Okay do you know how we can taste things and that was pretty special? It’s not special anymore, because researchers at UC Davis working with colleagues Carnegie Mellon have developed a way for an experimental soft robotic gripper to ‘taste’ things as well, using bacteria engineered to allow it to detect a specific chemical.

The robot employs a ‘biosensing module’ that’s built using an engineered strain of E. coli bacteria to indicate the presence of a chemical called IPTG by producing a protein, which in turn triggers a circuit built into the robot that’s designed to detect light. That signal is used to let the robot know whether the chemical is present in the water bath in the clip below, and so you can see that once the chemical is totally dissipated and no longer present, the robot can detect that and then it knows it’s safe to put the object (a ball in this case) into the water.

Basically, researchers have built a robot with integrated organic components, or what they call a ‘biohybrid bot.’ This one is somewhat limited in what it can do, because it can only detect a single thing, and it’s a challenge to build one that can track small changes in concentration over time, too.

But the researchers have hopes that once they can solve the challenge of building a microbial community that can exist and remain stable in size and makeup over time (like the ones that live in our gut and are crucial to digestion do, for instance), they can potentially do a lot. For example, they could provide ways for robots to not only detect chemicals, but also perform self-healing repairs by building polymers or even generate bioenergy to help power the robot independent of other sources.

Ready to tackle the colossus that is enterprise software? Join us and more than 1,000 attendees for TC Sessions Enterprise 2019 on September 5 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. We’re talking founders, technologists and investors digging deep into the challenges facing established and emerging enterprise companies today. Get your early-bird tickets now and save.

TechCrunch’s first ever event focused on Enterprise is a prime networking opportunity that will feature a crowd drawn to a day of intensive, on-stage interviews (led by TechCrunch editors) with the king pins of enterprise as well as breakout sessions, exhibiting startups, receptions and much more.  Naturally, we have a fantastic networking app to help attendees wring the most opportunity out of the show.

CrunchMatch (powered by Brella), is TechCrunch’s free business match-making service. Effective networking is more than just meeting people. CrunchMatch helps you search for the right people based on specific mutual criteria, goals and interests. The platform’s combination of curation and automation lets you easily find, vet, schedule and connect with the people you want to meet — founders, investors, technologists, researchers or MBA students. You decide, and CrunchMatch delivers.

CrunchMatch is available to all attendees. When the platform launches, keep an eye out for an email with a sign-up link. Fill out your profile with the pertinent details — your role (technologist, founder, investor, etc.) and who you want to connect with at the event. CrunchMatch will make meet-up suggestions, which you can approve or decline.

Now that you’re up to speed on the networking situation, all you need to do is buy a ticket to TC Sessions: Enterprise.  Early-bird passes cost $395, and you can save an extra 15 percent when you buy group tickets (four or more) for $335 each. Student passes sell for $245. Bonus: for every TC Sessions: Enterprise ticket you buy, we’ll register you for one free Expo Only pass to Disrupt San Francisco 2019. Holla!

There are a limited number of Startup Demo Packages available for $2,000, which includes four tickets to attend the event.

TC Sessions: Enterprise takes place on September 5 in San Francisco. Join your community of enterprise-minded founders, investors, CTOs, CIOs and engineers to talk machine learning, AI, intelligent marketing automation, the cloud, quantum computing, blockchain and so much more. Buy your early-bird tickets now.

Interested in sponsoring TC Sessions: Enterprise? Fill out this form and a member of our sales team will contact you.

Could you use a little summer startup fun? We’re rolling out our next round of tickets to the TechCrunch Summer Party at Park Chalet, San Francisco’s coastal beer garden. If you want to join your startup peers to eat, drink and be merry, don’t delay. These limited-release tickets will be snapped up before you can say “hold my beer.” Buy your Summer Party ticket today.

Our 14^th annual summer soiree offers an opportunity to connect and converse with like-minded entrepreneurs in a relaxed setting with ocean views. Take a break from the daily grind, have a local brew and strike up a conversation. You never know where it might lead or when lightning might strike — especially with Lead VC Partner Merus Capital along with firms August Capital, Battery Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, Data Collective, General Catalyst, and Uncork Capital in the house.

