My friend has a Tesla Roadster. For those who are unfamiliar with Tesla Motors, the Roadster is the Ferrari of the electric-vehicle world, a high-performance two-seater with more sex appeal than Mae West. How ironic, then, that my friend pines for her old Honda Insight, a dinky little hybrid that has been a commercial failure but remains a cult favorite among the green car set. Why would any sane, hedonistic California resident wish their Ferrari were a Chevy Chevette?

Because the Insight had a wonderful feature that told her how efficiently she was driving. That feature was a light on her dash that glowed green when she was driving smoothly, braking gradually, and accelerating at a moderate piece. It glowed red when she drove like a bat out of hell, braked hard, and turned sharply. While driving her clunky little Insight, her focus was on how to make that light stay green.

Several years ago, when I was doing research for hedge funds, I spent a month talking to Autodesk (ADSK) resellers. Autodesk's AutoCAD software suite is the standard tool used by designers and architects in the construction trade, and it dominates its market much like Adobe's Creative Suite dominates the print, graphic and interactive design fields. Its resellers are the hundreds of consulting organizations and systems integrators that sell Autodesk licenses to customers in the construction business. Like many big software companies, Autodesk relies on a huge reseller channel for the majority of its sales volume.

What my favorite resellers all told me was that they like to play construction-related stocks based on what they see happening at Autodesk, which serves all segments of the construction trade including building, civil engineering, office building design, and factory design.

Nancy Floyd was early to the greentech investing game. A prominent venture capitalist, she founded and remains the managing director of Nth Power, an early-stage venture capital fund based in San Francisco. Nth Power, a $180 million fund, has seen a number of successful exits, including companies specialized in biofuels and "smart" meters.

More than a quarter century ago, Floyd founded NFC Energy, one of the country's first wind development companies. She has also been active in non-profit energy projects, such as home audits, and sat on the Vermont Public Uitlities Commision. These days, she makes bets on the future of greentech. I sat down to talk with her in San Francisco. Here's an edited transcript of our conversation:

Google (GOOG) likes to blow up entire industries. Two weeks ago, the search giant dropped a bomb on the GPS industry with the release of its free and open-source voice-activated navigation app -- sorry, Garmin (GRMN) and TomTom. Google is also in the process of blowing up the productivity applications business with its Google Apps offering, a suite of online email, word processing and other tools that costs a fraction of the price of Windows Office and other Microsoft (MSFT) software.

Today, Google's new Chrome browser-based OS came into clearer focus, and from the looks of it, Google may be en route to blowing up a handful of other businesses.

Yet again the Golden State has set a de facto national environmental policy. It came this time when officials moved on Nov. 18 to ban sales of all big-screen TVs in California after 2010 if the sets don't meet state energy efficiency requirements. The ban has been brewing for several months now as the California Energy Commission (CEC) has debated a mandate that would require a 33% improvement in energy efficiency for all TVs sold starting Jan. 1, 2011, and a 50% improvement for sets sold starting Jan. 1, 2013.

These mandates would force off the market all current-generation plasma TVs with screens over 40 inches. LCD (liquid crystal display) sets tend to be more efficient, but many of the current models also wouldn't meet the new requirements. In short: Hasta la vista, Señor Plasma!

Dear Lloyd:

I read about your kind offer to spend $500 million to help 10,0000 U.S. small businesses by underwriting continuing education courses for them at local colleges and giving money to community-lending institutions for loans. I'm certain this offer is sincere. However, as someone who has tried launch a small business and who has many small-business owners as friends, I can assure you that most of them don't need any community college course to learn how to make money.

No, their needs are far more mundane. They need cheaper health insurance for their employees. They need lower taxes on their revenues. They need more earnings to pay their employees a fair living. They need funds to buy supplies because their credit lines have been eliminated and their vendors are demanding COD payments. In short, they need more money, not more schooling.

At the Microsoft (MSFT) Professional Developers Conference on Tuesday, company CTO Ray Ozzie (pictured) took the stage to chat about his company's latest effort in cloud computing. Called WindowsAzure, this new Microsoft offering will allow companies to write code on a cloud-based operating system that runs in Microsoft data centers. After a year of testing, Azure is slated to go live in January, with paying customers coming aboard in February.

Microsoft is playing catchup in the cloud realm. Amazon (AMZN) and Google (GOOG) have both been running live cloud-computing offerings for over a year and have gained considerable traction with Internet companies and IT organizations seeking to avoid the limitations of physical servers, hardware maintenance and static bandwidth contracts. The big surprise that Ozzie unveiled, however, wasn't technological. It was actually a customer: Automattic, the hot software and blog hosting company that is behind the highly popular WordPress platform.

Boy, this mobile advertising scene is starting to get complicated. So Apple (AAPL) spoke to mobile online advertising company AdMob before the company's CEO Omar Hamoui inked its recent $750 million deal with Google (GOOG), Bloomberg and others have reported. This was unusual as Apple has typically steered well clear of advertising or of anything that required a serious sales force beyond its retail domain.

A mobile advertising network requires both a salesforce but also its own marketing efforts and other assorted business functions currently not native to Apple. The AdMob purchase was a comfortable fit for Google, in all probability, because AdMob's vice president of engineering and top technical officer Kevin Scott is a Google alum (he served as senior engineering manager).

Consider the disposable diaper. It's part engineering marvel, a mechanism that takes one of the most foul side effects of parenthood and absorbs it into a small, manageable, plastic-wrapped package. But it's also part environmental catastrophe.

The average baby makes nearly 6,000 diapers dirty before becoming bathroom-trained. Waste watchers estimate that 27.4 billion disposable diapers are discarded each year in the U.S., adding as much as 3.4 million tons to dumps annually.

And that's not all. Each disposable diaper contains plastics and, in many cases, toxic chemical residues that show up in paper products, such as the chlorine used to make those diapers lily white.

Can Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg create the first truly dominant global social network? It's a big ambition, but it's looking less implausible all the time. Previously, social networks were strong in one region primarily or in several, but never globally. Friendster couldn't catch on in Europe or South America. MySpace was much weaker in Asia than in the U.S.

Facebook, however, is well on its way to establishing dominance in several parts of the world. Already very strong in North America and Europe, Zuckerberg (pictured) looks set to take Asia, too.