Farmville

How Mafia Wars can fix the media

The online gaming industry sells $2 billion a year in virtual goods through micro-transactions. What if they sold newspapers?

By John Patrick Pullen, contributor

The Internet is an emporium of inequity. For example, in the massively popular social game Farmville, a little garden gnome will run you 13 Farmville Bucks, which converts, roughly, to $2.75 USD. Over on Kingdoms of Camelot, another successful game hosted on Facebook, the gauntlet of MORE

How gaming became the future of social media

Gaming is already wildly popular. A recent spate of deals with Google, Disney, and Gamestop, suggest that social games have the promise to be wildly profitable, too.

by Patricia Sellers and JP Mangalindan FarmVille. Mafia Wars. Pet Society. With their collective userbases numbering in the hundreds of millions, social gaming is as ubiquitous and mainstream as primetime TV programming.

But for years that wasn't the case -- skeptics disregarded social games, MORE

Lawyers seek iPhone Death Grip victims

The personal injury law firm that sued Facebook and Zynga is now gunning for Apple

Here come the lawyers.

Less than a week after the release of the iPhone 4 -- and the first complaints of reception problems -- a Sacramento-based law firm has begun soliciting clients for a possible class-action lawsuit against Apple (AAPL).

"If you recently purchased the new iPhone and have experienced poor reception quality, dropped calls and weak signals," MORE

Zynga CEO: Facebook takes on Google

In this episode of Techmate, Michael Copeland talks to Zynga CEO Mark Pincus about Facebook's new features, what they mean for his social-gaming company, and how Mark Zuckerberg is taking on Google (GOOG).

Electronic Arts reboots

The video game stock has been a laggard - but fund managers and analysts say it will bounce back soon.

By Mina Kimes, writer

Once a blazing hot tech stock, Electronic Arts (ERTS), the maker of "Madden" and "Rock Band," is badly in need of a restart. The video game company's shares have sunk 63% over the last three years while the NASDAQ has been flat. Sales growth slowed after EA failed MORE

Is casual gaming destroying the traditional gaming market?

Trip Hawkins sees a videogame business at war with itself. It's Farmville vs. Halo and the winner could shape the next generation of game play.

It was only a few years ago that the videogame industry was tagged as "the new Hollywood," a billion-dollar market that operated with binary simplicity: A game's opening weekend – like a theatrical release – would determine whether the tens of millions a developer had MORE

Zynga CEO: 'No hurry for IPO'

Behind the scenes with Zynga

Zynga suddenly is everywhere. What gives?

The social gaming company behind FarmVille is seeking the spotlight. Some analysts sense an IPO.

If ever a company had a moment, this is Zynga's.  The small, privately held company that makes games for Facebook and other social networks is getting publicity and attention companies many times its size would love to have.

The force behind the FarmVille sensation has appeared on the front page of the New York Times, and been MORE

Where social media's "It Boy" cut his teeth

Before getting into gaming, Farmville's father was a player in the glam world of online tech support.

Before Zynga, there was SupportSoft.

Prior to launching the hot social gaming outfit that spawned Farmville and Café World, Mark Pincus founded a trio of companies: Social networking company Tribe.net, downloading service FreeLoader, and SupportSoft, a company that began providing support software for enterprise companies in 2001.

Today, SupportSoft is called Support.com (SPRT) and its current CEO is MORE