Party-planning details you need to know:

• When: July 25 from 5:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
• Where: Park Chalet in San Francisco
• How much: $95

Don’t miss your chance to enjoy a fun night that fosters both opportunity and community. We always mix it up with games and door prizes — like fun TechCrunch swag, Amazon Echos and tickets to Disrupt San Francisco 2019.

Remember, we release tickets to the Summer Party on a rolling basis and they sell out quickly. Buy your 14th Annual Summer Party ticket today. If you strike out this time, sign up to be notified when the next batch goes on sale.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at the TechCrunch 14th Annual Summer Party? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

It’s not every day the three biggest computers in a space join forces to denounced political action. Of course, this isn’t the first time the Trump administration has had this impact on a category.

Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony (collectively known as gaming’s “big three) penned a joint letter noting the harm the industry stands to face in the age of Trump administration tariffs on China. Addressed to Office of the United States Trade Representative General Counsel Joseph Barloon, the note asks for a modification the existing tariff list.

“While we appreciate the Administration’s efforts to protect U.S. intellectual property and preserve U.S. high-tech leadership,” the letter reads, diplomatically, “the disproportionate harm caused by these tariffs to U.S. consumers and businesses will undermine—not advance—these goals.”

The three companies highlight a broad range of cascading impacts the laws could ultimately have the vast industry, including,

• Injure consumers, video game developers, retailers and console manufacturers
• Put thousands of high-value, rewarding U.S. jobs at risk
• Stifle innovation in our industry and beyond.

The impacts of tariffs have already begun to take their toll on various technology sectors, with several leaders — including, notably, Apple’s Tim Cook — personally petitioning Trump for exceptions.

Reddit’s r/The_Donald subreddit has been a lingering issue for the site’s leadership.

The community, which was organized in the lead-in to Trump’s presidential run, has come to represent much of the site’s failures in uniformly enforcing content policies. Add in Russian election interference and a dollop of racism, sexism and xenophobia and you have the recipe for a long-simmering scandal that has finally coming to a head after the community hosted “threats against the police and public figures.”

Today, Reddit quietly quarantined the Donald Trump-focused subreddit, meaning that the content on the subreddit will stay self-contained at its URL for non-subscribers and will require an opt-in screen for visiting users.  Perhaps more notable, the quarantine removes the community from Reddit’s ad network, ensuring that the company isn’t making ad revenue from content on r/The_Donald.

In a lengthy, carefully-worded statement to TechCrunch regarding the action, a Reddit spokesperson said, “We are clear in our site-wide policies that posting content that encourages or threatens violence is not allowed on Reddit. As we have shared, we are sensitive to what could be considered political speech, however, recent behaviors including threats against the police and public figures is content that is prohibited by our violence policy. As a result, we have actioned individual users and quarantined the subreddit.”

The step is far from the ban that users have long requested from the company’s CEO Steve Huffman in his regular site-wide Q&As. Just last month, Huffman addressed some of the issues r/The_Donald had been causing:

“…Yes, we do see individual posts and comments that cross the line, but the offending content also gets removed as we ask and expect, and we also take action against those individual users and accounts with suspensions or full bans from the site as appropriate. I wish there was a solution that was as simple as banning the community—certainly it would make some things easier—but the reality is that banning a large political community that isn’t in violation of our policies would be hugely problematic, not just for Reddit, but for our democracy generally…”

Reddit has had a history of being conservative in its efforts to phase out controversial subreddits. The venture-backed only recently banned a subreddit called r/WatchPeopleDie in the wake of the New Zealand mosque shooting.

Just last month, the Trump administration shared a public survey asking Americans to respond if they had been censored by social media companies.

Compensation is the most intimate way a company can interact with its employees. For far too long, compensation managers and committees have operated behind closed doors, keeping pay guidelines shrouded in mystery. Developers with equal experience, performing at the same level, and huddled around the same table while trying to perfect autonomous ocean to table omakase experiences could receive drastically different pay packages. Those times are over.

