Joe McCarthy at Gumption provides a solid review of some standout sessions at the just-finished Ubicomp 2006 event in Orange County, California. Among his notable quotes are:

"The field seems to be moving beyond "technology in search of a problem" (an early rant, or concern, of mine) and appears to be reaching a consensus on some problem areas: location, location and location ... and so I might recast my earlier concern as "technology in search of an application" within a problem domain.  I am glad to see so much progress being made on location sensing and tracking technologies, and I do share the underlying intuition that these technologies will support useful applications."