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Zynga is poised to harvest some cold hard cash in its initial public offering. Who knew that selling virtual cows and digital corn on Facebook would create a $7 billion company?

Zynga offers free games through Facebook, then studies data on how its audience plays them. It uses its findings to fiddle with the games to get people to play longer, tell more Facebook friends about them and buy more virtual goods.

The Finns behind Angry Birds seek global domination... “We think we can hit a billion downloads by the end of next year,” Vesterbacka says, casually. Then, almost as an aside: “We think we can be the leading entertainment brand in China by 2012.” Excusez-moi? “We think we can be bigger than Disney in China,” he clarifies. As growth projections go, this sounds absurd. Rovio grossed $20 million (the company is profitable) in the first three months of 2011. Disney will spend that amount every ten days for the next five years building its 1,000-acre theme park in Shanghai.

A World Bank study to be released Thursday reports that the online gaming industry has grown into a $3 billion business that provides living wages to migrant workers in Asia who play games all day, amass virtual currency and sell it to wealthy customers in the Western world for actual cash.

The hit game is one of the unlikeliest pop-culture crazes of the year — and perhaps the first to make the leap from cellphone screens to the mainstream.

This is a historic moment for social games. “FarmVille,” the hit Facebook game among all hit Facebook games, is no longer the top app on the social network. For the first time since claiming the top spot more than a year ago in August 2009, FarmVille has fallen to second place in terms of monthly active users on Facebook, according to AppData.com. Coming in at no. 1 now is the app “Phrases.”

Japanese social games company DeNA is out to take down American rivals Facebook and Zynga.

The Kindle is no longer an ebooks-only device; developers have just released two Kindle-ready games, thanks to the Kindle Development Kit (KDK).

Augmented Reality may not be super practical yet. But it sure is cool, and a lot of fun. And a new Android game looks to make it even more fun.

Space InvadAR is a new Android game by Zenitum. It's the world's first "vision-based" AR game, according to the team.

MySpace has launched a new initiative to invite social game developers like Playdom, Zynga