Electronic Arts

If you're not familiar with Zynga, the undisputed champ of social gaming, odds are that you're not a fixture on Facebook or into smartphone app gaming. This month, it rolls the dice on a big public offering. Are you game?

In August, the Second Life community learned that the company responsible for their virtual world was planning to expand its universe. Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble has been vague, mentioning only that his company is working on a new mobile product separate from its pioneering project. Now we know more.

Even as investors reel from the stock-market roller coaster this week, Wall Street is moving on, with plenty of news on the way. Next week will bring headlines about retail and gaming earnings, as well as quarterly reports from News Corp., SodaStream and some newly public Chinese firms.

Electronic Arts is debuting EA SPORTS Season Ticket, an online subscription program that gives gamers a three-day jump on new sports titles, before they hit the stores. The hope is that a trial period will increase purchases, but some analysts are dubious.

Plenty of big names are set to report their earnings in August, including the country's largest cable and satellite television providers, several of China's leading dot-coms, radio giant Sirius XM, car rental companies Zipcar and Avis, and the two biggest video game developers.

We encourage you to "Ask the Expert" ... Stock-, investment- and market-related questions are pouring in ... So, we're chasing down people on the front-lines, including Chris Hill of Motley Fool. He's a straight-talker, the irreverent host of the nationally syndicated Motley Fool radio show and we...

A research firm that tracks video game sales reported that March hardware sales rose, but software sales plunged again. NPD claims that 23% of software sales in 2010 came from apps, but the industry isn't sure that its lagging sales figures can be entirely blamed on apps like Angry Birds.