TDmonthly Magazine/TOYDIRECTORY.com’s Toy Blog is updated each year during Toy Fair. For Toy News, Industry Trends, Retailing Tips, and more, you can visit TDmonthly Magazine all year long. Check back with us in February 2012 for daily updates out of Toy Fair in New York!

ToyDirectory and TDmonthly’s video team brought back dozens of demos from Toy Fair 2011. Here are a few of them:
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February 16, 2011 - UPDATED 6:00 PM EST – In addition to the on-the-spot news videos of toys and inventors we’ve been posting since the beginning of the show – ToyDirectory.com and TDmonthly Magazine is now giving you high-quality, edited videos of the best of the specialty toys and games from Toy Fair on our blog so you can see the toys up close,  meet the manufacturers, and use the videos on your own site. We’ll also include the videos in a special Toy Fair Wrap-Up article in …

These toys are making a splash at Toy Fair 2011. Updated throughout the day.

Sing-a-ma-jigs! Won the Coveted 2011 Toy of The Year Award, among others. Full list of winners after the jump.

Hoping to cut into some of LEGO’s hold on the building block market, Hasbro is introducing a new building line called Kre-O, which is compatible with LEGO’s blocks. The first line will feature characters from the “Transformers” movies. Another building system — Uberstix — is not only compatible with LEGO, but was also designed explicitly to mate with Erector and K’Nex as well. The Uberstix philosophy, though is not to take over other brands, but to give kids as many play options as possible to increase creativity, save money, and …

According to a report on msncb.com , the mood at Toy Fair is defintely upbeat. Toy sales inched up by 2 percent in 2010 and industry pros are predicting 2011 will be significantly better, mostly owing to movie-themed merch coming this summer. Passive play not your thing? No worries: LEGO’s offering a “Cars” based line of building blocks that will appeal to mass-market minds and constructive-play advocates alike.

TDmonthly’s reporters are on the scene in New York for Toy Fair 2011, getting exclusive video and pictures of the toys that could be the next Must Have Toy of 2011-2012. Updated throughout the day.

The New York Toy Fair weather is fine today, reported ToyDirectory’s correspondents, and the basement is heating up. The lower floor at the Javits Center  is where most of the newest, independent toy and game inventors go to show off their babies. All successful specialty toy retailers know this, and usually hit the downstairs first at Toy Fair, spending most of their time looking for something they (and their little customers) have never seen before. TD staff reported that the morning was slow, but by noon, the toy retailers started …

What a great story to open Toy Fair 2011; Mary Kay Russell  just posted on Facebook that Kubit2Me — her own invention, which debuted in 2007 — has just been licensed to Fundex Games and renamed “Party Block.” Congratulations, Mary Kay! Let’s hope some of ToyDirectory’s other favorite toys are as successful as yours. You can find ToyDirectory’s full listings of Kubit2Me products here.