive technology to mitigate power outages during extreme weather conditions. But Weather Company CEO Cameron Clayton says the technology could have major implications for utilities companies that are struggling to keep up with increasingly unpredictable weather.
About half of U.S. gamers are women, but you wouldn't necessarily know it by looking at hardware design. Vivian Lien, chief marketing officer at ASUS North America, joined Cheddar Friday to discuss how her company is trying to make gaming more welcoming for women.
Snap Inc. laid off five employees from its research group this week, according to people familiar with the matter. The five employees were part of a team led by Bobby Murphy, Snap's co-founder, chief technology officer, and second largest individual shareholder.
It's not fitness. It's life. Such is the motto of wellness brand Equinox ー which is taking that commitment to the next level with "Cycle for Survival." "At Equinox, we are a 'do good' company. We're about high-performance living and we felt that this was a cause we wanted to get involved in, " Scott Rosen, president of Equinox, told Cheddar.
Abra's new investment features that allow users to invest their Bitcoin in traditional stocks and ETFs are the latest step forward for the crypto wallet and exchange to become a global crypto bank, CEO Bill Barhydt told Cheddar Thursday.
TikTok, the Chinese-owned company that has quickly become one of the hottest apps in North America, has hired a veteran YouTube executive named Vanessa Pappas to oversee its U.S. operations. TikTik parent company ByteDance is the most valuable private company in the world.
By all accounts, 2018’s North American Bitcoin Conference was packed. The bull market attracted more than 4,000 zealous attendees to Miami to hear the Bitcoin gospel. That January, the term “Bitcoin Billionaire” was widespread, and a tide of scheming hustlers and buttoned up institutions had infiltrated the ranks of Bitcoin’s true believers, looking for riches.
Motorola is out with its latest line of smartphones offering customers more options when it comes to budget-friendly devices. The new G7 models feature bigger screens, sharper cameras, and longer battery life. Motorola's head of product operations, Doug Michau, talked to Cheddar about the importance of low-cost options and also addressed rumors of a Razr reboot.
