If cats can tweet, why can’t taps? We created an apparatus that tweets each time a beer is poured – and reminds you when it’s time to refill the keg.

This is the story of a tap, who – by the grace of technology – has finally been granted a voice. For centuries he has been humankind’s silent servant, swiftly and adeptly fulfilling our need for cold, frothy refreshment. But no more. We set out to devise a digital bartender of sorts – a tweeting tap that would amuse us with his witty banter, let us know when the keg was getting low and remind visitors to tip their bartender…

At approximately 4 p.m. on May 19, @TweetingBar uttered his first words – and the world will never be the same.

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This March, 360i is in like a lion — and out like a lion, too.

On the heels of CEO Bryan Wiener’s presentation at the 2009 AAAA Media Conference & Tradeshow last week, 360i will spend the latter half of the month participating in some of this spring’s top industry events. Here’s the rundown:

March 12 – Social Media Buyers Guide Podcast & DigiDay Mobile/Social

David Berkowitz, Director of Emerging Media & Client Strategy at 360i, will be a featured guest on the Social Media Buyers Guide “Insights from Service Providers” podcast at 2:00 p.m. EST. Please note this event has been rescheduled from its earlier date.

David will also attend DigiDay Mobile/Social in New York. (more…)

What might a Google killer look like?

Last week a lot of people were musing whether it would have search results in three columns with tabbed pages and irrelevant thumbnail images, with a black homepage background instead of a white one. That so-called killer,  in the form of Cuil, wound up not being a case of Goliath meeting its David so much as it was Goliath waking up with a minor case of halitosis. It was at most a temporary nuisance, and as is often the case with halitosis, it seemed to rile everyone else much more than it bothered the one afflicted with it.

Here’s another vision of what a Google killer looks like: it’s a downloadable program rather than a Web site, but you can use this program to access any site you want. You can use it to search, but it’s much more effective to visit Web sites you already know about and probably visited before. If you can’t remember a site you visited previously, you can type in a relevant keyword or two and it will show you the relevant sites from your history. You can customize the program to access countless other programs and tools, from weather forecasts to Twitter, all without going to any other site at all.

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It often seems like there’s zero correlation between how much a technological innovation matters and how much press it receives.

Take Cuil, for example. The search engine’s launch was such a spectacular flameout that it may well go down as a verb. “What happened to that Eddie Murphy movie that was supposed to win him an Oscar?” “It came and went — it got totally Cuiled.”

In the first six months of the year, Google Blog Search found 78 English-language mentions of “Cuil,” most having nothing to do with the search engine. From July 1 to July 25, there were 56 mentions. On Saturday the 26th, there were three. The first news hit on Sunday when Cuil got 86 mentions. Then on Monday, there were over 10,000 posts, and on Tuesday and Wednesday, another 8,600 combined. By September, we’ll read stories headlined, “Whatever happened to Cuil?”

One question that I kept wondering about Cuil is whether consumers need another search engine. Perhaps here the model of network TV will take hold. A few dominate for a long time; after a while, another may come along and gain traction (think Fox); then there’s room for dozens of other smaller properties to achieve success (cable). Changing search engines may be as easy as flipping channels, but consumers are in no rush to make a switch.

Do we need another search engine? There’s plenty of room for improvement, as evinced by semantic search challenges that Hakia, True Knowledge, and Powerset (acquired by Microsoft) are all addressing. The vertical and specialty engines are too numerous to name. Yet for most everyday searches, consumers seem content with the existing engines, and especially with the one most use.

What about other forms of technology and media?

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