Meta's social VR playground Horizon Worlds is now available to download for free in the US and Canada. The only caveat is that you need to be 18 or older to access the social playground. The company is also debuting a new minigame inside of Horizon Worlds called Arena Clash.

The past two years have been a boom for new businesses in the U.S. Yet many companies experience a slowdown as they try to scale. This phenomenon is often referred to as the "startup hump" and occurs when growth stops after a period of acceleration. Startups and small businesses have more tools at their disposal than ever before.

Oppo Find N will be the company's first foldable smartphone. The device will be launched next week on December 15th, on the second day of Oppo’s annual Inno Day. A teaser trailer shows it has a similar form factor to Samsung's Z Fold devices, combining a large internal folding screen with a smaller outer screen.

Google has pushed back its planned return to office further into 2022. The company has promised to give staff around the world an additional cash bonus of $1,600. The move is in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has affected many tech companies. Google didn't say how much the bonus would cost.

DeepMind has unveiled a new language model called Gopher. It's 60% larger than GPT-3 and about a quarter the size of Google's massive trillion-parameter LLM. Gopher outperformed state-of-the-art models in 80% of benchmarks used in research.

Kickstarter is launching an open-source protocol for its technology. It says the protocol will allow anyone, "even Kickstarter competitors," to build on it. Kickstarter will be one of the protocol's first clients and will give it funding and board members. It expects to move its site over to the protocol by 2022.

French firm Neoen SA (NEOEN.PA) activated Australia's biggest battery on Wednesday in time for the southern hemisphere summer, after fire damaged two of Tesla Inc's (TSLA.O) "Megapack" units at the project during testing in July.

For more than a decade, Alibaba Group (9988.HK) has been China's undisputed e-commerce king but of late its crown has shown signs of slipping, unsettled by an influx of aggressive competitors into the sector.

5G mobile networks are rolling out around the world. The key functions of 5G are enabled by the ‘core network’ This is the brain of the network, which provides all the functionality and architecture required to do its job. 5G can deliver faster data-transfer speeds and lower latency, which is the length of time the signal takes to get from the server to the device.

Facebook has deployed a new artificial intelligence system for some content moderation tasks. The system, called Few-Shot Learner, works in more than 100 languages and can operate on images as well as text. Facebook says Few- shot Learner makes it possible to automate enforcement of a new moderation rule in about six weeks, down from around six months.

In 2021, only 27% of U.S. VC dollars have gone to Bay Area startups, according to a new report. That's down from more than 50% in 2017. The report was co-produced by venture firm Revolution and PitchBook. It's been more than 10 years since that percentage fell below 30%.

Twitter has developed an internal list of users who could be targeted. Called Project Guardian, the list includes athletes, media personalities and politicians. Being on that list fast-tracks any complaints related to those users. The list also helps to protect normal people who end up going viral.