Speaking of cars of the future — and strategies to avoid the $4 gallon — the New York Times has a report on a couple of canny Davids trying to slay the uber-Goliath of the oil industry. Los Gatos, Calif. entrepreneurs Floyd Butterfield and Thomas Quinn have created the Micro-Fueller, a washer-dryer sized fueling station that creates ethanol — not out of corn, but a patented mixture of yeast and super-cheap industrial-grade sugar from Mexico. The cost: $1 a gallon. The ethanol will work in most any recent model car, no conversion required.

The cost of the device: about $5,000 with California alternative energy rebates. At that price, you’d have to make 1,667 gallons of ethanol before you start seeing ROI. That will come down with mass production, of course. But even at that price, it’s a bargain if you’re bearish on the price of oil. And let’s not forget the 100% markup you could make on $2 gallons of ethanol for all your neighbors. Forget lemonade stands: homebrew fuel is the new summertime moneyspinner.

The most important question — does the ethanol pass muster from the driver’s seat? The Times doesn’t say, which suggests either lazy reporting or a reluctance on the inventors’ part to offer test drives. It would be a shame if it were the latter, for this is a fascinating development that deserves a lot of attention. Future Boy is on the case.

UPDATE: The folks at E-fuel (that’s Butterfield and Quinn’s company) pinged FB to say they will be officially unveiling the Micro-Fueller to the press next week, and to invite him to sit down with the inventors in Los Gatos. Stay tuned, and let me know your thoughts on whether cheap NAFTA sugar is the fuel of the future.

Stereotype alert: not only does Future Boy drive a Prius, he also unapologetically sips lattes while doing so. (What, you don’t like fuel economy and frothy milk?)

Since his is a first edition, 2002 model, FB is able to feel smugly superior to Johnny-come-latelys. This weekend, as San Francisco gas prices climbed above the $4-a-gallon psychological barrier (almost as much as a Venti latte!), a curious coincidence happened: four of FB’s neighbors suddenly swapped their SUVs for second-edition Priuses (Priusi? Prii?), all of them as blue as this blue state. It turned out to be the result of a long wait list, a recent shipment to the local Toyota, and a lack of neighborly color coordination. Still, it was timely proof that the Prius’ popularity shows no signs of dipping.

Today Toyota announced that the mark 3 Prius would be unveiled at next year’s Detroit auto show. Early reports suggest that it will improve its fuel economy by 10 mpg, from 45 to 55, despite having more horsepower and length. Not bad, but not as great as the 94 mpg Toyota says it’s aiming for.

That should mean no drop in business for the small PHEV companies — those plucky bright sparks who will gussy up your hybrid by adding a larger battery and plug-in capability, despite a lack of cooperation from Toyota. Kits from little guys like Hymotion and eDrive purportedly take your mpg into the 70-90 range. In other words: lots more free lattes.

Step forward and receive your Congressional medals, small web-based enterprises. A hearing in the House of Representatives today, featuring Google and Amazon, was a love fest for the little guy. Both companies claimed they wouldn’t be where they are today — propping up the online economy — without you.

“There are millions of small businesses, millions of Web site publishers, and billions of people interacting on the ‘long tail’ around products and services catering to individual tastes and personalities,” said David Fischer, Google’s VP of online sales. “And the economic potential in this long tail is driving some of the most successful and innovative businesses online today.”

Amazon’s spokesman pointed out that an increasing percentage of its $11 billion revenue comes from marketplace fees — skimmed off the top of those billions of used item resellers. Future Boy, whose ten-year-old Amazon addiction is now centered largely around buying used books, and whose fiance just yesterday became an Amazon reseller, couldn’t agree more.

Today’s tip from Future Boy: if you dislike your current browser, or simply want the last word (so far) in web browsing, download the free Firefox version 3 Beta 5. Beta? Wait, doesn’t that mean unfinished? It certainly does — and yet this beta is remarkably solid. Unlike Firefox 2, it doesn’t suck up your computer’s memory. Loading is faster than ever. If this is a beta, FB can’t wait to see the final version.

