*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).
Adoption of new technology won't necessarily cause jobs to disappear ー even if that technology is a humanoid robot, said Steve Carlin, the chief strategy officer of SoftBank Robotics America. "I think the incorrect assumption is simply because you're employing technology, that therefore a job has to go away," Carlin told Cheddar's Hope King on Thursday.
Dustee Jenkins, global head of communications for Spotify, came to CES to "put a stake in the ground" for podcasting. She told Cheddar that Spotify still sees upside in new forms of audio storytelling, and its "discover" algorithm can help users find podcasts that will appeal to them, much in the way millions of people use the feature to find new bands.
GoPro has carved out a niche for itself as the go-to maker of action cameras. And one trend in particular helped kick-start the camera-maker's success: the selfie. CEO Nick Woodman told Cheddar's Hope King the company had a real "aha" moment around 2009 when it introduced high-definition (HD) footage into its selfie-style camera.
Cars in 2019 are about so much more than transporting passengers from point A to B. That's why luxury carmaker Mercedes-Benz chose to sit out the Detroit Auto Show, and debut its second-generation CLA Coupe at CES instead. "Today's cars aren't just about metal and an engine anymore," Dietmar Exler, president and CEO at Mercedes-Benz USA, told Cheddar from the Las Vegas convention Wednesday.
The electric vehicle industry got a jolt this week as Harley-Davidson introduced its new LiveWire electric motorcycle at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show. "We're the leader in the category, so we're going to lead the electrification of the sport," Heather Malenshek, senior vice president of marketing and brand at Harley-Davidson, told Cheddar at CES.
This year, CES marked a new partnership between gaming hardware maker Alienware and "League of Legends" developer Riot Games, a union that was a year in the making, according to the general manager at Dell's gaming arm, Alienware. "It actually started here a year ago," Azor told Cheddar at the Las Vegas conference on Wednesday. "That's where we first met."
Among the attendees at this year's CES was Aurora, a startup building autonomous driving technology, backed by some of the top talent in the field. Aurora CEO Chris Urmson, who co-founded the company with a former Tesla engineer and robotics expert, told Cheddar's Hope King that Aurora was "building the driver" for driverless cars.
Flying taxis are closer to liftoff than you might think. Dr. Tom Prevot, a former NASA aerospace engineer who now runs the engineering division at Elevate, Uber's airspace unit, told Cheddar's Hope King that the nascent industry is reaching a point at which "a lot of things come together."
Procter & Gamble is the world's biggest advertiser and the company is looking to the future to upgrade common products people use everyday. Cheddar's Hope King talked to Marc Pritchard, the Chief Brand Officer of Procter & Gamble, about how the company is integrating tech into everything from razors to toothbrushes.
Influencer marketing company IZEA Worldwide is expanding into Latin America with the acquisition of FLUVIP. FLUVIP is a Latin American-focused influencer marketing company with more than 100,000 influencers. Companies are projected to spend between $5 billion and $10 billion in influencer marketing by 2022.
