Year: 2018

Nintendo has finally revealed the details of its paid online service after months of speculation by fans. The pricing is pretty much as expected ($20 per year), but the additions of online save game backups and NES games with added online multiplayer sweeten the deal.

We first heard the pricing last June, including the $3.99 monthly and $7.99 3-month options, but the announcement then left much to the imagination. This one makes things much clearer, but there are still a few mysteries it will perhaps clear up at E3 or closer to the September launch.

Save data being backed up online is perhaps the most asked-for feature on the Switch, and one other platforms have provided for years. So its official announcement will surely be greeted with cries of joy. The exact details are coming soon.

But it’s the online play for NES games that really caught my eye. Officially called “NES – Nintendo Switch Online,” it will be a collection of 10 games to start and 10 more to come, all of which can be played in both single- and multi-player modes online. How that looks exactly isn’t quite clear; the Nintendo release says “Depending on the game, players can engage in online competitive or co-op multiplayer, or take turns controlling the action.”

Does that mean we’ll have leaderboards? Ghost runs in Super Mario Bros 3? Low-latency battles in Balloon Fight? No clue.

At least the first 10 games are confirmed: Balloon Fight, Dr. Mario and Super Mario Bros. 3, Donkey Kong, Ice Climber, The Legend of Zelda, Mario Bros., Soccer, Super Mario Bros. and Tennis. The other 10 will supposedly be announced soon, with more added “on a regular basis.”

Those are of course all Nintendo-made games, suggesting licensing negotiations are still underway for classics like Final Fantasy and Double Dragon. For now it’s a package deal, you can’t just buy Soccer and play it unless you go for the full online experience.

The $20 per year subscription will also be necessary starting in September for online play. It might be a bit much to ask if you don’t play a lot of Splatoon or Mario Kart 8 or aren’t so into retro NES games, but it’s sure cheaper than the competition.

If you want to talk with your friends while trading off Zelda dungeons, you’ll still need the smartphone app, though. Perhaps a chat service will be announced another time.

A couple technical notes: the subscription is tied to an account, not the hardware, so if you and I shared a Switch and only I paid for the online aspect, you don’t get it when you log in. On the other hand, when I go to a friend’s house, I can log in to their device and use online services there. There is a $35 yearly option that lets you authorize up to 8 accounts though, for families with multiple users.

The Switch Online service isn’t needed for system updates or buying games online or anything — just online play, the NES games, and save game backups.

Hidden inside the code of Facebook’s Android app is an unreleased feature called Facebook Avatars that lets people build personalized, illustrated versions of themselves for use as stickers in Messenger and comments. It will let users customize their avatar to depict their skin color, hair style and facial features. Facebook Avatars is essentially Facebook’s version of Snapchat’s acquisition, Bitmoji, which has spent years in the top-10 apps chart.

Back in October I wrote that “Facebook seriously needs its own Bitmoji,” and it seems the company agrees. Facebook has become the identity layer for the internet, allowing you to bring your personal info and social graph to other services. But as the world moves toward visual communication, a name or static profile pic aren’t enough to represent us and our breadth of emotions. Avatars hold the answer, as they can be contorted to convey our reactions to all sorts of different situations when we’re too busy or camera-shy to take a photo.

The screenhots come courtesy of eagle-eyed developer Jane Manchun Wong, who found the Avatars in the Facebook for Android application package — a set of files that often contain features that are unreleased or in testing. Her digging also contributed to TechCrunch’s reports about Instagram’s music stickers and Twitter’s unlaunched encrypted DMs.

Facebook confirmed it’s building Avatars, telling me, “We’re looking into more ways to help people express themselves on Facebook.” However, the feature is still early in development and Facebook isn’t sure when it will start publicly testing.