From the foward-thinking folks at Wharton, here’s an interesting chat with Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts. The blue-chip ad man opines that the consumer is now king — which is hardly news, but Roberts manages to wrestle the notion to its logical conclusion. Which is this: businesses must therefore strive to brand themselves with what Roberts calls “Lovemarks”: corporate names so beloved that consumers show loyalty beyond reason. (Hello, Macheads! Greetings, Google Wingnuts!)

How does this translate for small firms? FB thinks there is little translation needed. Everyone knows that everyone likes to do business with human beings. We like to form bonds of trust. We like a good laugh. A company’s emotional health is plain for outsiders to see, though insiders may not notice. Ponder this as you go home tonight, Small Business Owner. Is your receptionist smiling because it’s the weekend, or because of the week she had? How would it affect your bottom line if the answer were different?

Staying in a hotel just off the Champs-Elysees might have seemed like a good idea, but it actually put Futur Garçon fairly far away from all that Web startup action in the Eigth Arrondissement. So FG was grateful when entrepreneurs could come to him, such as Benoit Bergeret. The 45-year-old CEO was FG’s first interview, and he suggested lunch in a Champs-Elysees hangout called Laduree, an elegant, 18th century establishment known for its pastries. Laduree retains the refined air of the aristocratic apartment block it once was, and its vol-au-vents and white wine selection made FG feel he had truly arrived in France.

Bergeret is the founder of two related companies: Paris-based Realeyes 3D, and San Francisco-based Quipit. After some negotiation between members of his boards, he now spends three weeks of the month in San Francisco, and one in Paris, which sounds to FG like an unbeatable arrangement. He showed FG his product, which turns camera cellphone snaps into PDFs as effortlessly as the French bake pastry. And he told FG three things that would become themes throughout the week of French startup interviews. First, that French universities churned out people with great technical knowledge that startups can take advantage of, especially a startup based around image processing. Secondly, that it’s harder to retain employees in San Francisco than in Paris, where there is way less turnover. Thirdly, that the French have no clue how to push their products. “We don’t do marketing in France,” he said. “We do lunches.”

That is changing, of course, as France itself becomes — ever so slowly — a more entrepreneurial culture. When FG asked Bergeret of an underdeveloped area where U.S. companies could make a killing, he thought for a minute and said: “air conditioners.” France gets hot in the summer, and there is no AC in private homes. “The big guys think there’s no residential market,” he said. “Come with a green proposition, make it none too expensive,” — and you’ll have a winner. Just remember to take your clients out to lunch.

Apologies for the radio silence: Future Boy was on assignment in Paris, meeting a surprisingly large number of web entrepreneurs. I say surprising, because FB — or to give him his Parisian name, Futur Garçon — did not expect to find a lot of high-tech startups in the City of Light. Great food, fashion and Gallic snobbery, oui; hard-working, forward-thinking online businesses burning the midnight oil, non.

But that’s one stereotype FG was quick to dispel. It turns out that Paris is becoming the European answer to Silicon Valley, with a critical mass of hot tech companies that are gaining international following — and international funding. More importantly, its Internet infrastructure is light years ahead of anything the U.S. can offer. For a mere thirty euros a month (about $45), you can have DSL service delivered to your home and office at a blazingly fast 1.25 gigabits. But wait! There’s more! You also get a wi-fi router, all the TV channels you can eat delivered over the same pipe, and free phone service to 70 countries. (It’s VOIP, but nobody cares for such acronyms — all your average Frenchman knows is that you plug your phone into the back of your DSL box, and you’re done.)

Amazingly, this is all the doing of one entrepreneur — 40-year-old Xavier Niel, an unassuming, constantly smiling man whom FG met one Friday at his headquarters near St. Augustin in Paris’ trendy 8th Arrondissement. Niel is the founder of Iliad, the company that sells that astonishingly cheap service described above, which is called (ironically, but not too ironically) “Free.” As he sat down in a combination conference room and living room in Iliad’s basement, the better to demo its product, Niel told FG he ran the most profitable company in the French market. Astonishingly, the entire payroll is financed with a mere 4% of its revenues. Free has 3 million subscribers, rising rapidly — and is giving France Telecom, the stodgy state-sponsored market leader, a run for its money.

