Andrew Mobbs, managing director of the Hatchery, has a big dream. He wants to move the world off of credit cards and onto using their cell phones to pay for things. He’s not the first to have that dream, but I think he’s thought through some of the problems better than other people I’ve talked to about this so far. He is in Silicon Valley today, visiting from London, UK, which is where he’s located.

But that’s not what was interesting about my breakfast with him this morning. What I found really interesting was his dilemma as an entrepreneur. What is it?

1. His product is too difficult to use, so it needs some more work. That takes capital, but he’s not able to land Silicon Valley capital (at least not yet).
2. Because he’s chosen a “boil the ocean” strategy (getting, say, Starbucks or Amazon to adopt his technology) he’s finding it hard to get adoption.
3. Because he doesn’t have adoption, investors aren’t interested.
4. Plus he’s going against big companies (PayPal, Visa, MC, American Express) which makes investors nervous, unless you have a clear differentiator that’ll be defendable for some time.

Compare his story to Omar Hamoui’s story, CEO of Admob, a mobile advertising network. He walked into Sequoia Capital and had a term sheet in his hands in about 24 hours. I interviewed him yesterday, and we’ll have his story of how he did that up on FastCompany.tv in a few weeks (we start our daily video show tomorrow, and have about three weeks of shows stored on our Seagate hard drives right now).

How did Admob land the capital it needed?

1. They had customers and rapid growth BEFORE they walked onto Sand Hill Road.
2. They didn’t try to boil the ocean, nor did they try to go up against entrenched competitors.
3. One thing common is both picked the rapidly-growing world of mobile.

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see if Andrew gets any feedback based on the 18-minute conversation we had this morning on Qik. My feedback to him?

Instead of trying to get in front of the CEO of Visa, Starbucks, Facebook, or getting a VC like Sequoia, or even an investor like Jeff Clavier to pay attention to him, I’d do some new work. I’d hang out at Stanford with Dave McClure, who teaches a Facebook class there. If Andrew gets a couple of Facebook app developers to build his payment techology into their apps, then he’d have something to show investors. Plus, he’d probably have millions of people trying his technology and he’d be able to learn from their usage model.

Translation: don’t try to boil the ocean, just pick off a small bucket of water, boil that first, then work on the ocean later.

What do you think?

Either way, it’s pretty rare that entrepreneurs let you look into an early-stage company and some of the challenges that it faces trying to get a new idea and a new company started.

I have started reading my Google Reader feeds again. Of course, if you followed my FriendFeed page you would already have known that.

But, Google Reader isn’t as efficient for finding something different, I’ve found, as just scanning a page of headlines.

That’s where Guy Kawasaki comes in. He has a page of ego bloggers. I like it, because I’m on top. Hey, if you are gonna be on an ego blog page you better have a competitive ego, no? Heheh.

Anyway, I was scanning this page. I read lots of these people already, but I’ve missed a bunch cause I just can’t keep up with everything on Google Reader anymore.

There I found a blog by Jimmy Guterman on O’Reilly’s blogs and one of his headlines was “Amazing TED Talk.”

Indeed, it was. Amazing.

So, thank you Guy Kawasaki for bringing me the egos which, in between being egotistical or whatever got us all on this page, did bring me an amazing TED Talk.

The talk? Jill Bolte Taylor’s talk, where she talks you through her own stroke. She’s a Harvard neuroanatomist.

Can I use the word “amazing” again? This video deserves it.

Rob La Gesse is totally becoming a raving lunatic about Rackspace’s new “Mosso” hosting cloud.

This is a company the industry could easily underestimate for a long time. After all, it’s in San Antonio, Texas. What kind of technology ever gets invented in San Antonio, right? (Um, ask this guy, he was Vice President on the team that developed the Intel 8008 chip in the building where Rackspace is currently located, which was the first chip along the line that today is in our computers). Anyway, the point is that because Rackspace isn’t in Seattle or Silicon Valley that it is pretty ignored. It’s a huge mistake for its competitors to make.

Anyway, back to Rackspace and Mosso. Anyone else using it? Are your experiences the same as Rob’s?

Where’s Google and Microsoft in this cloud game in comparison?

OK, I keep getting calls from people who get kicked off of Facebook for stuff that they think is normal usage of Facebook. Last week I asked Mark Zuckerberg about it, and he said they only kicked off people who were spamming.

So, today, when Nathan Stebeski called me I asked him “mind if I record you?” I used my iPhone to call BlogTalk Radio and record the call. I was on the freeway and BlogTalk’s new “Cinch” service really rocks for doing stuff like this.

Here’s the result. It’s a 10 minute audio conversation (MP3 file) where we talk about what happened to him and how he got kicked off. Sorry that the audio ends abruptly, but you get the idea by then what’s going on.

Facebook: this is totally nuts. You’re destroying your “utility” because people can’t build businesses on something like this where you live in fear that you might just get kicked off for seemingly minor reasons. With no, or little warning. With no recourse.

I found Nathan to be very believable. How about you? He had a great idea: that Facebook should have a “penalty box” where your account is locked down for a couple of days.