In the onboarding flow for the feature, Facebook explains that “Your Facebook Avatar is a whole new way to express yourself on Facebook. Leave expressive comments with personalized stickers. Use your new avatar stickers in your Messenger group and private chats.” The Avatars should look like the images on the far right of these screenshot tests. You can imagine Facebook creating an updating reel of stickers showing your avatar in happy, sad, confused, angry, bored or excited scenes to fit your mood.

Currently it’s unclear whether you’ll have to configure your Avatar from a blank starter face, or whether Facebook will use machine vision and artificial intelligence to create one based on your photos. The latter is how the Facebook Spaces VR avatars (previewed in April 2017) are automatically generated.

Using AI to start with a decent lookalike of you could entice users to try Avatars and streamline the creation process so you just have to make small corrections. However, the AI could creep people out, make people angry if it misrepresents them or generate monstrous visages no one wants to see. Given Facebook’s recent privacy scandals, I’d imagine it would play it conservatively with Avatars and just ask users to build them from scratch. If Avatars grow popular and people are eager to use them, it could always introduce auto-generation from your photos later.

Facebook has spent at least three years trying to figure out avatars for VR. What started as generic blue heads evolved to take on basic human characteristics, real skin tones and more accurate facial features, and are now getting quite lifelike. You can see that progression up top. Last week at F8, Facebook revealed that it’s developing a way to use facial tracking sensors to map real-time expressions onto a photo-realistic avatar of a user so they can look like themselves inside VR, but without the headset on.

But as long as Facebook’s Avatars are trapped in VR, they’re missing most of their potential.

Bitmoji’s parent company Bitstrips launched in 2008, and while its comic strip creator was cool, it was the personalized emoji avatar feature that was most exciting. Snapchat acquired Bitstrips for a mere $64.2 million in early 2016, but once it integrated Bitmoji into its chat feature as stickers, the app took off. It’s often risen higher than Snapchat itself, and even Facebook’s ubiquitous products on the App Store charts, and was the No. 1 free iOS app as recently as February. Now Snapchat lets you use your Bitmoji avatar as a profile pic, online status indicator in message threads, as 2D stickers and as 3D characters that move around in your Snaps.

It’s actually surprising that Facebook has waited this long to clone Bitmoji, given how popular Instagram Stories and its other copies of Snapchat features have become. Facebook comment reels and Messenger threads could get a lot more emotive, personal and fun when the company eventually launches its own Avatars.

Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that visual communication is replacing text, but that’s forced users to either use generic emoji out of convenience or deal with the chore and self-consciousness of shooting a quick photo or video. Especially in Stories, which will soon surpass feeds as the main way we share social media, people need a quick way to convey their identity and emotion. Avatars let your identity scale to whatever feeling you want to transmit without the complications of the real world.

For more on the potential of Facebook Avatars, read our piece calling for their creation:

Around the time of the FCC’s vote to roll back existing 2015 rules and replace them with threadbare new ones, many senators and representatives were sending stern letters to the agency informing its chairman of their displeasure. Pai has recently responded to these diverse voices of concern — with a form letter repeating the same misinformation he and other proponents were spouting all through 2017.

Dozens in Congress received the same letter in the past couple of weeks, regardless of their position on the issue or the contents of their own letters.

“It is alarming that throughout the course of your deliberations, one must look far and wide for advocates of your proposal. Additionally, I have not heard from a single constituent in South Texas who is in favor of giving up Net Neutrality,” wrote Representative Vicente Gonzales (D-TX) in late November.

“It is not enough for the FCC to turn its back on consumers. You willfully plan to tie states’ hands to prevent them from protecting their own residents. It is a stunning regulatory overreach,” reads a letter signed by 39 senators in December. “Underlying your plan is the false notion that your action will return the internet to the supposed halcyon days of “light touch” regulation from the past… Even under the Bush-era FCC, the agency adopted open internet principles and held out the threat of regulatory action to combat harmful activity.”

