Sun chairman Scott McNealy is fond of wearing his family’s automaking roots in Detroit as a badge of working class honour. Most technology execs, though, would rather run a mile than risk being compared to such an environmentally unfriendly industry.

Yet Silicon Valley’s image-makers face the same PR problem as Detroit’s finest when it comes to addressing the issue of global warming. The harder they work to paint themselves as environmentally aware, the more they draw attention to the rampant inefficiency of many of their existing products. The lastest case in point: today’s announcement of an initiative by Google and Intel to boost the power-conversion effectiveness of PCs and servers.

This is clearly a laudable aim. But how green can the Valley claim to be when the inefficiency of some of its products seems to rival that of Detroit’s famous gas-guzzlers? The power supply equipment in a PC (the unit that converts mains AC power to direct current and regulates the voltage that flows through to the CPU) turns only half of the power it receives into useable energy. Server power supplies waste a third of the electricity they suck off the grid.

This once again draws attention to the broader environmental damage caused by the sort of massive server farms built by Google and powered by Intel chips. Just how many searches per gallon does Google achieve, anyway?

Challenged to disclose Intel’s carbon footprint, Pat Gelsinger fluffed, saying the information was disclosed  today in a "white paper" (PR-speak for a one-sided analysis of a subject) on Intel’s website. But that report discloses nothing of the sort. Meanwhile Urs Holzle, the man charged with running Google’s datacenters, stuck rigidly to Google’s famous secrecy about the scale of its own massive computing base. He said Google would shortly announce a string of new energy-saving iniatitives, but stopped short of promising that it would disclose it’s overall impact on the environment.

Four years ago, it was widely rumoured that Google ran 500,000 servers in its datacenters. Since then it has grown from a neat little search engine into a global internet power. Larry Page and Sergey Brin may be in line to be among the first customers for the all-electric Tesla sports car, but that shouldn’t detract from the wider environmental impact of the company they created.

The picture may look great with high definition Blu-ray and HD-DVD players coupled with big HD screens, but where are all those extra features they promised us on the discs, enabled by the new technology?

In an extreme example, I rented Battle of the Bulge, a 1965 World War Two film out on Blu-ray, at the weekend and loved the image quality.

But the disc started without even a menu screen and stopped halfway through with a still image labeled Intermission.

I half expected an ice cream lady with a tray and a torch to appear and shout “Albatross! Stormy Petrel on a Stick!”

Sony’s HD offerings seem to be suffering the same problem as its PlayStation 3, which has a dearth of blockbuster games – there is not enough of an installed base yet to encourage developers and the studios to spend any extra money on added features.

That will change, Stan Glasgow, Sony Electronic’s US president told me yesterday. Programmers were still working out Blu-ray but some interactivity using Java would be appearing on a forthcoming Disney disc.

High-definition television can already offer better image quality than watching a movie in a cinema but Sony is planning to add a ‘24p’ feature to its sets that will reproduce the original 24 frames-per-second cinema experience for those that want it.

Older films, intermissions and all, may convert better to Blu-ray than newer ones. Those shot in 70-millimetre, like Battle of the Bulge, should look better than those shot in the current 35mm standard, with Blu-ray capable of highlighting the higher quality and greater detail in this older stock.

Trust the Web 2.0 crowd to come up with a new take on boring offline business cards.

London-based Moo.com started a craze for its MiniCards when it launched last September, offering Flickr members the chance to print 100 business cards with up to 100 different photos from their online galleries on the back.

More than 3m of the less than half-sized cards later, Moo users are coming up with all kinds of other uses for them.

There is the chain letter, where the originator sends out 100 cards and the next person takes one out and puts in a different one, and so on. There are similar art projects and a Where is Moo scheme where an empty box is gradually being filled by cards from around the world.

Moo cards are being used as gift tags, wedding place-cards and even as Moonopoly sets.

Richard Moross, chief executive and founder, says he likes to observe how users hand out their cards.

“People use them like a gallery in their pocket. Very rarely do you see someone pulling out a single card, they fan them out or get the whole box out and ask people to pick their favourite ones.”

Business cards are 300 years old and Moross came up with the original idea for Moo in 2003.

“I realised that my teenage sister had more methods of communication – instant messaging, email, mobile phone - than my dad in his forties and here was the most successful networking tool of all time that was still here because it was so simple.”

“Consumers can create online avatars, but they are still scribbling their contact details on the back of napkins.”

The size of the cards means 52 can be printed per sheet of paper. So precisely have they been designed that changing their dimensions by a millimetre would mean a 33 per cent loss in gross margins per sheet.

Moo has grown by extending its partnerships to Bebo, Vox, Fotolog, Second Life and Habbo Hotel, allowing users to create avatar cards for example. Its latest innovation is notecards that stand up on a table or desk.

Other companies selling services on the back of the online photo sites include Qoop, Blurb, Zazzle and imagekind.

Moross’s ambition is to bring manufacturing of Moo’s products fully in-house and develop in the same manner as VistaPrint, the Nasdaq-listed online printing company that has grown to a $1.7bn market capitalisation

There are no signs of tents yet outside the San Francisco Apple store, but with less than a month left until the launch of the iPhone in the US,  Apple-watchers are getting excited.

Gene Munster at Piper Jaffray put out a note yesterday saying he expected Apple to ship 48m of its new-fangled mobile  handsets in 2009. That may seem like a large number, but according to Gene, it would require Apple capturing just under 8 per cent of the North American handset market and less than 3 per cent market share of the rest of the world over the next two years.