Employment sits at historic lows, investors are pouring in money through massive rounds, and companies are stepping on, over, and around each other to attract the best talent. Silicon Valley sits at the epicenter of competitive labor markets, but we’ve heard the same story over and over: Big Company X is coming to town, and we can’t pay like them.

Heads up Seattle, Austin, Boulder, Boston, New York, Chicago, and most recently, Virginia! Recruiters must be aggressive, and it’s only a matter of time before an all-star employee mentions a 25% pay bump available at Company X. A team member hears the news and they’re suddenly browsing job boards as well. The dreaded churn switch is pushed a notch higher.

Today’s workforce is more connected than ever, having grown with technology since the days of Tetris, Shufflepuck, and Oregon Trail. What was once taboo to share with anyone beyond your significant other, is now being posted freely for the masses.

We won’t even start on the impacts of social media! Reviews and ratings began popping up for schools, restaurants, and workplaces. Glassdoor, Salary, and others provide deep insights to pay, work-life balance, and executive leadership approval ratings.

Then, things went a step further by detailing gender alongside compensation, most notably in the employee-led survey at Google in 2017. It was the shot heard round the world. How could a well-known organization which prides itself on diversity, and that some think is the entire internet, find itself with gender pay disparity?

Over the past year, I’ve visited and revisited the gender pay gap with various talent partners at prominent venture firms. Kelly Kinnard of Battery Ventures and Bethany Crystal of USV authored pieces on the topic. One theme was common when discussing pay disparity – What if we had real data? What if we had corporate-sourced data that wasn’t subject to disgruntled employees or selective reporting? Well, we do.

Advanced-HR hosts the world’s largest compensation database specific to venture-backed companies. For the first time, we took a deep dive into compensation and gender at privately held, VC-backed companies and we’re sharing the findings.

Thousands of companies and 10,000+ corporate-sourced employee data points. Nothing inferred. Though we analyzed the entire data set, this article only considers US Company data.

We do not display gender-based compensation data but VC-backed companies can access our database of 2800+ participants for free by completing a quick survey. Venture firms and all others interested in our data, contact us here.

About the data

Each year, we have the privilege of running the industry standard VC Executive Compensation Survey alongside 160+ top venture firms. All sponsoring firms and their participating portfolio companies receive the final report of detailed, aggregate, and anonymous compensation data. Before we review compensation, let’s visit gender representation at VC-backed companies.

The following slide is part of a more comprehensive 11-slide deck viewable at the end of this article, highlighting takeaways and key findings from our data.

Data is great. Now what?

It’s the hot topic and hiring managers are on red alert. Pay fairly or risk a PR nightmare. Here are some steps you may want to consider.

1. Founders need to hire. Owning the hiring process allows founders to gain valuable experience and exposure. By creating job descriptions, founders can be thoughtful and sensitive to the fact that connotations and tone can unintentionally isolate a specific segment of eligible talent.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. San Francisco takes the final steps toward becoming the first U.S. city to ban vaping product sales

San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors unanimously approved an ordinance that prohibits the sale of e-cigarettes within the city.

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera, who co-sponsored the ban, told Bloomberg that products will be allowed to be sold in the city again if they receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

2. Lifestyle goods resale marketplace StockX raises $110M, pushing valuation past $1B

StockX rode the sneaker culture boom of the past half-decade or so, as the startup first focused exclusively on acting as a resale source for shoes with high levels of hype. Its unique value prop was offering a verification service, so that you knew when you were buying the real deal.

3. FTC, Justice Dept. takes coordinated action against robocallers

In the so-called “Operation Call It Quits,” the Federal Trade Commission brought four cases — two filed on its behalf by the Justice Department — and three settlements against parties said to be responsible for making more than a billion illegal robocalls.

4. 300M-user meme site Imgur raises $20M from Coil to pay creators

Coil is a micropayment tool for creators, and Imgur says it will eventually launch a premium membership with exclusive features and content reserved for Coil subscribers.