“How does the FCC intend to address the concerns of small business regarding the appeal of Net Neutrality that may lead to a lack of competition in the ISP market?” asks Representative Pittenger (R-NC), in a friendlier but still critical letter. “Do you plan to accompany the elimination of Net Neutrality with deregulating efforts to expand and open the construction of needed Internet infrastructure in order to ensure sufficient competition?”

There’s even a letter from multiple Republican representatives that is almost doglike in its vapid admiration (“The record is exhaustive, every viewpoint is well represented, and the time has come for the Commission to act”) and parrot-like in its repetition of talking points (“We write today in support of the [FCC’s] plan to restore Internet freedom by reversing… a statutory scheme created for the monopoly telephone carriers of a bygone era.”)

To all these and more, Chairman Ajit Pai has the same vague, redundant response presenting the standard distortions of the campaign to replace the 2015 rules:

In early 2015, the FCC jettisoned this successful, bipartisan approach to the Internet and decided to subject the Internet to utility-style regulation designed in the 1930s to govern Ma Bell… Under Title II, annual investment in high-speed networks declined by billions of dollars… By returning to the light-touch Title I framework, we are helping consumers and promoting competition.

Practically everything he writes has been challenged by experts or is a misrepresentation of the facts. You can find the details of most of these arguments, and their counter-arguments, here.

It’s likely that Pai sent along more private notes of thanks or feels some questions were answered in the rules themselves, but it’s still disappointing to see substantive questions and concerns from the nation’s lawmakers (and his bosses) going publicly unanswered or even unacknowledged.

Around the time of the FCC’s vote to roll back existing 2015 rules and replace them with threadbare new ones, many senators and representatives were sending stern letters to the agency informing its chairman of their displeasure. Pai has recently responded to these diverse voices of concern — with a form letter repeating the same misinformation he and other proponents were spouting all through 2017.

Dozens in Congress received the same letter in the past couple of weeks, regardless of their position on the issue or the contents of their own letters.

“It is alarming that throughout the course of your deliberations, one must look far and wide for advocates of your proposal. Additionally, I have not heard from a single constituent in South Texas who is in favor of giving up Net Neutrality,” wrote Representative Vicente Gonzales (D-TX) in late November.

“It is not enough for the FCC to turn its back on consumers. You willfully plan to tie states’ hands to prevent them from protecting their own residents. It is a stunning regulatory overreach,” reads a letter signed by 39 senators in December. “Underlying your plan is the false notion that your action will return the internet to the supposed halcyon days of “light touch” regulation from the past… Even under the Bush-era FCC, the agency adopted open internet principles and held out the threat of regulatory action to combat harmful activity.”

“How does the FCC intend to address the concerns of small business regarding the appeal of Net Neutrality that may lead to a lack of competition in the ISP market?” asks Representative Pittenger (R-NC), in a friendlier but still critical letter. “Do you plan to accompany the elimination of Net Neutrality with deregulating efforts to expand and open the construction of needed Internet infrastructure in order to ensure sufficient competition?”

There’s even a letter from multiple Republican representatives that is almost doglike in its vapid admiration (“The record is exhaustive, every viewpoint is well represented, and the time has come for the Commission to act”) and parrot-like in its repetition of talking points (“We write today in support of the [FCC’s] plan to restore Internet freedom by reversing… a statutory scheme created for the monopoly telephone carriers of a bygone era.”)

To all these and more, Chairman Ajit Pai has the same vague, redundant response presenting the standard distortions of the campaign to replace the 2015 rules:

In early 2015, the FCC jettisoned this successful, bipartisan approach to the Internet and decided to subject the Internet to utility-style regulation designed in the 1930s to govern Ma Bell… Under Title II, annual investment in high-speed networks declined by billions of dollars… By returning to the light-touch Title I framework, we are helping consumers and promoting competition.

Practically everything he writes has been challenged by experts or is a misrepresentation of the facts. You can find the details of most of these arguments, and their counter-arguments, here.

