As BoomTown did last year, I took to the much-less-crowded floor of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week with tech review kingpin Walt Mossberg and Mossberg Solution columnist Katherine Boehret to get their take on the scene.

Big news for Walt was the Palm Pre launch and the Yahoo Connected TV initiative. For Katie, it was a $2,000 cellphone.

As I also said last year, I jokingly call Walt the “Brangelina” of CES, since he is stopped constantly on the floor by fans who want to meet him in person and those who just want to kibitz with him about the latest and greatest trends in the tech sector.

So, here are this year’s video ruminations:

Last night, Walt Mossberg and I hosted yet another annual “What’s Hot and What’s Not in Personal Technology” event for the Churchill Club.

A brief rundown of the Palo Alto gadgetfest show-and-tell: An animatronic singing Elvis freaked out my No. 1 son, Louie, who played an excellent Luke Skywalker/gadget boy for my presentation; our guest gadget geek was Twitter Co-Founder and CEO Evan Williams, who was a delight with a mini-helicopter, a flat-screen reader and a wry wit; Walt showed off the new Blackberry Storm from RIM (RIMM), the alleged Apple (AAPL) iPhone killer (maybe not so much), as well as a fuel cell and more; and our crazy gadget maven, Greg Harper, co-founder of Gadgetoff, went perfectly insane with everything from tiny projectors to a creepy probe to minicellphone towers to USB ties and eyepads.

It was a lot of fun with a packed crowd, even in this econalypse-impacting Silicon Valley.

Here is a rather longish video, which is well worth watching. Yes, BoomTown is–along with Louie and Elvis–wearing a Yahoo (YHOO) hat.

Here’s the video:

[Photo courtesy of Dan Farber of CNET.]

While there are rumors that these wildly popular videos of a posse of cellphones popping popcorn by their rings or other unknown death rays are fixed, BoomTown actually does not care one iota, as the remote possibility that they are not is freaking me out.

Frankly, it would freak Orville Redenbacher out too.

But they are still riveting.

Here are a few choice ones with an international flair:

From Japan:

From France:

From the United States:

Was it just me or did you also get a bit of déjà vu upon reading a story today by the New York Times’s Laura M. Holson about yet another mash-up of a Hollywood talent agencies with Silicon Valley VCs.

That’s apparently what is happening with a new investment venture that includes the William Morris Agency, Accel Partners, Venrock and–filling out the unlikely foursome–AT&T (T), as a limited partner.

The focus of the investment fund will be to hand out cash–and, presumably, expertise–to digital media start-ups in Southern California.

While the Times drilled in on the presence of a big cellphone carrier–just the kind of company that my partner Walt Mossberg has dubbed one of the “Soviet ministries” for stifling innovation with overly controlling behavior in the mobile space–I am more focused on the rocky road of many such deals that have been struck in the past.

Now, I think all the players involved are very smart, including Accel’s Jim Breyer, Venrock’s David Siminoff and also William Morris CEO Jim Wiatt (as well as Morris’s Paul Bricault).

That said, a lot of sharpies have gotten sucked up in the past into the this-has-to-be-a-marriage-made-in-heaven dreams of the perfect Hollywood-Silicon Valley pairing.

Today, there are a number of interesting efforts, such as Comedy Central’s deal with the creators of “South Park” to create a joint-venture digital studio, as well as the better-known pairing of Sequoia Capital with the Will Ferrell-led Funny or Die comedy site (see my video interview with Sequoia’s Mark Kvamme about the site below).

And, of course, although nothing was actually settled, the recently ended writers’ strike was all about content revenues that might–or, perhaps more accurately, might not–be coming from digital sources in the future.

But if the past is prologue, this new group of investors might have to learn to be a bit patient.

Breyer acknowledges as much in the Times’s article. “There is always a fear, I know, that the bubble is about to burst when a parade of actors and actresses comes through my door,” he said, before noting, “this time the discussions are much more rational.”

I guess that is why the funding is in the tens of millions of dollars, the article noted, rather than the larger sums that have been spent in previous attempts to forge these kind of tech and entertainment alliances.

In fact, Holson herself penned a very good piece in 2002 about the failure of one much-touted experiment in such an integration–LivePlanet–between celebs Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and Redpoint Ventures.

That company was supposed to be a multimedia wunderkind, straddling the tech and media worlds with all sorts of gizmo-content wonders. One of its debut press releases in 2000 was, in fact, titled: “LivePlanet Unveils Integrated Media Concept–Entertainment Experiences that Span Traditional Media, New Media and the Physical World.”

Now, it is a shadow of that. According to a January article in Variety about the shuttering of its film unit, “LivePlanet evolved into a satellite company that [partner Sean] Bailey, Affleck and Damon would return to when not engaged in their own projects.”

In the 2002 piece, after a series of problems, including the bust of the dot-com bubble, Affleck himself got it dead right.

”If we stick around long enough and convince people we can do these things, we will matter in the new economy. I’d like to slip to the last page to see how it ends. But who knows.”