5. ‘The Office’ is leaving Netflix in 2021 because NBC wants it back

By far the most popular show on Netflix in 2018, “The Office” was bound to leave the service eventually — or, at the very least, see some huge contract renegotiations. NBCUniversal, meanwhile, sees it as an important asset for its upcoming streaming service.

6. MIT AI tool can predict breast cancer up to 5 years early, works equally well for white and black patients

MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab has developed a new deep learning-based AI prediction model that can anticipate the development of breast cancer up to five years in advance.

7. How to scale a start-up in school

If you’re serious about starting and scaling your business in school, treat your time in school like an extended incubator. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

Despite Google employees petitioning San Francisco Pride to exclude the company from participating in the Pride parade this weekend, SF Pride says Google will be allowed to march in the parade.

Earlier today, about 100 Google employees urged SF Pride to ban the company from participating in this weekend’s Pride parade and drop the company as a sponsor. That came after activists expressed concerns regarding Google’s participation in Pride in light of YouTube’s response to homophobic and racist content on its platform. Earlier this month, YouTube said conservative commentator Steven Crowder’s racist and homophobic remarks did not violate its policies.

“We feel we have no choice but to urge you to reject Google’s failure to act in support of our community by revoking their sponsorship of Pride, and excluding Google from official representation in the Pride parade,” the employees wrote on Medium. “If another official platform, YouTube, allows abuse and hate and discrimination against LGBTQ+ persons, then Pride must not provide the company a platform that paints it in a rainbow veneer of support for those very persons. On the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, in a Pride celebration whose very slogan is “Generations of Resistance”, we ask you to join us in resisting LGBTQ+ oppression on the internet, and the subjugation of our right to equality in favor of calculated business concerns. The first Pride was a protest, and so now must this Pride be one.”

“We appreciate the engagement of community members who reached out to San Francisco Pride with their concerns about Google,” SF Pride said in a statement. “Google and YouTube can and must do more to elevate and protect the voices of LGBTQ+ creators on their platforms, and we’ve found that Google has been willing to listen to this criticism and is working to develop appropriate policies. They have acknowledged they have much work to do to promote respectful discussion and exchange of ideas.”

SF Pride goes on to say Google has been a long-term supporter for years and that the company has historically been a good ally to the LGBTQ+ community. But employees feel otherwise. Despite claims from the company that it will look at the policies, employees say they’re never given a true commitment to improving.

“We ask that, even if you will not consider excluding Google so soon before Pride, that you will issue a determination, absent a real change in these policies and practices, and a strong position statement to that effect, that Google will not be permitted to sponsor or be officially represented in future San Francisco Pride celebrations,” the employees wrote.

I’ve reached out to Google and will update this story when I hear back.

Brandless, a direct-to-consumer purveyor of food, beauty, and personal care products, says that every item it makes is non-genetically modified, kosher, fair-trade, gluten-free, often organic and, in the case of cleaning supplies, EPA “Safer Choice” certified. Beginning with its 2012 launch, items were also priced at $3 across the board.

That changed in January, when the company added baby and pet products to its stable of offerings, some of them at a $9 price point. But according to a new report in The Information, that’s far from the only change afoot at the company. Instead, the outlet paints a picture of a company that sold 40 percent of its business to SoftBank for a stunning $240 million before it had found its footing,  and where things have been sliding downhill since.

Indeed, while cofounder and longtime CEO Tina Sharkey suggested to Bloomberg that SoftBank loved Brandless’s uniform price points, its messaging to customers, and that Brandless was focused on a “highly curated collection” in contrast to Amazon’s everything-store ethos, Brandless has steadily been losing customers since the round closed  — a lot of them, according to The Information.

Specifically, it says that analysis provided to it by Second Measure, a company that analyzes anonymized debit and credit card purchases, found that Brandless had 26.5% fewer customers last month than it did in May 2018.

We’ve reached out to both Brandless and SoftBank for more information. (Brandless’s earlier backers include Redpoint Ventures, New Enterprises Associates, GV, and Cowboy Ventures. It has raised $292 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.)

