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It has announced Amazon Inspire, an open education resources (OER) platform for teachers to source free learning materials for students from kindergarten to twelfth grade, starting first as a beta in the U.S.

Think of what eBay might do. With .eBay, the company becomes a registry that, like an apartment building owner, decides who gets an .eBay address and manages all the website names it signs up. Maybe that's anyone who wants to sell occasionally on the site. So instead of a convoluted website address such as http://myworld.ebay.com/abestshop4u/?_trksid=p4340.l2569, which only a mental contortionist could remember and would be useless to use in print material, you get OldBooks.eBay. Not only can you put it on printed material, but it can appear where those who might see it can still remember it, say, the side of a bus.

"The program, which Boston.com calls Insights, came about partly because so many advertisers are creating content for their own sites, according to Thomas F.X. Cole, executive director-business development at Boston.com and The Boston Globe, units of The New York Times Co. "It's a new unit to address a new need," Mr. Cole said. "Our advertisers and particularly our smaller advertisers have been creating their own content. They need to get it exposed. As much as 50% of small businesses are blogging. The one thing they want is to have people see their material.""

"The video walls tell the Lacoste story, while promoting merchandise through the evolution of the product. The content tells the brand story from conception, to the first clothing line and materials used, and segues to current days where there are many colors available based on the original concept of René Lacoste. The content was developed by Lacoste and is updated remotely by Lacoste headquarters."

 "Our research showed that our target group of ages 25 to 35 views life as a game...not fun and frivolous, but purposeful," said Sara Bamossy, strategic planning director for the Saatchi office. In search of a property, Toyota and the agency approached Hasbro to license the material for the campaign. Ms. Bamossy said the agency found that many in the target demographic grew up playing the board game and that [real] life for them is a constant media stream of information, but they love social games, they might invent a game at work, and it bonds them together."

Brand as Partners Longreads has become a great resource for readers whose attention span lasts longer than this blog post. Now, it's getting into travel writing via a new partnership with Virgin Atlantic. Longreads today announced the launch of Travelreads, a new channel that will help people find and share the best stories about the best places in the world.

But Dutch tweens who are happy with their lives are immune to the corrosive effects of materialism and watching hours of television, the study found. Only children who were both unhappy at the study's start and logged a lot of TV time were susceptible to the siren call of marketing. For these kids, frequently seeing advertising made them more materialistic, the researchers discovered.

"But before they can become global media brands, venture-backed video content providers need to earn revenue. Dublin-based BalconyTV, which showcases up-and-coming music artists, has nearly 32 million views but is exploring advertising, sponsorships and brand partnerships to capitalize on its massive following. "We'll probably bring a brand on board and advertisers in the short-term," said BalconyTV Chief Executive Stephen O'Regan.  "We need to get a lot of things right before we can reach our goal of becoming a large music brand globally." AwesomenessTV, meanwhile, is currently relying on advertising revenue it shares with Google but Terbeek said the earnings were "material" so far. But he added that larger opportunities including licensing content to third parties and big media brands exist down the road, not to mention potentially lucrative exit opportunities."

Interesting - copyright deal struck so UGC can include copyrighted material in videos without fearing takedowns

CMP.ly aims to provide bloggers and advertisers with a set of easily identifiable disclosures and codes that can be used to identify any material connections in blog posts, tweets or other communications.

To enter, consumers simply have to snap a picture of the special Coors Light SnapTag, which is found on product packaging, in-store displays, out-of-home advertising, digital ads and other branded materials, and send it in via their phone's standard messaging capabilities. The program is supported with banner advertising on NFL.com and Facebook. Out-of-home advertising appears in locations such as bus shelters. "The target demographic of the campaign is males ages 21-28," said Ryan Lindholm, Chicago-based client partner at Razorfish. "Razorfish identified that Coors Light could take advantage of the SnapTag's ability to maintain consistent branding while also implementing promotional variations with a change of the SnapTag Code Ring."