It’s likely that Pai sent along more private notes of thanks or feels some questions were answered in the rules themselves, but it’s still disappointing to see substantive questions and concerns from the nation’s lawmakers (and his bosses) going publicly unanswered or even unacknowledged.

Snap Chief Financial Officer Drew Vollero is going to be leaving his post at the Snapchat parent company next week and will be replaced by Amazon VP of finance Tim Stone, according to financial documents filed with the SEC today.

Vollero was the company’s first CFO and has presided over Snap finances since joining less than three years ago. Since going public a little over one year ago, Snap has endured some rather turbulent times on Wall Street.

After opening at $24, the company’s lackluster user growth numbers and ruthless competition from Facebook has left the company trading below $11 currently. This follows a particularly rough quarterly earnings report last week that saw user growth crawl and left the stock price diving.

Stone comes aboard after a whopping 20 years at Amazon, where he was most recently employed as the company’s VP of finance. When Stone joined Amazon, the stock price was hovering above $6; it’s now trading above $1,600, so it sounds like he’s doing pretty well. Nevertheless, Snap is giving him $20 million in RSUs and a base salary of $500,000, so it sounds like the good times are continuing.

“I am deeply grateful for Drew and his many contributions to the growth of Snap,” CEO Evan Spiegel said in a statement. “He has done an amazing job as Snap’s first CFO, building a strong team and helping to guide us through our transition to becoming a public company. The discipline that he has brought to our business will serve us well into the future. We wish Drew continued success and all the best.”

 

Buried inside Twitter’s Android app is a “Secret conversation” option that if launched would allow users to send encrypted direct messages. The feature could make Twitter a better home for sensitive communications that often end up on encrypted messaging apps like Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp.

The encrypted DMs option was first spotted inside the Twitter for Android application package (APK) by Jane Manchun Wong. APKs often contain code for unlaunched features that companies are quietly testing or will soon make available. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment on the record. It’s unclear how long it might be before Twitter officially launches the feature, but at least we know it’s been built.

The appearance of encrypted DMs comes 18 months after whistleblower Edward Snowden asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for the feature, which Dorsey said was “reasonable and something we’ll think about.”

Twitter has gone from “thinking about” the feature to prototyping it. The screenshot above shows the options to learn more about encrypted messaging, start a secret conversation and view both your own and your conversation partner’s encryption keys to verify a secure connection.

Twitter’s DMs have become a powerful way for people to contact strangers without needing their phone number or email address. Whether it’s to send a reporter a scoop, warn someone of a problem, discuss business or just “slide into their DMs” to flirt, Twitter has established one of the most open messaging mediums. But without encryption, those messages are subject to snooping by governments, hackers or Twitter itself.

Twitter has long positioned itself as a facilitator of political discourse and even uprisings. But anyone seriously worried about the consequences of political dissonance, whistleblowing or leaking should be using an app like Signal that offers strong end-to-end encryption. Launching encrypted DMs could win back some of those change-makers and protect those still on Twitter.

Google has been rolling out news at a steady rate since last week, in what feels like a bit of a last-minute clearinghouse ahead of tomorrow. The company’s already taken the wraps off of news about Android TV, Google Home, Wear OS Assistant, you name it. If this were practically any other company, we’d be concerned that there’s nothing left to discuss.

But this is Google. The next few days are going to be jam-packed with developer news and a whole lot of information around the company’s consumer-facing offerings over the next year and beyond. Android, Assistant, Wear OS, search and the like are going to take center stage when the company kicks off the festivities tomorrow at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View.

You’d better believe we’ll be on-hand bringing you all of the relevant information as it breaks. In the meantime, here’s some of what you can expect from the big show.

Android P

The latest version of Google’s mobile operating system seems likely to take center stage here — be it Peppermint Patty, Pudding or Popsicle. The first developer preview of 9.0 dropped in March of this year, and I/O is likely to be the launching pad of the next big one. Given how much of Oreo’s changes happened behind the scenes, it stands to reason that we’re in for a more consumer-facing update for the OS this time out.

