While the Consumer Electronics Show and other big events feature acres of tiny booths crammed one against another, Mobile World Congress features a different kind of bigness. The show is spread out over eight big buildings in a historic area of town. Every couple of buildings are set several flights of stairs up from the last one, with the final two buildings just a stone’s throw from the grand National Palace.

Connecting the buildings and lining the promenade between them are various smaller trailers and bungalows.

Unlike the cramped booths at CES, the spread-out nature of Mobile World Congress allows even moderate-size companies a good amount of space to show their wares. Even those with bungalows outside a main hall stand a good chance of attracting visitors. Companies that went with that approach included Acer and INQ Mobile, which was touting its new Android phone with quick access to Facebook and Spotify.

That said, some folks’ presence at Mobile World Congress is clearly bigger than others.

One booth that stands out is Google’s first-ever Android booth, tucked in the corner of Hall 8, just inside the entrance.

The two-story pavilion features many of Google’s partners showing Android applications, as well as a place to create one’s own Android mini-me, plus a sushi-bar-style conveyor belt featuring the many phone and tablet designs based on the Google operating system. Among the designs that scrolled by while I was standing there were well-known names such as Samsung and HTC, as well as less-familiar brands such as China’s ZTE and Alcatel, which is new to Android.

Perhaps the pièce de résistance of the booth is a slide that allows children of all chronological ages to relive their youth and glide down from the top floor back to the bottom. The most popular thing, though, was a series of collectible pins being passed out throughout Mobile World Congress by various Android partners. They were a hot commodity, and by Tuesday afternoon most booths were completely out of their supply of pins, placing green candy inside the dishes instead.

While impressive, the Android booth was not the largest by any stretch. One of the more massive setups I saw was the Ericsson booth, which occupied nearly all of Hall 6. A small Sony Ericsson booth was open to the public. Behind a security gate, though, was a massive spread for the many partners of both Ericsson and Sony Ericsson. It featured two bars and two kiosks serving various tapas.

There were meeting rooms and patio tables for more-casual interactions. On display were all kinds of Ericsson technologies ranging from its core infrastructure gear to all kinds of other products and research projects.

A few caught my eye, including a mobile payment section that featured a “Museum of Money” talking about days gone by when people used paper currency with all its flaws. Under glass were such relics as money, piggy banks and counterfeit-detection pens, while Ericsson showed off its many payment technologies.

In another corner, Ericsson was showing off a vending machine that is paid, not with cash or credit card, but via SMS message. Ericsson has a unit that serves as an intermediary between the vendor and the carrier to manage the transaction.

The way to solve that problem, and this is especially true of companies, governments and nonprofits whose domains are often used for the purposes of spamming, is to vouch for the messages you do send, making it easier for spam filters to correctly catch the ones that really are spam.

One widely used method of doing this is by using DomainKeys Identified Mail. DKIM is an industry consortium that over the years has absorbed similar email security work done by Yahoo and Cisco Systems. One key problem is that it’s tricky to put DKIM in place.

Google announced today that its Google Apps customers will get a new feature that easily enables DKIM-certified mail. Google has long supported the DKIM standard, and in 2008 worked with eBay and PayPal to authenticate inbound messages from those domains. Now Google Apps customers can get the same certification. DKIM-signing for outbound messages will be enabled for Google Apps customers who turn on the feature in the “Advanced Tools” tab of their dashboard. Take that, spammers.

Goldman is asking Facebook to expand the number of shares available through the deal, which may depend on the amount of interest among Facebook employees in selling their personal stock at this time. (Before the Goldman deal, employees were prohibited from selling shares, though they were able to do so for a short time last year as part of a deal with Digital Sky Technologies.)

Goldman plans to stop soliciting interest in the project on Thursday, according to the Journal. Only wealthy individuals and a few hedge funds and private-equity firms have been asked to participate, with a minimum investment of $2 million for people who do not work at Goldman.

