FlorianDargel

Target Partners Thanksgiving Vernissage

It all went swimmingly for Target Partner's annual Thanksgiving Vernissage/Party in their long, open plan offices. No wonder the picture was one of the first to be sold. Almost more impressive than the very smooth organisation (apart from the also annual power failure at the beginning ;-) was the erie lack of any traces of work - as a notorious clutter fiend I can only imagine the agony of having to put away weeks' worth of carefully composed piles of paper and notes.

Generally there was a buzz about the place that had been missing for some time, reminding me of old First Tuesdays but in a good way. Wellington kindly went on a two year fundraising expedition in the wilderness, so that the rest of the German VCs are now able to raise money in their slipstream. Much backslapping about this fortuitous timing went on, only occasionally sobered by having still to slog it out on the fundraising trail ("Good to be on the other side for a while yadayada crocodile tear"). I wonder if they think of the entrepreneurs as customers as Fred argues.

As a bonus point I had my first "hey I read you blog" conversation, with a German crypto VC blogger no less. Alas he gave his up some time ago so no link love for tonight.

 

Cool Amazon Mechanical Turk

Several sites pointed to the beta of the Amazon Mechanical Turk. It's a distributed outsourcing service. Turning on the fact that many jobs, such as low level data processing, anything requiring a modicum of creative input or stuff that isn't worth training a whole computer cluster on but can be solved by a human brain in seconds could be dealt with by many people given access to a computer. It's hardly a new idea (characteristically, Martin Geddes told me about something like it before), but simple and quite powerful for all that. I will be interested to see where Amazon will take that, it has potential and is quite scalable.

PS: I didn't care for the name at first, but I guess it's a clever twist on the original Mechanical Turk, because it looks like automation when it ain't....