Meanwhile, Crunchgear’s "The Futurist"  says fragile screens, software bugs - and oh, that buttonless keyboard! - could all cause the handset to bomb. Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch has his doubts about that thesis, as do we: Sharp edges on the new MacBooks aside, if there’s anything Apple can be counted on to get right with the iPhone, it’s the design and user experience.

Where could things go wrong? It’s price, not design, that stands the best chance of de-railing Apple’s iPhone hopes. When Steve Jobs unveiled the basic model’s $499 pricetag in January, the gasp from the crowd was audible. With business customers unlikely to flock to the gadget until it become compatible with Outlook and other business email services, convincing millions of consumers to part with $500 for a phone could be a tall order. But it’s not out of the realm of possiblity - not by a long shot.

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Qualcomm’s fight with Broadcom has echoes of Research in Motion’s battle with NTP, settled in March 2006 after four years of legal action.

Rim paid $612m to end a patent infringement dispute with NTP that threatened to shut down its Blackberry service in the US.

Qualcomm is now under pressure itself to settle with Broadcom, over infringing its patent for power management in 3G mobile phones.

The International Trade Commission has ordered that the guilty chips in future phone models should be excluded from the US. However, the importation ban would hit not just Qualcomm, but handset makers such as Motorola and carriers such as AT&T, as well as consumers.

Qualcomm is hoping President Bush will step in. It admitted on an analyst conference call today that a presidential veto of an ITC exclusion order is rare, but argued that a situation where so many third parties would be impacted was equally unusual.

The San Diego chipmaker could spin this out longer with an appeal, but analysts asked why Qualcomm could not just reach a settlement now and put to bed its two-year dispute.

“They are seeking terms that would be destructive to our business model, they are terms that we just cannot accept,” said Louis Lupin, general counsel.

So it is not just about money, it seems. Rather, Broadcom brought the patent dispute in part to give itself leverage with Qualcomm on licensing its rival’s patents.

Broadcom needs to licence Qualcomm’s W-CDMA technology to make its own 3G chips. Like others in the industry, notably Nokia, it has complained at the royalty rates charged by Qualcomm.

It may want to tie a settlement over its power-management patent to a deal on lower W-CDMA royalties.

But that would set a precedent Qualcomm would feel it could never afford.

Silicon Valley is renowned for the contribution that venture capitalists make to its ecosystem, but it is the larger private equity guys that are currently taking centre stage.

Targeting mature companies rather than promising start-ups, deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars instead of seed funding are taking place.

On a manic Monday, Elevation Partners, the Menlo Park fund starring U2’s Bono, paid $325m for a 25 per cent stake in the handheld maker Palm, based in Sunnyvale.

Blackstone Group and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts also were reported to be in talks to buy the San Jose chip designer Cadence, which has a market value of more than $6bn. KKR had invested $700m in Sun Microsystems earlier this year.

The interest is a reminder that the Valley and Bay Area is not just a place of dot.com innovation, but has its deep roots in mature hardware and software companies. Private equity is attracted more by their strong cashflows and reserves than the prospect of rapid growth on the back of technological advances.

Ramping of shares on online bulletin boards and pump-and-dump scams made many investors shy away from the unsolicited financial advice available on the internet.

But Web 2.0 tools and websites are helping to restore some faith.

A number of sites, including Stockpickr.com, BullPoo, SocialPicks and FeelingBullish allow investors to compare each other’s portfolios, real or virtual, and track performance, share information, form groups and pick up tips.

Users can feel even more confident about the reputations of their fellow investors on a new wave of online brokerage sites offering social networking tools. On TradeKing, users can publish their own blogs, read RSS news feeds and make available their verified trading history.

Silicon Valley-based Zecco, which offers free trading, is taking this one step further with a service now in beta testing that allows investors to display their trading history plus their portfolio, with the percentage breakdown of different stocks held.

These come straight from Zecco’s database, establishing the veracity of any stock-picking successes that members claim. Zecco expects users to take this information to establish their own virtual investment clubs, sharing views with investors holding the same shares or with investment approaches in common.

It promises analytical "market guru" tools later this year that will slice up data to show information such as what the top-performing investors are buying on a particular day.

Zecco’s community of investors is small at 20,000 accounts, but is growing by 1,000 a week.

"It helps to talk to your peers about investment ideas," says Gabriel Dalporto, Zecco’s chief marketing officer, "Traditionally, stock-picking has been a very lonely process."

Proof of purchase or sinister music industry plot? That is the question being pondered tonight by customers of Apple’s iTunes music store. News that Apple has hidden personal information such as full names and emails in the tracks purchased from iTunes has created something of a stir. While it’s true that Apple didn’t make a point of telling people it was including such information in their music files, Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter research suggests that privacy concerns are overblown:

It’s a pretty common practice to identify stuff like this as proof of purchase and other stores do this as well. Apple has always embedded this information from day one and it’s very easy to see. Other vendors likewise do the same thing. The reasons are many why you might want to be able to tell which songs on a users hard drive came from your store for things like promotions and or upgrade offers. If you’re really concerned there’s plenty of ways to remove the information.

Of course, embedding personal information in Apple’s new DRM-free tracks also means it would be easy to trace them back to their original owner should they end up on file-sharing sites. So what’s the bottom line? As ArsTechnica puts it: "Sharer beware." The rest of us should have little to worry about.