If nothing can convince businesses they’re dumb not to optimize Internet content for cell phones, consider the jaw-dropping 2000 percent growth in mobile-ready websites, as reported today by web mobilization tool providers dotMobi. Yes, that’s a two and three zeroes. Clearly, anyone who doesn’t try to reach customers with mobile content really are hand-delivering them to rival companies.

In its report, titled “Mobile Web Progress,” dotMobi found that the number of mobile websites grew from 150,000 in 2008 to 3.01 million in 2010, faster than the growth of websites viewed on desktop computers. Of the top 1,000 websites as ranked by the intelligence firm Alexa, 40.1 percent are mobile-friendly; of the top 10,000 sites, 29.7 percent.

Ronan Cremin, dotMobi’s Director of Engineering, pointed out something that’s easy to forget when marketers think it’s enough to have an app for a sexy handset like the iPhone or members of the Android smart phone family: “The mobile Web lets you address all of your mobile customers, not just those with iPhones and Android handsets,” he said in a release.

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Back in 2006 I spied something behind my apartment in San Francisco: A fantasy-style commercial being filmed to promote Hewlett-Packard’s iPaq phones–behemoths that were more PC than pocket–to young consumers. The gist was that a group of teenage boys were using a GPS game to find a beautiful teen princess. To my knowledge the commercial never aired, but I was impressed how HP–which had already snagged Shawn White to endorse its laptops–was thinking about targeting young people with its smart phones. At the time its handsets retailed for around $600, the Treo was the apple of geek enthusiast eyes, and the only smart phone-like handset with teen appeal was the Paris Hilton-promoted T-Mobile Sidekick.

So when HP announced last May that it was buying Palm, I think I was the only observer to get a little excited. HP pairing its decent, affordable hardware with the highly-acclaimed webOS? It could go incredibly right–or else horribly disappointing. We’ll soon find out, now that HP has announced the Palm Pre 2, with webOS 2.0 will be released Friday in France and later in the United States and Canada.

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I got to thinking recently about a case in Shanghai back in 2005. The friendship between two Internet gaming enthusiasts went horribly south after one “stole” the other’s virtual sword. Qiu Chengwei went to Zhu Caoyuan’s house after the latter sold the virtual weapon for 7200 yuan (about $1083)–and fatally stabbed him in the chest. The convicted man was ultimately given a suspended death sentence.

The case is an extreme example of just how much people value their virtual goods– worth remembering in light of last week’s report from Flurry saying that in 2010, iOS app revenue will shift from advertising to virtual goods sales, the latter of which will make up more than 80% of revenue. Once the Google Android market allows in-app sales, it’s a good bet that Android apps will see the same shift.

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A report released today by the firms Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies outlines a conundrum for anyone who wants to leverage mobile technology: Increasingly more consumers want smart phones, but they don’t seem that excited on those features that the phones so smart.

According to the report, 52 percent of U.S. consumers surveyed said they intend to make their next mobile purchase a smart phone, compared to the 29 percent who plan on buying a regular cell phone. Conversely, it’s what they plan–or don’t plan–to use with their phones that caught my eye. While 33 percent of those surveyed said their smart phone data plan usage would increase, 41 percent said they don’t anticipate using such service. And 32 percent will increase their time browsing the web on their mobiles, as opposed to 38 percent who won’t use mobile web browsing capabilities. A whopping 46 percent don’t plan to use mobile apps, compared to the 28 percent who will.

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Recently we’ve reported on group texting, or SMS, services that have started en masse, like SMS GupShup’s “reply all” launched in the Philippines and Fast Society’s conference calling/texting hybrid solution. But what might spark mass adoption of group texting is budget carrier Metro PCS, which today announced a free service powered by GOGII’s textPlus app.

How it works: A MetroPCS user sends the keyword “!chat” to the short code 60611, which then prompts him or her to enter the contacts they want to include in the group chat. Then textPlus connects the user to the group. It’s still a step more than being able to send a message to a list of contacts and have everyone be able to reply all, but it doesn’t sound that clunky.

What’s really interesting about the MetroPCS/textPlus offering is that it could foment not just widespread consumer use of group texting in the United States–but also consumer outrage against SMS rate hikes.

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One of the funniest things about the far-futuristic movie Johnny Mnemonic was the climactic plot point of having the protagonists desperately seeking… a dial-up Internet connection. But the movies remain forward-thinking when it comes to mobile video calls–unless and consumers and professional users like marketers clamor for it, the technology won’t become mass-market technology within the next five years, according to the firm Juniper Research.

It’s not like there hasn’t been  lot of ballyhoo. Sexy solutions abound, like Apple’s FaceTime iPhones, and the Qik and Fring apps for Android phones like the EVO. Thing is, Juniper points out in the new report “Next Generation Smartphones: Strategic Opportunities and Markets, 2010-2015,” none of these solutions are compatible with each other. “The use of video calling has had several false dawns and has remained flat in recent years,” Anthony Cox, Senior Analyst at Juniper, said in a release. “We forecast that there will be 29 million smartphone video users in 2015, but the market may be held back by a lack of interoperability between different devices.”

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“I’m the type who’d like to sit home and watch every party that I’m invited to on a monitor in my bedroom,” Andy Warhol once said. Imagine what he would have thought about the monitoring capabilities of smart phones. Especially with a new LBS app that connects fans of art–or of Pop–with all things Warhol within 1,000 miles.

True to the eccentric cultural icon, the app is called Augmented Reality and was created by the ad agency Brunner. Users’ phones, utilizing location-based technology, can find points of interest “from Warhol’s early career, life, and death in Pittsburgh to his work, friends, life, and celebrity in NYC,” according to a release. Technology from Layar lets a user point a mobile phone camera at a place or object and receive digital information on top of the image. The app integrates the Google Maps API to find both the user’s location and the points of interest, and offers text and image content to explain things like “frozen hot chocolate parties at Serendipity Café with guests Marilyn and Jackie O.”

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