Daily Crunch: Facebook stock falls after Apple’s privacy changes make ads harder to track

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for September 22, 2021. Disrupt Day Two is racing along as I write to you, which means I am missing some Battlefield presentations. But good news for both of us: We have posts below about each of the companies showing off what they are building. We won’t miss out!

Tomorrow we’re crowning a new winner of Battlefield, by the by. See you there! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • Microsoft wants to kill Zoom, not Slack: That’s according to Slack CEO and possible Salesforce successor Stewart Butterfield. There’s some logic to the point — Microsoft’s Teams product competes with Zoom and Slack, but that doesn’t mean that it’s going after each equally. Butterfield also noted during Disrupt that many Slack customers are also Office 365 customers.
  • Microsoft details new Surface hardware: Rudely, I have to say, Microsoft also held an event today. However, unlike our startup-focused shindig, Redmond wanted to talk hardware. Namely new Surface gear, one piece of which has a laptop screen unlike anything I’ve ever seen in production before. If you are into computers, take a peek.
  • Facebook sheds value on revenue warning: Changes that Apple is making to the larger digital ecosystem are having effects on Facebook, TechCrunch reports. The social giant also noted that it underreported a metric that may have caused customers to think that their ads were underperforming by some 15%. Facebook stock fell nearly 4% on the day.
  • If you want to have some fun, observe how your humble servant tried (and failed) to buy an NFT.

Startups/VC

As we did yesterday, we’re kicking off our startup notes with a Battlefield roll-call. A big shoutout to Startup Battlefield Editor Neesha Tambe, one of the TechCrunch staff that you don’t get to see much on the site. She’s amazing and helped the companies below prep for the event — not to mention taking point in making the hard calls about whom to include.

Battlefield roll call:

But that was hardly all. Startups were busy today:

Dear Sophie: What’s the difference between IEP and the latest proposed startup visa?

Dear Sophie,

What’s the difference between International Entrepreneur Parole and the latest proposed startup visa?

Do you think the startup visa will become a reality? If so, when?

— Financial Founder

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

Big companies were busy as well, which means we have a little bit more news to nosh on. Enjoy!

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