At least one company is making money off of social networking. The game developer behind 'FarmVille' and 'Mafia Wars' has seen its web-based games take off – and deliver profits.

Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga

On any given day 500,000 tractors are sold on the Internet. But don't start buying stock in John Deere or Caterpillar just yet. These are $20 "virtual" tractors that belong to the 50 million players of FarmVille, the largest and fastest-growing social game on the Internet.

Social games are free online applications accessed through sites such as MySpace and Facebook. If you've spent any time on either site you're probably familiar with titles such as FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and Caf World. All three games, which rank among the top five games played daily on Facebook, were developed by San Francisco-based Zynga, one of the tech sector's most talked-about companies these days.

Behind the buzz: Annual revenue at the two-year-old firm is likely to surpass $100 million this year, prompting speculation that the company — backed by the likes of LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and PayPal cofounder-turned-investor Peter Thiel — will soon go public. The software company also has managed to do something that other hot online brands such as Twitter and Facebook have not: Zynga has found a way to make social networking profitable.

Zynga was founded in 2007 by Mark Pincus, 43, who also started social-networking site Tribe.net and software company SupportSoft (SPRT), which eventually went public. (The name Zynga is a misspelled tribute to his deceased American bulldog, Zinga.) While many of his Web 3.0 peers rely on advertising and sponsorship for revenue, Pincus makes its money by getting gamers to buy virtual goods, like tractor fuel or land in the case of FarmVille, that enable players to build bigger farms at a faster rate.

By developing games on social networks, Zynga is able to capitalize on the viral nature of the platform. (Zynga estimates it has 70 million monthly unique visitors.) Gamers can invite friends to join them in the game, and they can send updates on their progress to their friends, stoking interest. More

A year ago this week Apple opened the floodgates and began letting software developers sell software for the iPhone, and geeks everywhere caught iPhone fever.

Since then Apple's iTunes App Store has swelled to more than 50,000 titles, logged more than 1 billion downloads, and inspired an entrepreneurial surge that's reminiscent of the dot-com gold rush — only without the illusion that everyone is making tons of money.

In fact, aside from Apple and AT&T, it's hard to point to many folks that are raking in a pile of iPhone cash quite yet. Matt Murphy, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, guesses that as many as 95% of the developers building iPhone apps "aren't trying to build a company on the iPhone" — they're just hobbyists making a little money on the side, or companies using fun iPhone apps as marketing vehicles.

The world is still waiting for the equivalents of eBay, Amazon, or Yahoo — the groundbreaking new companies that will redefine and inspire the mobile ecosystem.

Not that people like Murphy are discouraged.

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Nvidia inside: Apple's latest MacBook laptops have an Nvidia graphics processor next to their Intel chips, which puts the spotlight on graphics chips as an important part of today's basic computer system. Image: Apple

With all the presidential campaign talk about American exceptionalism, it might be easy to forget that we do a pretty unexceptional job at some things — like shopping for computers.

No question, we Americans buy a lot of them – the latest estimates say more than 75% of U.S. households have at least one PC, among the highest ownership rates in the world. The problem is, we are hooked on the underpowered, bargain-bin variety, the sort that putter around on the Internet, choke on high-definition video, and struggle to render 3D games. Our habits make PC buyers in places like Germany laugh at us. (The mainstream German PC buyer has a nose for good engineering – no big surprise there.)

What should we Americans be buying that we're not? Something called a graphics processor is high on the list. These special chips made by companies like AMD (AMD) and Nvidia (NVDA) speed up visually intensive (and increasingly popular) tasks such viewing photos and high-definition video, and playing games. According to research firm IDC, last year 39% of consumer PCs worldwide shipped with graphics chips — but both AMD and Nvidia says the United States lags savvy countries in Europe and Asia when it comes to embracing the technology.

That's why when Apple (AAPL) unveiled new MacBook laptops last week, the specs turned a few heads. Unlike the other mainstream PC makers, Apple has chosen to stop using the standard-issue integrated graphics that come packaged with Intel (INTC) chips, and switch to a new setup from Nvidia, which Apple says can run about five times faster. Apple will continue to source the main laptop processors from Intel, but those Intel processors will now work in tandem with a respectable graphics chip, part of Nvidia's GeForce 9400M chipset. More

Using OptiTex software, fashion designers can simulate real fabrics on the computer screen – right down to seeing how they'll move when a model twists on the catwalk. Image: OptiTex

You wouldn't know it from browsing the chic fall styles at the mall, but fashion is a messy business. For example, a designer typically makes a shirt three times before perfecting the one you see on the rack, and often the rejects go straight to the trash.

