If you live or have ever lived in New York, then you understand the pain and stress people go through to find an apartment.  Well new start up Naked Apartment is looking to make this process a little easier for renters, landlords and apartment brokers. As a renter this site really excels at weaving through the fake ads and lost opportunities by matching qualified renters with brokers and landlords based on the renters’ search criteria.

As a renter, all you will need to do is set up an anonymous account that feature key statistics such as annual income, desired monthly rent, desired apartment size, location and move-in date. Once completed, brokers and landlords can review these profiles and choose to contact renters that they believe meet the rental properties requirements.  As an added bonus Naked Apartments also includes a free credit check when you sign up.  This rocks because New York brokers are known for charging $50+ a credit check, even though we all know they are pulling our credit through freecreditreport.com.

As for revenue, Naked Apartment has a small fee of $2 which brokers and landlords have to pay every time they want to contact a renter.

Known mostly for their graphic tees and affordable cashmere, Uniqlo is now pushing their new jeans lineup. Unless you love super tight skinny jeans or are a hipster, Uniqlo may not be for you…but the site is pretty mesmerizing and worth a look: check it out here

Not looking to be outdone in the real-time search department, Yahoo! recently announced a partnership with Twitter to integrate real-time content into social experiences on Yahoo!.  Searchers can now view relevant tweets pertaining to the topics in which they are most interested.

Previously, Twitter results were available on Yahoo! via their Yahoo! News Shortcut and for other buzz worthy topics (Yahoo! continuously kept track of search queries, and when there was a spike in interest in a topic, their search algorithm selected relevant tweets to show on the search results page, either as a part of the News shortcut or in a Twitter section).  With this new partnership, Yahoo! has built a real-time index of Twitter feeds, allowing for access to the full public feed of user tweets.

Bryan Lamkin, Yahoo!’s Consumer Products Group SVP, notes that this is just a “part of Yahoo!’s Open Strategy (Y!OS) to make the Web more open and relevant” to its users, promising additional features of the real-time search integration to be launched “later this year”.

Like most people in the media world, there’s nothing I love more than creating daily pivot tables from mounds of data collected from DART or any other adserver. Then once I pivot, I create awkward looking charts with highlighted backgrounds for that key visual appeal. Talk about innovative and exciting!! Pivot tables are where it’s at!

Sensing the buzz, the folks at Microsoft Live Labs just made all of our lives easier by releasing PIVOT (which was demoed at TED). Pivots presents data in the form of a collection of images accompanied by textual information.

Check out the video above for a demo.

Look out blogosphere – here comes erutchik or some of you might know me by @whatevansaid.

Either way, here is a must see if you are a dog lover like myself.

Let us know what you think…

A close pal sent this to me not too long ago and I thought I would share.  I bet you can probably make as many calls on this phone as your real iPhone – especially if you live in NYC.

Welcome!  We’re glad you’re here.  We think you will like what you read, what you see, what you hear … maybe even what you experience.  My name is Steve Minichini and I am  president of TargetCast tcm Interactive.  Every day we find new challenges to solve, new opportunities and new relationships.  Growing a company in this marketplace takes a special something and I have been lucky enough to find great partnerships that have helped us succeed.

Each and every day I found myself engaged in great conversations.  Conversations about marketing, about politics, about culture, the arts and sciences, history and of course the digital landscape … all of it!  You will find a different point of view on this blog and I am sure at times things could get a little dicey.  At the very least, I think it will be interesting. 

We would love to hear from you.  Any point of view is fine.  Feel free to post away.  We are open for comment…….

Steve