NBC is planning 85 hours of VR programming for the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games. “The VR content, the first time Olympics coverage will be presented in virtual-reality experiences, will be available exclusively on Samsung devices,” Variety reports.

Not unlike tweet-tracking platforms Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, Twitter is rolling out a new Dashboard app for businesses to monitor chatter about products, key words or hashtags that escape “@” mentions. With the new dashboard, “They can also schedule a lineup of tweets, see a more detailed readout on how tweets perform and even get auto-generated suggestions for potential messages,” Mashable reports.

Mozilla is working with TODO, an Italian creative agency, to teach Web users how to better understand the math that protects each of us online. “If encryption was too dry a topic before for you to fully dive in and understand, Codemoji wants to help by making it fun -- with emoji,” The Next Web write. “Codemoji is a Web-based platform that enables users to write a message, encode it with emoji and then send it to a friend.”

Facebook just hired Kevin Lo, former general manager for Google Fiber. Lo is joining Facebook’s connectivity team -- which is focused on bringing Web access to unconnected users around the world -- as Director of Infrastructure Connectivity and Investments. In other words, “He’ll deal with many of Facebook’s external partnerships pertaining to its connectivity efforts,” Recode writes.

Instagram is getting less cool, and more ads are directly to blame, according to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue. “Instagram users really don't like [the influx of new advertisers] and it's not going to hurt them overnight,” McCue tells Business Insider. “But it does make the brand less cool in the eyes of people and that means what will happen there is that ultimately someone else is going to come out with a product that's going to start to rival Instagram.”

With the help of Foursquare, Twitter is finally starting to let users see tweets from specific places. Location feeds could inspire people to tweet more while out and about, fuel Moments about particular places, and improve Twitter’s ad targeting data,” TechCrunch notes. Also, “Better location functionality could be an important building block for Twitter’s future products and revenue potential.”

Earning their spot in the history books, Twitter’s Periscope and Facebook’s Live feature played a starring role in Wednesday’s protest on the House floor over gun control. Of course, the streaming video services were so vital because Republican leaders ordered the House to shut down its official camera feed, as Politico reports. “Technically, it’s against House rules to film from the House floor,” it notes. “But Rep. [Scott Peters (D-Calif.)] said the sit-in was breaking the rules anyway, so he figured he’d keep going.”

Since paying $10 million in April for the right to stream 10 of the NFL’s Thursday Night Football games, Twitter has sold about 60% of its related ad packages, according to Matt Derella, the company’s head of North American sales. “These ads packages … are selling between $2 million and $8 million per advertiser,” a source tells Recode.

In the near future, when users encounter videos in their Twitter timeline, they will be able to click that video to launch “Watch Mode” -- a separate section of the app featuring other videos they may like. “Facebook did something similar last summer, and said it would show ads in that stream and share the revenue from those ads with video creators, à la YouTube,” Recode reports. “Twitter says it will not show ads in Watch Mode at launch.”

Birchbox has suspended plans to open at least three physical stores in the U.S., The Wall Street Journal reports, citing sources. “It has also cut roughly 50 of 300 employees and consolidated from two floors onto one at its New York headquarters, The Journal reports. Worse yet, the startup -- credited with starting subscription-box craze has reportedly had trouble raising additional funding from investors.