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Last night, Zynga brought virtual reality to real life. At a press event in New York City, the social gaming giant erected highly detailed sets for its most popular games, including a pastoral landscape complete with watering cans and crates of actual FarmVille apples; a dusty old-western saloon for FrontierVille; and an upstairs speakeasy with bartenders serving 1920s-style cocktails in honor of Mafia Wars

A number of moves by different companies and organizations around the world seem to be confirming a long - held rumor is true: Wireless credit card payments using NFC (Near Field wireless Communications) are coming. And (although we ourselves have wavered a bit ) they're coming soon. Verifone We knew Verifone , one of the biggest players in the handheld credit card processing unit market, was going to be adding NFC to all its new handsets, but the company has just set out exactly how and why it's making this move.

Ballengee: Tiger Woods has often enjoyed success at Arnold Palmer's tournament, and this week's tourney can be a barometer of Woods’ peace of mind. Where is his game?

As the NCAA men’s basketball tournament brings our national productivity to a halt today, with 16 games between noon and midnight EST, there are plenty of intriguing storylines.

University-backed research inspires a game where users crush virtual cigarettes--and, in turn, their own bad habit.

Ballengee: Phil Mickelson may not win at Augusta this year.

Team builders to the smartest companies in tech, the founders of the Go Game are letting everyone play their coveted "textured scavenger hunt." HR managers rejoice. You might say that the Go Game , an iPhone game launching this week at SXSW , is the best-researched project in the history of location games. Founders Ian Fraser and Finnegan Kelly have spent the last 10 years running a hacked-together version of the game at corporate team-building events for Google , Apple , EA Games, Zynga , Facebook , Microsoft , and Intuit .

The Boston startup plans to disrupt Groupon and Foursquare by making a game that combines the genius of both, and imagines how the benefits of games can extend beyond business. Thousands of SXSW -goers packed like dominoes onto the escalators of the Austin Convention Center on Saturday, waiting to hear Seth Priebatsch, the 22-year-old founder and "chief ninja" of Scvngr , proclaim the future of location-based apps

Each day, Inc.'s reporters scour the Web for the most important and interesting news to entrepreneurs. Here's what we found today

PGT: Nicklaus wants to see the game grow, and the Golden Bear knows the future of the game is in the hands of Tiger Woods, and his successor.