We’ve already seen a bit of those visual updates, including new notifications and some upgrades setting the stage for the nearly ubiquitous top notch. That, by most accounts, won’t be going away any time soon. “Material Design 2” is a buzzword that’s been floating around for a few months now to describe the first major overhaul to the OS’s aesthetic in about four years, bringing an overall flatter and more universal design language to Android.

We’ll also likely get some more insight into a gesture-based navigation that takes some cues from the iPhone X.

Assistant/Home

Assistant has been a linchpin in Google’s ecosystem play for a few years now, and its importance is only likely to grow. Announcements over the past couple of weeks have broadened the company’s Siri/Alexa competitor to even more categories, including Android TV and Wear OS, so probably don’t do an Assistant-related drinking game tomorrow, unless you’re gunning for alcohol poisoning.

It also seems fairly likely that we’ll see more devices on this front. A second version of Google Home seems overdue. That could well get an Echo-like update, bringing it up to speed with the rest of the line. And what of all of those Smart Displays the company talked up back at CES? Things have been pretty quiet on that front — perhaps a little too quiet.

Expect partnerships galore. The company showed off a Fandango Action just this week — and that’s likely to only be the tip of the iceberg.

AR/VR/AI

Artificial intelligence has also been gaining plenty of steam on the Google campus. AI and ML have been the driving forces in key offerings like Translate, Lens and, of course, Assistant, which the company is looking to truly distinguish from the competition. The company’s TensorFlow machine learning engine is going to get a lot of attention.

Google also just recently took the wraps off the Lenovo-branded Daydream headset, setting the stage for some big VR talk at this week’s show. Of course, the company seems even more content to focus on augmented reality these days. The tech has been a focus recently on Pixel devices, as the company looks to distinguish ARCore from Apple’s ARKit. Now’s the time for the company to really double down on what’s becoming a more and more important piece of mobile tech.

Wear OS

This is a tough one. Google already revealed some Assistant features for the newly rebranded wearable operating system, perhaps in an attempt to build a little excitement around what, by most accounts, has been a pretty stagnant product category for the company. Wearables in general have been on a bit of a downward trajectory and Google specifically hasn’t done a lot to change that.

The company really needs to come in with guns blazing here and reassert itself in the category. Assistant integration will do a bit to help invigorate the company, but expect to see Google do a much better job laying out what the future of wearables will look like under the new rebrand.

Google I/O kicks off tomorrow. You can follow along here. 

Barnes & Noble, that once proud anchor to many a suburban mall, is waning. It is not failing all at once, dropping like the savaged corpse of Toys “R” Us, but it also clear that its cultural moment has passed and only drastic measures can save it from joining Waldenbooks and Borders in the great, paper-smelling ark of our book-buying memory. I’m thinking about this because David Leonhardt at The New York Times calls for B&N to be saved. I doubt it can be.

First, there is the sheer weight of real estate and the inexorable slide away from print. B&N is no longer a place to buy books. It is a toy store with a bathroom and a cafe (and now a restaurant?), a spot where you’re more likely to find Han Solo bobbleheads than a Star Wars novel. The old joy of visiting a bookstore and finding a few magical books to drag home is fast being replicated by smaller bookstores where curation and provenance are still important while B&N pulls more and more titles. To wit:

But does all of this matter? Will the written word — what you’re reading right now — survive the next century? Is there any value in a book when VR and AR and other interfaces can recreate what amounts to the implicit value of writing? Why save B&N if writing is doomed?

Indulge me for a moment and then argue in comments. I’m positing that B&N’s failure is indicative of a move towards a post-text society, that AI and new media will redefine how we consume the world and the fact that we see more videos than text on our Facebook feed – ostensibly the world’s social nervous system – is indicative of this change.