Meanwhile, the interest of the Securities and Exchange Commission has been piqued by the Goldman deal, which was structured to avoid adding shareholders to Facebook’s fastidiously maintained count. The company has carefully avoided having more than 500 shareholders to avoid SEC disclosure rules.

It had already been reported that the SEC was looking at the recent growth of secondary market trading of shares in private companies, with some assuming that such an inquiry could lead to the practice being shut down.

However, The Wall Street Journal now reports that the agency is studying whether the 1960s-era disclosure regulations for private companies need a rewrite. That has some on Wall Street wondering whether the SEC inquiry could “open the floodgates” for similar deals, where “hybrid” companies are private yet have their shares traded in a limited way.

The idea that wealthy Goldman clients are the only ones able to invest in Facebook, a company with some 600 million users, doesn’t sit well with many people. BoomTown’s Kara Swisher yesterday described the Goldman-Facebook deal as “sneaky,” “elite” and “opaque.”

Some Goldman clients complained that they were given too little time and information to evaluate the Facebook opportunity, which only emerged this past weekend. Apparently enough of their cohorts did not feel that was the case.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Yes, that Steve Largent. For those who have been in a dead zone for the past two decades, the former Seattle Seahawks wide receiver went on to become a congressman and has spent the last seven years heading up the wireless industry’s trade association–a 90-person group with an annual budget of nearly $50 million.

It was a fun talk, though he did deflect some of the more divisive questions, including whether the carriers’ differing definitions of 4G is leading to customer confusion. In general, though, Largent showed the same soft hands he had during all those years on the gridiron.

Largent began by talking about his top priorities (spectrum, spectrum and more spectrum, plus a need for no new wireless taxes) and then I jumped in. Here’s an edited transcript of our talk:

On the need for more spectrum: It really is the lifeblood of the industry. It fuels the virtuous cycle….We’ll work with any interested party to get more spectrum. It really is the most critical element to the service that we provide.

What a lot of people forget about is how long the process takes to get spectrum to the marketplace. The last two spectrum auctions that we had took somewhere between eight and 11 years to come to market. We simply can’t wait that long. The FCC and the president called for 500 MHz in the next 10 years and 300 MHz of that in the next five years. That is a laudible goal. We’re seeing if we can’t even get more spectrum and get it quicker.

That really is priority 1, 2 and 3 for us as a trade association. It has been this year and it will be until we see that spectrum auctioned.

(Largent then went on to talk about the group’s actual No. 2 and No. 3 priorities, which I will summarize. No. 2 is to keep downward pressure on taxes, such as pushing for a five-year ban on new wireless taxes. No. 3 is all the warm-fuzzy stuff like environmental friendliness and those commercials that tell you to hang up and drive.)

Mobilized: Your organization opposes the extension of net neutrality into wireless broadband. Won’t this eventually mean the end of net neutrality as a whole since everything is heading wireless?

Largent: To me, this all goes back to the first point I was making and that’s this spectrum issue. The reason wireless is unique is because of the limited amount of spectrum we have today. To alleviate that, we have to have more spectrum and the more spectrum we have, the more services we have and the necessity of managing our network becomes less severe.

Until we get to that point–and we are not there yet–we have to have the ability to manage our network. If we don’t, you could have 911 calls blocked or people’s calls from their kids in college blocked or emergency alerts blocked and that’s not the system anyone wants to see.

You’ve been at the group since 2003, so you have seen some generation shifts. How would you say the 3G to 4G transition is going, relative to past transitions?

I think it is going very well. I think it is actually going faster. This is a quantum leap, going from 3G to 4G, and it takes an incredible amount of investment. We’ve seen the first of the 4G technologies with Sprint. We see Verizon coming on very quickly this year. AT&T is following closely on their heels. T-Mobile, they have some real spectrum constraints and yet they are coming on very quickly as well.

