According to Nielsen, there are reportedly 57.3 million mobile users in the United States. And as Jessica Tsai reported earlier last month,  two-thirds of today’s companies have expressed the intent to deploy mobile applications to extend business operations.  Given those statistics, the future of mobile is now.

For those reasons and to expand its reach in the collaboration software market, enterprise 2.0 vendor Socialtext has released a new version of its mobile software. The company, perhaps best known for bringing Twitter-like status functionality to the enterprise, is now allowing customers to access its collaboration software via the Web on their smartphones. According to Socialtext President, Chairman, and Co-founder Ross Mayfield (a recent recipient of CRM Magazine’s 2009 Influential Leader award), the Socialtext Mobile platform capitalizes on the following capabilities:

1. Microblogging,
2. Activity Streams,
3. Social Networking, and
4. Collaboration with content through Workspaces.

Socialtext Mobile is available for all customers at no extra cost. “In terms of mobile design, it’s making the choices of what not to include, make it simple yet effective and how do you make sure you’ve done a  mobile application that’s designed for speed and for the different usage patterns that people have,” Mayfield says. He adds that the decision to host the application via the Web made a lot more sense. For users running the application behind the firewall, they have the ability to leverage Motoroloa’s Good Mobile Connection to provide additional secure transport to the Socialtext software.

With its Free 50! promotion, Socialtext is offering a free trial version of its software online for up to 50 users. Those who sign up will also be able to log into Socialtext Mobile without cost.