First, some thoughts on writing versus film. In his book of essays, Distrust That Particular Flavor, William Gibson writes about the complexity and education and experience needed to consume various forms of media:

The book has been largely unchanged for centuries. Working in language expressed as a system of marks on a surface, I can induce extremely complex experiences, but only in an audience elaborately educated to experience this. This platform still possesses certain inherent advantages. I can, for instance, render interiority of character with an ease and specificity denied to a screenwriter.

But my audience must be literate, must know what prose fiction is and understand how one accesses it. This requires a complexly cultural education, and a certain socioeconomic basis. Not everyone is afforded the luxury of such an education.

But I remember being taken to my first film, either a Disney animation or a Disney nature documentary (I can’t recall which I saw first), and being overwhelmed by the steep yet almost instantaneous learning curve: In that hour, I learned to watch film.

This is a deeply important idea. First, we must appreciate that writing and film offer various value adds beyond linear storytelling. In the book, the writer can explore the inner space of the character, giving you an imagined world in which people are thinking, not just acting. Film — also a linear medium — offers a visual representation of a story and thoughts are inferred by dint of their humanity. We know a character’s inner life thanks to the emotion we infer from their face and body.

This is why, to a degree, the CGI human was so hard to make. Thanks to books, comics, and film we, as humans, were used to giving animals and enchanted things agency. Steamboat Willie mostly thought like us, we imagined, even though he was a mouse with big round ears. Fast-forward to the dawn of CGI humans — think Sid from Toy Story and his grotesque face — and then fly even further into the future Leia looking out over a space battle and mumbling “Hope” and you see the scope of achievement in CGI humans as well as the deep problems with representing humans digitally. A CGI car named Lightning McQueen acts and thinks like us while a CGI Leia looks slightly off. We cannot associate agency with fake humans, and that’s a problem.

Thus we needed books to give us that inner look, that frisson of discovery that we are missing in real life.

But soon — and we can argue that films like Infinity War prove this — there will be no uncanny valley. We will be unable to tell if a human on screen or in VR is real or fake and this allows for an interesting set of possibilities.

First, with VR and other tricks, we could see through a character’s eyes and even hear her thoughts. This interiority, as Gibson writes, is no longer found in the realm of text and is instead an added attraction to an already rich medium. Imagine hopping from character to character, the reactions and thoughts coming hot and heavy as they move through the action. Maybe the story isn’t linear. Maybe we make it up as we go along. Imagine the remix, the rebuild, the restructuring.

Gibson again:

This spreading, melting, flowing together of what once were distinct and separate media, that’s where I imagine we’re headed. Any linear narrative film, for instance, can serve as the armature for what we would think of as a virtual reality, but which Johnny X, eight-year-old end-point consumer, up the line, thinks of as how he looks at stuff. If he discovers, say, Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, he might idly pause to allow his avatar a freestyle Hong Kong kick-fest with the German guards in the prison camp. Just because he can. Because he’s always been able to. He doesn’t think about these things. He probably doesn’t fully understand that that hasn’t always been possible.

In this case B&N and the bookstore don’t need to exist at all. We get the depth of books with the vitality of film melded with the immersion of gaming. What about artisanal book lovers, you argue, they’ll keep things alive because they love the feel of books.

When that feel — the scent, the heft, the old book smell — can be simulated do we need to visit a bookstore? When Amazon and Netflix spend millions to explore new media and are sure to branch out into more immersive forms do you need to immerse yourself in To The Lighthouse? Do we really need the education we once had to gain in order to read a book?

We know that Amazon doesn’t care about books. They used books as a starting point to taking over e-commerce and, while the Kindle is the best system for e-books in existence, it is an afterthought compared to the rest of the business. In short, the champions of text barely support it.

Ultimately what I posit here depends on a number of changes coming all at once. We must all agree to fall headfirst into some share hallucination the replaces all other media. We must feel that that world is real enough for us to abandon our books.