Fashion industry veteran Shenlei Winkler has estimated that in the process of working on one collection that sold at Wal-Mart (WMT) years ago, she generated more than 10 cubic yards of landfill, and spent about $75,000 on materials. "It's a lot of waste," she says, of both time and resources.

Experiences like that inspired Winkler to see if technology can come to the rescue. As founder of the Fashion Research Institute, she's now working with IBM (IBM) Research on a virtual environment where designers up clothes on their PCs, fit them on digital models and revise their patterns. If you've heard of Second Life, you get the gist – except instead of using her virtual space as a digital pickup joint or storefront, Winkler is using it as a workshop. More

The first phone to use Google's Android operating system will be available on October 22.

If Google plays its cards right, its unveiling of the first Android-powered phone on Tuesday will prove to be more than a distraction from iPhone-mania – it will be the moment the search giant capitalizes on Apple's control issues.

First, the lowdown on Google's (GOOG) Android mobile operating system. The first phone to use it, the $179 G1 from HTC, will be available around October 22 and will use T-Mobile's wireless network. Data plans will start at $25 per month, and cost $35 per month for unlimited access. (Voice plan is separate.) It comes with nifty programs like Gmail, YouTube, contacts, calendar, IM, and Google Maps with Street View, which shows pictures of locations on a map.

Think of Android as an attempt to do for phones what Windows does for the PC, or OS X does for the Mac. But unlike Microsoft (MSFT) and Apple (AAPL), Google isn't looking to make money off of phone software or hardware; instead, it's giving Android away for free to any phonemaker and wireless carrier who will bake it into a handset. Why? If people use their phones to get online, the more they'll do Google searches, click Google ads, and in the process, make Google money. More

Click above for video of AMD vice president Patrick Moorhead talking about how the chipmaker will face the competition from Intel and turn things around.

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Click above to see some of the futuristic technologies Intel is cooking up in its labs.

Earlier this week at Intel's (INTC) annual research day in Silicon Valley, the company showed projects that could influence the way we live tomorrow.

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The new Voodoo Envy 133 is .7 inches thin, and has a carbon fiber body strong enough to support a removable battery. Image: HP

A little more than a week ago, Rahul Sood blogged a picture that showed him cutting his birthday cake with a $1,800 MacBook Air laptop.

It's so damn sharp, he wrote underneath, it did a fine job.

For Apple fans this was blasphemy, something like drinking Kool-Aid from the Holy Grail, and they swiftly voiced their displeasure on the web. Sood is the chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard's (HPQ) PC gaming group after all, so his cake-cutting stunt was clearly not a testament to Apple's (AAPL) design prowess. While Sood claimed that a merry mix of wine, friends and a good cigar had pushed him to it, his closing statement on the offending blog entry suggested a deeper motive:

Ahh well, I wouldn't be needing this notebook for long anyways … : ) Stay tuned for more … More

Watch out, Intel: Advanced Micro Devices has a laptop with turbo power.

In essence that's what the chipmaker has created in its Puma chip platform, which it plans to unveil Wednesday. On regular settings, a Puma-powered laptop conserves battery life and does a so-so job handling complex graphics. Switch to turbo and it's a powerhouse that effortlessly renders 3D games and plays HD video. More

Later this year, select Micro Center stores will set up HP-branded areas like this one that show off sleek designs and demonstrate how the products work together. Image: HP

Rahul Sood was working in a Calgary rug store when fate beckoned in 1991. A friendly customer saw him fixing a computer by the front desk, and suggested he take his skills into the PC business.

Sood borrowed $1,500 on a MasterCard and started Voodoo PC, buying high-end parts and building powerful workstation computers for clients in the local oil and gas industry. It didn't take long for him to find a more appropriate niche: In the early days Sood and friends stayed up until 2 a.m. playing graphics-rich video games on the office computers, so it felt natural when Voodoo began building eye-catching rigs for fellow video game enthusiasts.

Now Sood is a key player in Hewlett-Packard's (HPQ) push to create breakthrough new computer designs to push it further ahead of its rivals. Since HP acquired Voodoo in 2006, Sood and his team have been working to bring Voodoo's artistic, high-performance culture to HP's mass-market audience. HP's latest efforts, which will be unveiled on June 10, could begin to establish the company as a provider of beautiful technology gear – an image that consumers had traditionally associated with competitors like Apple (AAPL) and Sony (SNE). More