How can that be? Niel is offering a top-of-the-range data service, every form of communication you could possibly want except cellphone coverage (though he plans to expand into that too), for a bargain basement price. Indeed, Niel says he is often visited by representatives of U.S. cable and wireless companies, who tell him they would charge their customers three times what he’s charging for this service — if they had the infrastructure to offer such a thing.

Niel not only refuses to go above the 30 euro threshold, but he also keeps adding services at no extra cost. For example, you can now plug a video camera into the back of your Free box, and presto: you’re broadcasting your own TV channel to other Free subscribers. Price? It’s all part of your 30 euro bill. What gives?

First of all, Iliad keeps its equipment and software costs low by building everything itself. Niel was proud to show FG the ramshackle, do-it-yourself innards of the boxes the company uses. “We’re like Apple without the cool design,” he says. He called the remote control that comes with the Free box “the least beautiful but most powerful remote in the world.” Iliad engineers wrote all the software the company runs on. “The French are pretty good at software,” he says, citing the educational system’s emphasis on science and technology.

His entire optical fiber system runs on two Cisco routers. Back in the dotcom bust of 2001, Niel — then a small businessman — bought up tons of optical fiber infrastructure for a song. Nobody thought it was the future any more. They were wrong, and Niel was right — as he seems to be about many things, including keeping prices dependably low.

Now Niel is spending 300 million euros building yet more optical fiber, overcoming the “last mile” problem, and running it direct into every building in Paris via the city’s sewers. He expects the project to be complete, and Paris to be an all-optical fiber city, by the end of 2009. He even expects people to start using their ultra-speedy service to run their own Internet Service Providers out of their apartments. He doesn’t mind the competition. “Fiber is light,” he says. “There’s nothing speedier. People may still be using this system in 500 years.” Optical fiber in the sewers — a perfect metaphor for the digital renaissance currently taking place in the City of Light.

Super Tuesday didn’t decide it, but the Potomac primaries might have done. The scales of the Democratic presidential primaries seem to be tipping towards Barack Obama, with today’s key endorsement from Andy Stern and his Service Employees International Union and yesterday’s nod from civil rights leader John Lewis. For better or worse, Democratic stalwarts are deciding that Obama is the most impressive and electable candidate.

Which means it’s time for a roundup of what an Obama administration would mean for small business. Obama himself would like to know, according to the question he asked on the business networking site LinkedIn late last year: “how can the next President better help small business and entrepreneurs thrive?” He got close to 1,500  responses, most of them boiling down to: fix our taxes, fix healthcare, build incubators, and get out of our way.

Obama seems to have listened to some of that, according to this interview: he wants to eliminate capital-gains tax on small business investment and spend $250 million a year on business incubators in disadvantaged communities. That’s hardly a whole chunk of government cash — what’s that, 15 minutes’ worth of war in Iraq? — but it’s not chicken feed. Here’s part of another question-and-answer he gave to the San Francisco Chronicle the day before Super Tuesday:

Q: I was a very liberal Democrat growing up during Nam, Civil Rights, etc. I became a Republican when I opened my own business and ran into the buzz saw of governmental “protections” of everyone except those that create jobs in small businesses. Based on a Baby Boomer’s experience such as my own, why should I vote for you?

 A:  My administration will also seek to level the playing field for American businesses - particularly small business owners like yourself. Many small businesses are struggling with the cost of health insurance, and I have introduced a plan that will save businesses $140 billion annually in premiums. My health care plan will help small businesses that want to cover their employees by letting small firms buy into a new low-cost, high-quality national health plan similar to the one offered to members of Congress. And my plan will reimburse employer health plans for a portion of the catastrophic costs they incur above a threshold if they use the savings to reduce the cost of workers’ premiums … I will provide self-employed small business owners a $500 tax credit to offset their self-employed tax.

Lastly, there’s one thing FB would love to know: How much of Obama’s small business policy has been influenced by his friendship with Martin Nesbitt, owner of The Parking Spot and a former FSB cover boy? Stay tuned to see if Nesbitt gets called to the White House for late-night basketball sessions.