It’s up to book lovers, then, to decide what they want. They have to support and pay for novels, non-fiction, and news. They have to visit small booksellers and keep demand for books alive. And they have to make it possible to exist as a writer. “Publishers are focusing on big-name writers. The number of professional authors has declined. The disappearance of Borders deprived dozens of communities of their only physical bookstore and led to a drop in book sales that looks permanent,” writes Leonhardt and he’s right. There is no upside for text slingers.

In the end perhaps we can’t save B&N. Maybe we let it collapse into a heap like so many before it. Or maybe we fight for a medium that is quickly losing cachet. Maybe we fight for books and ensure that just because the big guys on the block can’t make a bookstore work the rest of us don’t care. Maybe we tell the world that we just want to read.

I shudder to think what will happen if we don’t.

Going to the dentist can be anxiety-inducing. Unfortunately, it was no different for me last week when I went to discuss Uniform Teeth’s recent $4 million seed funding round from Lerer Hippeau, Refactor Capital, Founder’s Fund and Slow Ventures.

Uniform Teeth is a clear teeth aligner startup that competes with the likes of Invisalign and Smile Direct Club. The startup takes a One Medical-like approach in that it provides real, licensed orthodontists to see you and treat your bite.

“For us, we’re really focused on transforming the orthodontic experience,” Uniform Teeth CEO Meghan Jewitt told me at the startup’s flagship dental office in San Francisco. “There are a lot of health care companies out there that are taking areas that aren’t very customer-centric.”

Jewitt, who spent a couple of years at One Medical as director of operations, pointed to One Medical, Oscar Insurance and 23andMe as examples of companies taking a very customer-centric approach.

“We are really interested in doing the same for the orthodontics space,” she said.

Ahead of the first visit, patients use the Uniform app to take photos of their teeth and their bite. During the initial visit, patients receive a panoramic scan and 3D imaging to confirm what type of work needs to be done.

Last week during my visit, Jewitt and Uniform Teeth co-founder Dr. Kjeld Aamodt showed me the technology Uniform uses for its patient evaluations.

In the GIF above, you can see I received a 3D panoramic X-ray. The process took about 10 seconds and it’s about the same exposure to X-rays as a flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles, Dr. Aamodt said.

“With that information, we’re able to see the health of your roots, your teeth, the bone, your jaw joints, check for anything that could get worse during treatment,” Dr. Aamodt said.

Below, you can see the 3D scan.

Next is looking in between the teeth. From here, the idea is to get a much more holistic view, Dr. Aamodt said. This is where things got interesting.

If you look at the bottom left of the photo, under my back bottom tooth, you can see a dark circle below the tooth. Dr. Kjeld gently pointed that out to me.

“That tells me there’s bacteria living inside of your jaw,” he explained. “A lot of people have this. It’s pretty common so don’t beat yourself up for it.”

This is when he told me I’d likely need to get a root canal to get rid of it. Mild panic ensued.

Dr. Aamodt went on to explain that, if I were a patient of his looking to get my teeth straightened, he would recommend that I first get the root canal before any teeth movement. That’s because, he explained, moving teeth at that point could potentially result in further infection.

“The concern about that is when we move a tooth with that, the infection will get worse and you could risk losing that tooth,” he told me.

Although I was freaking out internally, I continued to move ahead with the process. Next up was the 3D scan, which results in something fancy called a 3D Cone Beam Computed Tomography. This, Dr. Aamodt said, is what really sets Uniform Teeth apart in precision tooth movement.

This process takes the place of dental impressions, which are made by biting into a tray with gooey material. I didn’t feel like getting my bottom teeth scanned, but below is what the top looks like.

At this point Uniform Teeth would share its recommendations with the patient. My personal recommendation was to go see my dentist and, if I’m interested in straightening my teeth, come back once my roots are in a healthy enough state.

