The Barclays analyst figures that Amazon will be generating some $700 million a year from the oversized Kindle by 2012. Overall, he says, the Kindle line will be a $3.7 billion business then.

I still think observers are underestimating the amount of effort it will take to get colleges–which move about as quickly as a DMV line at lunchtime–to adopt the Kindles. But let’s say the gadget does make headway with administrators and faculty. Who’s going to shell out $489 a pop for a gadget when that money could go to essentials—like beer.

For starters, let’s assume that the devices will see a big price drop in three years, just like every other consumer electronics device. It’s also possible that Amazon (AMZN) works out student discounts with college campuses in the same way that Apple (AAPL) used to many moons ago.

But even at $489, Anmuth argues, the Kindle DX would pay for itself in less than three years since it could (theoretically) save students $195 a year in textbook costs.

His math:

Of course, these numbers only work if you don’t have to replace your Kindle periodically because it falls victim to a beer bong or whatever else the kids are up to these days. But what do I know? I graduated from college in the pre-email days. Maybe the young people of today take exceptionally good care of their consumer electronics…

And now it’s gone. At least temporarily.

Federated has taken down the site at the request of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and has put up a placeholder search page in its place. The problem? The college sports group, which keeps a tight grip on any and all trademarks related to its teams, games and tournaments, says the site infringed on its copyrights.

You’d think that might have crossed the minds of Twitter, Federated or at least the folks at AT&T (T), who already work with the NCAA. But no matter. Federated spokesguy Matthew DiPietro says the site will be back up with a new look, a lack of copyright violations and a different URL in time for the tournaments Final Four games this weekend.

Does this derail the great Twitter advertising strategy? Nope. But it does illustrate just how new and unformed this stuff is, both for Twitter and its ad partners. Which DiPietro is happy to admit. “These are first-of-their-kind executions,” he told me. “They’re very experimental… things will get worked out.”

CBS (CBS) says it has locked up AT&T (T) Coke (KO) and General Motors’ (GM) Pontiac as “presenting sponsors.” And Comcast (CMCSA) is paying to associate itself with the Webcast’s “boss button,” which you’re supposed to hit if one of your remaining superiors waddles by your cube while you’re watching the Duke game.

Chris Albrecht at NewTeeVee thinks CBS will need to take some of that extra dough and plow it right back into bandwidth bills, since the company is using a high-end player from Microsoft (MSFT) to stream the games this year. I’m not so sure about that–last I looked, Microsoft was still trying to persuade companies to use its player instead of Adobe’s (ADBE) Flash, and I have to believe it’d be willing to make it worth CBS’s while to do so.

At Sony’s keynote presentation yesterday, CEO Howard Stringer devoted a good chunk of his presentation to the wonders of the technology and showed off a 3-D short from Disney’s (DIS) Pixar. And last night a few hundred of us got another demo–a broadcast of the Florida/Oklahoma BCS championship game, on a giant screen, live, in 3-D.

This sounded great in theory. A brace of companies, including Cinedigm, 3ality, Carmike Cinemas (CKEC), News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and Sony (SNE), partnered up to create a special 3-D broadcast that went out to a handful of movie theaters across the U.S. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones and this Web site.) And they’d like to replicate this a dozen times a year for other special occasions: Other big sports events, concerts and the like.

This stuff is still a bit rough around the edges. The 3-D cameras seem to have a hard time keeping up with high-speed action like a pass, some images didn’t seem to focus that well, and the broadcast, which was created separately from the show everyone else in the country saw, seemed to be several cameras short–not enough overhead shots of the action, etc. But that’s OK: CES is usually stuffed with vaporware that never makes it to market, so we’re willing to cut an actual product some slack.

The bigger question is whether the 3-D experience will be amazing enough to convince people to pay money to watch a big game at a theater instead of their living rooms or at a sports bar. I’m not convinced, but I’m willing to give it another shot.

Here’s some video footage from the event; I can’t show you what the broadcast looked like because my not-so trusty Flip Mino doesn’t have any kind of flash. And there’s not much point in watching a clip of a 3-D broadcast in 2-D anyway, right? Instead, I chatted with Cinedigm CEO Bud Mayo, recent Carmike investor Mark Cuban (more from him later), and Nate Westheimer, a New York-based tech guy around town who filled in as my volunteer cameraman and one-man focus group.

[Image Credit: Life/Google]