Although you won’t believe me for a few paragraphs (*cough* tangent *cough*), this article is about something called the Amazon Mechanical Turk service. But now that I have promised to walk off the path, I wouldn’t want to disappoint – so let’s begin with some history.

About 280 years ago a fellow named Wolfgang von Kempelen was born in the Kingdom of Hungary. He became an accomplished linguist, architect, artist, poet and mechanical engineer. He designed and patented various inventions (even including a “speaking machine”) but his most famous invention by far was the “Mechanical Turk”.

Von Kempelen completed construction of the device in 1770 when he was 36 years old. It was a spring driven automaton, shaped like a desk with an attached mechanical torso.

While unstaffed the last few weeks, a manager tapped me to help put together a BlackBerry proof of concep for one of our clients.  I have had experience working on a BlackBerry project from a previous employer's project, however I did not have hands on experience programming the device myself.  I was looking forward to this as I had been wanting to do some dabbling with mobile devices, I just had not had the time.