SoftBank declined to comment and we’ve yet to hear back from Brandless. In the meantime, The Information says it has talked with numerous former employees who cite quality control issues as one of the company’s biggest challenges over time — from silicone serving spoons that detached from their handles, to glass containers that arrived broken on customer’s doorsteps and, in some cases, sliced their fingers.

They also recount inventory challenges, including buying too much perishable inventory and not buying enough of other, popular items. And they say that some of the inventory for sale on Brandless in its early days came from  Beach House, a company that was cofounded by Ido Leffler, an Israeli entrepreneur who also cofounded Brandless with Sharkey.

A bigger revelation by The Information is that Sharkey stepped down as CEO in March, which Sharkey had herself quietly revealed in a Medium post in March titled “More Goodness.”

A source familiar with the situation says Sharkey made the decision, approaching the board about replacing herself and moving exclusively into a co-chairman role. The Information cites its own source, who seems to echo that Sharkey was not pushed out, but who suggests her decision stemmed from tensions with SoftBank, which was pushing for Brandless to turn a profit.

The Information also reports that Brandless recently appointed a new CEO to replace Sharkey: serial founder John Rittenhouse, whose LinkedIn profile says he began the job last month. Rittenhouse spent several years as a C-suite executive at Wal-Mart nearly 20 years ago. He has since cofounded two beverage industry companies, VinAsset and the business-to-business software firm Fortera.co.

A source tells us he was introduced to the company through New Enterprise Associates .

The Information report is definitely worth a read, offering as it does other interesting details while leaving open the question of whether Brandless is going through the growing pains of a young company that raised too much capital too soon, or its problems run deeper.

Either way, the bet is looking like a troubled one for SoftBank, and at a time when the Japanese conglomerate reportedly has other, seemingly major challenges with which to contend.

Startups in the AR space see a bright future for bringing retail experiences into the home, but there haven’t been a ton of convincing examples of companies carrying out this vision effectively. Wannaby is using AR to help sneaker heads visualize their next purchase by letting them try on the shoes virtually.

The company launched its own app Wanna Kicks earlier this year where users can “try on” high quality 3D models from Nike, Adidas, Allbirds and others. The startup just launched a partnership with Gucci this morning to help consumers try on shoes inside the luxury brand’s dedicated app.

Users launch the feature in the Gucci app, bringing up a camera which leverages Wannaby’s AR tech to position the shoes proportionally on their feet. Snap a photo and you can get a direct link to Gucci’s website where you can drop a few hundred dollars on the shoes you were just “wearing.”

Gucci is just the tip of the iceberg for the AR startup based in Minsk. The 22-person team is hoping that its tech can blur the lines between shopping at home and going to a retail store. The company closed a $2.1 million seed round last year from local firm Bulba Ventures.

As sneaker marketplaces like StockX and GOAT gain in popularity among streetwear enthusiasts, there’s a lot of potential to make advances in helping users visualize purchases. GOAT, which acts as a middleman between resellers verifying the authenticity of kicks, currently uses AR to help consumers see every angle of the shoe, but hasn’t integrated tech like Wannaby’s to take the try-on process further.

While there aren’t too many other AR platforms focused on foot-tracking, there is the danger that a Google or Apple drives to the hoop and integrates that tech into its platform enabling apps to do it themselves, but Wannaby’s CEO says that their product is about content and implementation as much as it is about foot-tracking.

“[These big platforms are] definitely a threat to some extent, but there’s more than just the technology,” CEO Sergey Arkhangelskiy.

Right now, Wannaby is largely working off of flat-rate licensing fees, but the startup is hoping that it can grab a slice of sales in the future if consumers spend time trying on a pair of AR shoes before they make a purchase.

The startup is obviously focused on a tight market, but Arkhangelskiy points to the acquisition of AR makeup app Modiface by L’Oreal as a sign that individual retailers are looking to build a closer relationship between smartphone users and their products using whatever tech they have available to them. Arkhangelskiy also tells me that he has hopes this tech can strengthen in-store sales as well, allowing retailers to tease new products or allow visitors to “try-on” shoes that are no longer in stock.