As I wrote last week, Russell and I were in LA for the fall CTIA show, which they pitch as “Wireless IT and Entertainment”, as opposed to the bigger, more general spring event. I don’t know if it’s this supposedly narrower focus, a lack of interest in traveling to LA, bad timing or what — but quite honestly, there wasn’t a whole lot of news coming out of the show. A couple of big deals (News Corp. buying 51 percent of Jamba from Verisign and RealNetworks buying WiderThan), and that was about it. No one new product or service had everybody talking, and there weren’t many announcements that made a big splash.

That’s not to say it wasn’t worth it — as always, meeting old and new friends and plenty of MobHappy readers made the trip worthwhile. We both had some interesting meetings and interviews we’ll get out this week, but in the meantime, MocoNews did its usual comprehensive job, while PhoneScoop kept up with the new phones.

Overall, the biggest takeaway from the show was that mobile advertising is the hot topic in the business right now. Anybody and everybody that’s got the slightest angle was playing up their ad chops, but it doesn’t take much to separate the wheat from the chaff and it’s a safe bet that many of these companies — that were all about mobile multimedia last year — will have moved on to the next topic du jour by the time next year’s show rolls around. In the meantime, get ready to receive ads on your phone, in one way or another, if the last week’s been any indication.

[tags]mobile, ctia[/tags]