Ah, election day. Future Boy is a confirmed political junkie, and it’s especially heartening to see a polling day where his adopted homeland of California actually matters. Accordingly, FB will be spending the night in the customary manner: at his computer, with a live stream of NPR coverage in one corner of the screen and a chat room with similar politics-mad journo pals in the other.

But now there’s one more window to keep a constant eye on: the Google-Twitter Super Tuesday mashup.  For those poor saps still unfamiliar with Twitter, it’s one of the coolest little apps to come out of a small business last year (the small business being Obvious Corp., brainchild of Ev Williams, the co-founder of Blogger). You and anyone you’re following on the service post pithy little updates on what you’re currently doing, or thinking, or anything else that takes up less than 140 characters. You can do this online or on your phone. The result: a kind of ticker-tape of community consciousness. After resisting Twitter’s lure for some time, FB gave in recently, and discovered it to be less inane and narcissistic than he’d feared. (If you’re interested, his user name is — what else? — FutureBoy.)

Twitter gave rise to Twittervision, where you can see random Twitter posts arrive in real time on a Google Map of the world, depending on where the Twitter-er comes from. That was fun, but little more than a curiosity. The Google-Twitter Super Tuesday collaboration focuses the random posts and overlays them on a map of the U.S. with all its electoral districts on display. The upshot is the most heartwarming sense of democracy in action that FB has ever seen. A user pops up in Georgia, bemoaning the fact that his mother-in-law and wife both voted for Hillary as “the least of all evils.” Five seconds later, someone in Kansas laughs at the people he’s seen still voting for Edwards. “Hello? McFly?” Obama wins Georgia, and Twitters pop up around the country, celebrating and cursing.

All we need now is for these people to actually talk to each other, rather than a website that gives us the illusion. But what an illusion — and what a great ad for Twitter.

It’s February, and that means we’re in the last five months of the Bill Gates era (the Microsoft chairman and Chief Software Architect is bowing out in June to spend more time with his Foundation). And how is the company celebrating? By blowing the company’s wad on Yahoo, the troubled search service. It’s quite an attempt to burnish his legacy, considering that the $45 billion price tag is more cash than the software giant has on hand. Indeed, it’s probably a little more cash than Gates is currently worth, given Microsoft’s plummeting share price.

What would a combined Microsoft-Yahoo, presuming it can clear all the regulatory hurdles, mean to the small business world? Here are a few preliminary thoughts:

– In the short term, very little. In the long term, more competitive online ad pricing, given that the whole point of the deal is to better compete with Google. Expect both sides to make some preemptive price-per-click cost-cutting.

– The combined company — call it Microhoo — would likely be cash poor for a while, and focused on the internecine battles of its own internal integration. Got a cool tech startup and want to be acquired? Take it to the Googleplex.

– If you need engineers, now would be the time to go fishing in Sunnyvale, Calif. and Redmond, Wash. The companies cover so many similar areas — search, ads, and dozens of other online services — that there’s going to be a lot of blood on the floor.

Microhoo could be a prescient combination that looks good once Gates has gone, much as HP’s acquisition of Compaq turned out to be a point for Carly Fiorina (but only after she was ousted). Or it could be a costly folly, the business world’s answer to the Iraq war. Either way, it isn’t likely to make much difference to the bigger picture of computing, where Gates once shone.

A report released by venerable research firm Gartner yesterday says Apple is likely to double its share of the PC market between now and 2011. The report also predicts that 80% of all commercial software will have open source elements by 2012. Around 40% of companies will be using Internet-based business software by then, Gartner says. Microsoft, in all these cases, is the loser — something worth thinking about while you consider that costly upgrade to Windows Vista or Office 2008.

The “Coming Internet Tidal Wave,” as Gates called it in a famous 1995 memo, is here, and it’s about to wash right over the company he is leaving. Thirteen years later, it is doubtful that the software giant has done enough to prepare itself for the tsunami — if it had, after all, why would it need Yahoo? Now it’s trying to appropriate some extra hands in order to keep its supertanker afloat. Savvy small businesses, meanwhile, can just keep paddling along in their flotilla of kayaks — and enjoy the spectacle of a grand old ship going down.