What did he do wrong? He had too many inbound friend requests, he says. How did he get so many? He has a Fashion site and had three Facebook groups that were getting popular. Facebook kicked him off and closed down the groups.

I’m going to ask Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s PR for a response to Nathan’s claims. More on this soon.

FriendFeed just added search. I just talked with Bret Taylor and he said that next up is an API, coming within weeks.

Rocky and me will do an interview with the team at the end of the month.

I told Bret that I’m an addict.

Of course, maybe that means I have a mental disorder. Hmmm. Maryam might agree with that!

I was just looking at my FriendFeed page and see that I’m on 14 different services. Competitor of FriendFeed, Profilactic, says they support 155 different services (FriendFeed only supports 28).

It’s pretty clear that only five are going to survive long term. So, that means deadpools, buyouts, mergers, etc. ahead.

Well, at least we’ll be able to search through all the stuff, thanks to a new FriendFeed search feature turned on tonight.

What a fun day. IBM invited me over to its research building, where we moved atoms around with a tunneling electron microscope (among other things).

I shot some videos with my Qik cameras while Rocky was setting up his HD camcorders. The quality is low, but that’s because they didn’t have a 3G network up there so I needed to turn down my cell phone to a lower quality setting. Qik rocks because it pushes the videos to YouTube now.

Here’s the videos:

A look at a machine that lays materials down at the atomic level. They are using this machine to try to find a new way to store information that will be 100 more dense (or maybe even more) than what’s possible with CMOS. At three minutes in you meet the guy who runs the lab. The engineer says that this machine can “airbrush with atoms.”

I got several videos inside the office where they are using the scanning tunneling electron microscope. You know it’s a cool lab when there’s a barrel of liquid nitrogen underneath the desk. Part I (why keep it cold). Part II (why keep it silent). Part III (a drawing done with individual atoms).

A look at the world’s first hard drive (which was invented in the lab, so was the relational database, among other things we all take for granted now).

Starting Wednesday we’ll have a daily show up on FastCompany.tv. This series will be up in a few weeks after we edit it and all that. I just wanted to give you a taste of what we saw today with our Qik cameras.

Thanks so much to the researchers who spent time with us:

• Shivakumar (Shiv) Vaithyanathan, PhD, Manager, Unstructured Information Mining
• Mark Dean, PhD, IBM Fellow, Vice President, Almaden Research Center
• Chris Lutz, PhD, Low-temperature Scanning Tunneling Microscopy and Atom Manipulation scientist
• Markus Ternes, PhD, postdoctoral scientist
• Sebastian Lutz, PhD, postdoctoral scientist

It’s amazing that science has progressed to the point where an idiot like me can pick up an iron atom and move it around to some place else with a click of a mouse.

Why does this science matter to all of us? Well, today’s hard drives need hundreds of thousands of atoms to store data. Think what they could do if they could get it down to a few atoms? Or, maybe, even one? They are doing research to find out if that’s possible, and, even if it is, what patterns of atoms work best?

Oh, and you know how electronics work? By doing things with electrons. The thing is, almost all of our electronics work by doing something with the charge of the electrons.

Today IBM showed me that they are able to study something else: the spin of the electrons. They are excited by being able to do that because it will let them get even more information density than they thought was possible previously.

Thanks to Seagate, my sponsor, for making it possible for me to go around the world and do stuff like this. I have a feeling a few of their researchers are gonna watch these videos. ;-)

You can read a lot more about what we saw today on Google.

I used Twitter a LOT during SXSW and it was only down for a few seconds that I could see. This is a huge turnaround in reliability.

I’d love to know what they did to finally fix their reliability problems.

In the meantime, congratulations to Twitter for finally getting reliable. Hopefully it doesn’t go down tonight to spite me the way Amazon went down when I bragged on Jeff Barr and the Web Services team there.

It’s been a long year, but surviving SXSW is a big feat and one that’s really appreciated by me.

One thing I’ve noticed is that Twitter is growing again because of the reliability upgrades. I’ve gained 1,500 Twitter followers in just a few weeks. My friends are seeing similar growth.

Speaking of Twitter and geeky stuff like scalability, the Twitter tech team is doing a technology blog. Mighty geeky, with some cool stuff, like how to get your stolen iPhone to Twitter home!

Heheh, Jason wants the top spot in Twitter so he’s giving away a MacBook Air if he gets there. Of course, I’m helping him in his goal! I want him to be #1. Go sign up.

You can tell I haven’t been reading feeds lately. Been too busy trying to get things going at FastCompany.tv. Not sure that’ll change much this next month (I’ll be in airports at least four separate trips over the next five weeks). But I did want to come back to this.

I’m sad that Dare Obasanjo isn’t blogging anymore (I linked to Jeff Atwood’s blog, who linked to all the stuff). We haven’t always seen eye-to-eye but he made me smarter, and that’s all I can ask of anyone. He works at Microsoft and I interviewed him for Channel 9. He says he never expected his family to read his blog, and that made things more complicated (his dad was President of Nigeria, which I can imagine made things pretty difficult).

Interesting how I found out this news. It was by reading Alltop, then visiting Mike Arrington’s blog, and then visiting the trackbacks on Mike’s post.