Happy hump day, Austin! Here's what the tech world is buzzing about this morning:
Reviews have arrived of HTC and Valve's ambitious Vive VR headset kit, which costs the same as the Oculus Rift, but is apparently not quite as polished in execution. The Verge says it's not particularly attractive and clunky to have in your living space. Mashable stresses it's a first-gen device, but does praise it as the fullest iteration of VR you can currently get. Here's our roundup from last week of the new VR hardware that's out this year.
The incredibly popular WhatsApp messaging service has enabled end-to-end encryption for all billion of its users by default. Will this raise the ire of the FBI? Stay tuned.
Medium, the publishing platform founded by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, continues to make waves in publishing with the news that it will become the content management system for publications including The Awl, MEL, FilmSchoolRejects and others, offering more tools than before. On their way to Medium: Money, The Hairpin and Women and Hollywood.
As we said in our post about NPR's "On Point," yesterday, Facebook Live is getting a big push from the social network and now there's word from Re/code that the company is paying The New York Times, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post and perhaps Vox Media to use the video-streaming feature.
In case you missed the news yesterday, Twitter has surprisingly landed the rights to broadcast Thursday night NFL games. Are you ready for some football (Tweets)?
North Carolina will apparently miss out on 400 jobs as Paypal has canceled plans for a Charlotte operations center due to the state's anti-LGBT law, HB2, which is targeted as transgender people.
