Last week, the SF mobile community dropped whatever they were doing and headed off to CTIA Wireless. The conference officially covers 4 days, if you include a day of preshow telecom university classes. But it is jammed packed with other sessions and parties. In addition to meetings and networking, I spent time at Location 2.0 and Mobile Jam. I recommend both highly.

Location 2.0 is sponsored by SiRF and others. Its focus is on mobile location and tracking. What I did not realize until I got there was that it included a pitch session for startups to discuss their take on location for the mobile device. Next time, Geogad will be entered for this competition. The big winner was DialDirections. Congratuations.

The Mobile Jam was held the last day of the conference. This was more of an unconference, free-flow event. This really attracted the hard core mobile people and/or the local mobile people. The highlight of the session was the announcement of a new mobile app platform from T-Mobile. It is designed to get mobile apps before the end customer with fewer headaches for both the carrier and the developer. The key is that T-Mobile seems to realize that they have trained the end user to call their support lines with all of their questions. This behavior is costly for the carrier and frustrating to the end customer and the developer. The new model going forward will be that the customer will realize that they need to call the app developer with any problems that they might have.

Gee, it sounds like the regular Internet and PC environment. Finally!

If you are in mobile communications, the place to be this week is CTIA Wireless in San Francisco. The concentration of wireless knowledge is just about as great as the concentration of free booze and food.

The major event for Geogad was SiRF’s Location 2.0 summit. This full day event consisted of moderated panels from industry experts and pitches from local startups. The part that I liked most was the frank talk about the new GPS system that Europe is creating to compete with the US GPS satellite system. According to the experts, the 3 billion euro project will actually end up costing 10 billion and will be competed around 2016, not the current estimate of 2013. Ouch! It has been a great way for the US system to become more competitive and to improve faster. It does make you wonder if the European system might be out of date by the time it is put in place.

I was not able to attend the keynotes at CTIA, but this gave me a wonderful way to ask people what they thought were the best points from the keynotes. The thing that seemed to make waves was Yahoo’s Blueprint system. It seems to be a free way for developers to quickly and easily make mobile web sites and mobile widgets and web apps. I cannot speak to the usefulness or the quality of Blueprint, but it may make things more difficult for the service providers that are currently creating the mobile sites for small and medium sized businesses.