What do you make of the fact that different companies are using different definitions of 4G. Do you think there is some risk that if your members don’t use that term to mean the same thing that consumers won’t understand the benefits of true 4G?

No. What I would tell you is this is a highly competitive marketplace. What these individual companies do in terms of marketing their plans for 4G and their services and how quickly they are available to customers, that’s a competitive practice and a competitive field. I’m not going to weigh in on that. That’s a place I am not going to go.

Obviously wireless is one of the most competitive areas, with customers looking for new services and devices every couple of years, and a lot of money is spent driving to retain and attract new users. It seems like attacks have gotten sharper in the past few years. Do you think there is more energy going into attacks, or is that just the way the game is played?

There’s a lot of sharp elbows in any competitive industry like ours and that’s not something I am embarrassed about. I’m actually very proud of the fact of how competitive our carriers are with each other. It goes beyond the carriers to handset makers to application providers. There is a lot of competition going on in this space.

The other thing to look at is the amount of money that they are spending to advertise their services. I think three of our four carriers are in the top ten of advertising. It’s very competitive, and those elbows do get sharp.

Since, I’m new to the wireless beat, I asked some of my colleagues to come up with some good, topical questions. Here’s what one came back with: The 1983 playoff win against the Dolphins was one of the most exciting and surprising games ever played. Do you agree?

I can tell you that 1983 was when this trade association came into existence….That game was very exciting–Dan Marino was a rookie that year.

Participants hope to outrace Chinese engineers in bringing a thousand-fold acceleration of today’s most powerful machines–replaying a crusade in the past decade that leapfrogged a supercomputer in Japan that briefly held the world speed crown.

This time, the challenges could be much tougher. Achieving the next major leap in computing performance could require systems with as many as a billion electronic brains, as well as programming breakthroughs to exploit them. And Republicans in Congress bent on reducing deficits may be hard to persuade to subsidize such developments.

It’s not going to be easy,” concedes Horst Simon, deputy laboratory director at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, a major supercomputer user. But he says a case can be made that important scientific problems won’t be solved without a new generation of systems. “It is really an economic-competitiveness issue and a national-security issue,” he says.

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The shift can be seen in Redwood City, where many tech companies long have made their homes–but primarily in the Redwood Shores office parks where Oracle Corp. and Electronic Arts Inc. are headquartered. This year, a trickle of start-ups has moved into downtown Redwood City, with digital ad companies Turn Inc., YuMe Inc. and compensation research firm Equilar Inc., among others, relocating to the area since January.

“We used to be located in the Redwood Shores area, but I didn’t like it because it was too remote,” says Bill Demas, chief executive of Turn, which moved into a 10,000-square-foot office in the restored late 19th-century Alhambra building in downtown Redwood City in January. “We wanted to be in a more urban location, we wanted more restaurants and bars near us.”

Redwood City is just the latest beneficiary of a downtown migration by start-ups. In Mountain View, demand is high for offices around its downtown Castro Street area. In Palo Alto, start-ups are seeking space around lively University Avenue. Commercial vacancy rates are particularly low in the downtown areas of some Silicon Valley towns, with downtown Menlo Park’s prime office space just 3.3 percent vacant in the second quarter compared with the city’s overall 14.8 percent commercial vacancy rate, according to Cornish & Carey Commercial Newmark Knight Frank.

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“When she wasn’t there it was an office,” Blank said. “But when she was there it was more like a home, which made it harder for us to have all-nighters.”

Startups often begin in a bedroom, basement or garage, but those lucky enough to expand often need office space to accommodate that growth. Fortunately for Blank and his co-founders, Pixable managed to secure a spot at NYU Poly Varick Street, a city-funded incubator for tech startups. Along with affordable rent, the Varick Street incubator gave Pixable a rich environment in which to develop ideas.

As New York City’s tech scene continues to blossom, a host of locations like Varick Street have sprung up to support fledgling companies. Typically these spaces are open to any entrepreneur willing to pay, but some are more selective.

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