And, even six years later, who knows?

Here is the Kvamme video, in which he discusses Funny or Die:

After Walt Mossberg’s “Free My Phone” call-to-arms earlier this week, will Apple’s Steve Jobs foist the wireless banner of liberty?

Click on the image to make it bigger:

But BoomTown was not moved in the least by the post that CTIA President and CEO Steve Largent (pictured here) wrote yesterday on the blog for the wireless industry association’s annual meeting, taking place in San Francisco now through tomorrow.

Titled “Largent to Mossberg…Wish You Were Here in San Francisco,” he was apparently trying to smack back at Walt’s “Free My Phone” piece earlier this week, in which Walt blamed the large cellphone carriers for lack of innovation and compared them to Soviet ministries.

Largent is the rep of the wireless providers, so he had to respond, of course. But his argument basically was a complaint that Walt was not at CTIA’s show to see all the fabulous innovations, and he then also declined to address the core issues that Walt’s essay raised.

Wrote Largent:

If Mr. Mossberg were here at CTIA’s Wireless I.T. & Entertainment 2007 show in San Francisco, he’d see what the wireless world really looks like today. Instead of writing about the old 2G world, he’d see firsthand how we have moved into the 3G broadband world, where options open up for consumers.

“He would see that there are more than 600 different wireless devices available to consumers in the U.S. today, from carriers, manufacturers and third-party retailers. Wireless customers in the U.S. can exchange voice, text and photo messages, can download or watch streaming videos and listen to radio programs. There are more than 150 wireless companies providing service across the country, from nationwide to regional and local providers. And dozens more companies have entered and exited the marketplace, driven by entrepreneurial vision and ambition to make their mark. If those things don’t define the meaning of a free market, what does?”

Largent went on to claim the industry was not static or stodgy and definitely not Kremlinesque, and noted that U.S. customers got the benefit of cheaper handsets than in Europe, for example.

What he left out? That those supposed benefits come at the steep price of limited choice, onerous contracts and inability to be, well, mobile, all of which Walt discussed and Largent did not address.

There was indeed a lot of innovation to be found at the CTIA show from a lot of great small companies, but that innovation comes in spite of the carriers and not because of them.

As Walt wrote:

Let me be clear: Any company that spends billions to build and maintain a wireless network deserves to be paid for its use, and deserves to make a profit and a return for its shareholders. Not only that, but companies like Verizon Wireless or AT&T Inc. should be free to build or sell phones or software or services.

“But, in my view, they shouldn’t be allowed to pick and choose what phones run on their networks, and what software and services run on those phones. We need a wireless mobile device ecosystem that mirrors the PC/Internet ecosystem, one where the consumers’ purchase of network capacity is separate from their purchase of the hardware and software they use on that network. It will take government action, or some disruptive technology or business innovation, to get us there.”

Well, Steve?

Also, what is with this odd graphic from the CTIA show–the slogan for the event is: “One Show. Two Personalities. Enterprise. Entertainment.”

But the picture is a six-person beast (pictured here) that scares us a little bit. (Largent, not so much.)

One was thrown by ContentNext Media, the online news site whose flagship paidContent.org writes all about online media, where I talked to Publisher and Editor Rafat Ali about big trends in cellphones.

He was spot on. It’s mobile search, mobile advertising and mobile–you guessed it–social networking.

All of these trends are still slow coming to the U.S., but not for lack of trying by start-ups (and more because of the innovation-free carriers, according to this most excellent essay by Walt Mossberg posted yesterday). I saw a few interesting products at another event showcasing a variety of mobile-focused companies.

And, of course, I ran right into blogger Robert Scoble, who–as always–had a lot to say. And not always about cellphones (naughty, naughty Scoble!).

Check out the video here:

With thanks to engadget, we repost this portrait of our beloved leader at AllThingsD.com, Comrade Walt Mossberg.

Walt has long railed on the topic of the stifling of innovation by the U.S. cellphone carriers–especially to me over dinner when I am really tired–so it is nice to see it in a terrific piece you should not miss.

That’s especially true this week with the CTIA’s annual conference taking place in San Francisco. CTIA represents the wireless telecommunications industry, including carriers, manufacturers and wireless Internet providers.

Comments on Walt’s post were lively today on the site, many agreeing with Walt and his comparison of the wireless kingpins to apparatchiks of the Soviet Ministries, although some were wary of the burgeoning wireless efforts of both Google and Apple too.

In any case, it’s a great debate and one sure to continue for a long time to come.

I’m going to use my $100 rebate I get from the I-had-to-have-it-before-my-brother iPhone to get one! And I’ll even have a dollar left over for a refreshing can of soda.

Watch Colligan explain here:

Hopefully, the Centro will do a little better than Palm’s Foleo, which was demoed at our D5 and was dumped before the launch.

And, as an added bonus, here is that Foleo demo video by Jeff Hawkins: