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News Byte

Talenthouse Brings in Nokia, Adidas and Coca-Cola to Sponsor Engagement Platform

Kara Swisher in Media on April 23 at 3:00 am PT

Los Angeles-based Talenthouse, a global creative collaboration community with two million members, said that it was launching an “engagement” platform with Adidas’s eyewear, Coca-Cola’s Vitaminwater and Nokia to allow its members to be paired with the mega-brands and be sponsored by them. Talenthouse said that artists will get paid based on engagements that their project and their content generates for those brands, which will be able to “integrate their message directly into the artists’ projects & portfolios and become part of all peer to peer social media conversation.”

News Byte

Tennis Champ Agassi Gives Yahoo Sales Troops a Pep Talk

Kara Swisher in News on January 31 at 8:24 am PT

Yahoo COO Henrique De Castro has been holding a global sales conference in Las Vegas this week, bringing together the large group of employees at the Silicon Valley Internet giant who are in charge of a big chunk of its revenue. While it’s a lot of talking by top execs about the dramatic new advertising structure that he has put into place, there is always the requisite inspirational speaker (in 2007, at another meeting, it was Apple’s Steve Jobs). For this event, sources said, it was former tennis champ Andre Agassi appearing there to get the troops juiced. The once-pugnacious athlete — who is now married to another tennis phenom, Steffi Graf — was probably a good choice, especially since one of his well-known quotes is: “Being number two sucks.”