From there, I’d receive a custom treatment plan that combines the X-ray plus 3D scan to predict how my teeth will move. After receiving the clear aligners in a couple of weeks, I’d check in with Dr. Aamodt every week via the mobile app. If something were to come up, I could always set up an in-person appointment. Most people average about two to three visits in total, Jewitt said. All of that would add up to about $3,500.

The reason Uniform Teeth requires in-office visits is because 75 percent or more of the cases require additional procedures. For example, some people require small, tooth-colored attachments to be placed onto the clear aligners. Those attachments can help to move teeth in a more advanced way, Dr. Aamodt said.

“If you don’t have these, then you can tip some teeth but you can’t do all of the things to help improve the bite, to create a really lasting, beautiful, healthy smile,” he explained.

Uniform Teeth currently treats patients in San Francisco, but intends to open up additional offices nationwide next year. As the company expands, the plan is to bring on board more full-time orthodontists.

“Right now, we’re an employment-based model and we’d really like to continue that because it allows us to control the experience and deliver a really high-quality service,” Jewitt said.

A lot of companies say they care about the customer when, in reality, they just care about making money. But I genuinely believe Uniform Teeth does care. After I left with my tail between my legs that day, I called my dentist to set up an appointment. The following day, my dentist confirmed what Dr. Aamodt found and proceeded to set me up to get a root canal. A few days later, Dr. Aamodt checked in with me via the mobile app to ask me how I was doing and to make sure I was getting it treated. I was pleased to let him know, as Olivia Pope likes to say, “It’s handled.”

This Friday, TechCrunch launches the West Coast debut of TC Sessions: Robotics at UC Berkeley on May 11. There are still a few tickets left, including $45 student tickets, that will get you access to the conference, workshops, and networking reception. With robots as far as the eye can see and top robotics experts abounding, this is one event you won’t want to miss.

Still not convinced? Here are five reasons why you need to be there:

1. Hear From The Best Minds In Robotics 

   Where else can you catch industry leaders like Marc Raibert (Boston Dynamics), Andy Rubin (Playground Ventures), Melonee Wise (Fetch Robotics), Ayanna Howard (Zyrobotics), Ken Goldberg (UC Berkeley) and many more all in one place? We’re honored that these leaders will be attending and speaking at the event. Check out more speaker spots here.

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1. Get Up Close And Personal With Groundbreaking Robots
   Meet lots of robots and their creators up close, including UC Berkeley’s industrial gripper Dex-Net System, SuitX’s exoskeletons, Agility Robotics’ bipedal Cassie, Boston Dynamics’ new SpotMini and UCLA’s sideways-walking NABi robot.

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3. Discover The Robot Categories Taking Over The Startup World
The majority of the top founders and investors in robotics will be on stage and around during breaks to network with and pick their brains. The agenda is impressive and full of top founders, engineers and educators.

 See the full agenda here.

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4. Meet Up-And-Coming Early Stage Companies
There will be 11 early-stage robotics-related companies showcasing their startups in the Zellerbach Lobby. These companies are just ripe for investment and in a variety of verticals:BEAR Robotics
DeepMotion
Exyn Technologies
Kadho
MultiplyLabs
Photoneo
Robotical
SAKE Robotics
Taechyon
TRA Robotics
VTRUS

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5. Drill Deeper At The Workshops
Discover how to turn your ideas into a venture-backable business at the “Starting Up” workshop. Hear Skydio co-founder Adam Bry describe how his team prototyped their way to a stunning commercial launch for a drone that follows you anywhere. Discover everything you need to know about DARPA’s Subterranean Challenge with Dr. Tim Chung. Attendees will get the chance to ask questions and go deeper into these topics. More details about workshops here.

Join us this Friday, May 11, and get your tickets now before we hit Zellerbach Hall’s capacity limit!

Students, don’t forget, you can get your tickets at a significant discount of $45 right here.