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 It does make you wonder if the European system might be out of date by the time it is put in place.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.