The Scoble Smackdown

ON MOST MORNINGS, the Really Mobile Project gives me a rush with its lively perspective. Today, the rush came on the back of a Scoble Smackdown. I won't go into the details because I think Dan Lane does better as he explains the core of global mobile expertise. "Android is based on the Linux kernel which was started by a man in Finland and maintained by a man with a beard in Wales. It's also heavily based around Java which was invented by a Canadian. All Android hardware available so far has been designed and built by HTC in Taiwan.

The iPhone is famously designed by Apple in Cupertino and built in China (presumably by underpaid workers). The principal designer of the iPhone is Jonathan Ive who comes from Chingford which is on the border of London and Essex, about 5 miles away from Chigwell which was the location for the 1980's BBC Sitcom "Birds of a Feather" which was about two wives of robbers currently serving a sentence in prison and has absolutely nothing to do with mobile phones but it served as the acme of british humour of the period, much the same way Dad's Army did in the decades preceding it." I like the history lessons.

Dan asks, "What did America have? M*A*S*H? Pfft remind me what the outcome of Vietnam was again?"

"Speaking of war," he writes, "It wasn't so long ago that the Americans fought for their independence from the British and there are many people who believe that this independence should be revoked poste-haste, especially if Americans are going to continue to prattle on about how much better the US of A is when they feel they have even the slightest advantage--there is such a thing as a sore winner you know!"

Like a lot of the cross-talk, the Scoble Smackdown is meant in jest. Thankfully for me, Dan Lane loves "our colonial cousins" and he explains why in reveling in "the contributions they have made to my waistline, cheeseburgers and V8 engines FTW... oh wait, the V8 is a French invention."

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Ben Smith -- "Dear Robert Scoble, No Sorry." in The Really Mobile Project, 10 July 2009.

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