Twitter Even More ‘Musked; Up; Ticketmaster-Antitrust Investigation from Swift Presale Mess; Personalized 3D Meds-Almost Here; Google Improves Maps for EV Owners

Twitter descended further into chaos yesterday after more employees than expected refused to go for Elon Musk’s latest demand of ‘working long hours at high intensity’ or else. Arstechnica.com says enough refused that Twitter again locked down buildings and blocked badge access…fearing sabotage. Some reports have less than half the remaining 4,000 employees after Musk’s original purge deciding to stay. Thousands of contractors were also laid off. One former employee said “I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers,” the former employee said. “There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.” Meanwhile, Elon Musk is touting increased usage numbers…although a lot seem to be logging on to see if the platform has crashed yet. Stay tuned to see how ‘Musked up’ Twitter gets. A hat tip to my KGO in Exile colleague Nikki Medoro for ‘Musked up.’ 

The Taylor Swift presale chaos has gotten the attention of Tennessee’s attorney general. According to techcrunch.com, that office is examining whether Ticketmaster violated consumer’s rights and antitrust regulations. Ticketmaster cancelled its public sales for Swift’s ‘Eras’ tour after the presale, citing “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.” In addition to the Tennessee AG, the presale mess has also piqued the interest of several Members of Congress. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Tweeted that “Ticketmaster is a monopoly, its merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they needed to be reigned in. Break them up.” 

In a crazy sounding yet cool story out of Finland, a startup there is working on #D printed, personalized medications. Thenextweb.com says the idea is to be able to make drugs in doses other than those offered by mass produced drugs, and even allowing for a different ingredient mix in the 3D made pills. They are aiming not just at medications for people, but also for veterinary use. It makes sense, as people come in all sizes, as do dogs and even cats…so getting personalized dosing could provide better care to patients. Curify Labs is the startup working on the tech. For humans, it would be particularly useful in producing lower dose meds for children…and even flavoring them like orange aspirin to get the kids to take them. Don’t expect these 3D pills in the next year or two, but they could ultimately be quite a sea change in providing meds to people and their fur babies. 

Google has pushed out a new update to Maps with a handy feature for owners of electric vehicles. Mashable.com reports that you can now filter EV charging stations in order to select ‘fast charging’ ones! On top of that, you can filter for plug compatibility. Both the new features should be available right now on both Android and iOS apps. Another new feature will show you if a business is wheelchair accessible or not. That feature is only in the US and Canada right now. 

I’m Clark Reid and you’ve been ‘technified’ for now.