Stop me if you're heard this one.

Three guys walk into a bar. The first guy finds his very dry martini waiting for him, exactly as he'd ordered it from his iPhone 15 minutes earlier. The second guy pulls out his BlackBerry and leaves himself a voice memo suggesting he outfit his salesmen with the same app the first guy used. The third guy looks at the first guy enjoying his drink and the second guy talking to himself, then turns around and walks out. "Damn techno bars," he says into his very basic Nokia to the assistant back in the office who has to manually keep track of all his boss' appointments.

OK, as far as jokes go, that one's not very funny. But it does serve to illustrate a dynamic shift taking place among small- to midsize-business owners, according to a survey of 1,762 owners and top executives of businesses with between five and 499 employees that was conducted by American City Business Journals (ACBJ is the parent company of Portfolio.com).

In 2007, 56 percent of these business owners could be identified as technological laggards, those who believe wireless services and applications wouldn't have much use for their businesses. Jump to this year and the number of laggards has significantly dropped—now, only 41 percent report that wireless doesn't play a critical role to their success.

And as the laggards have declined, two other groups have risen. The mobile professional, who works out of the office more than 30 percent of the time and sees wireless as being crucial to his business, has gone from 20 percent to 25 percent of business owners. And techno advocates, who spend more time sitting behind a desk than their mobile professional colleagues, but who agree on the importance of wireless, has risen from 24 percent in 2007 to 34 percent in 2010.

Find out more about the differences between the three groups by clicking here for an interactive.

The bottom-line conclusion of the survey isn't much of a surprise—more small- and midsize-business owners are embracing mobile technology, and more view it as critical to their business' success. What is worthy of calling out is how fast the universe of tech-loving business folks has grown between 2007 and this year.

• Three years ago, 53 percent of the business owners said that technology had "greatly increased" their companies' productivity. Today, that statement is made by 76 percent of the survey group.
• A slight majority, 51 percent, of the surveyed business owners have said for years that wireless services were either extremely critical or very critical to their business. This year, that overall figure has risen to 59 percent, but a far greater number now tag wireless as "extremely critical" to their business—10 percent in 2007 compared with 21 percent now.
• The number of business owners who say that wireless is going to be even more critical to them in the coming three years has grown from 51 percent in 2007 to 62 percent in 2010.
• Nearly three quarters (72 percent) of those surveyed this year say their businesses have "gone mobile," an increase from the 66 percent who made the same declaration in 2007. Dig deeper and you'll find a big increase—33 percent, up from 23 percent—in the number of business owners who say they have adopted wireless completely, thereby allowing their employees to work effectively outside the office at all times.

The survey also found that more of these professionals are spending more time working outside of the office. This signals an uptick in the business-travel market, which has been battered by the Great Recession. In fact, the outlook for business travel today is better than it was in 2007 before the economy collapsed.

In 2007, 24 percent of the surveyed business owners said they were traveling on business at least once a month. This year, that figure rose to 31 percent.

Finally, the survey looked at the travel and phone brands that appeal to the three broad segments of professionals. All three groups favored the same top three airline carriers: Southwest, Delta, and American. And they had similar favorites among hotels, with Marriott, Courtyard by Marriott, and Hilton taking the top three spots (the mobile professional segment picked Courtyard by Marriott as No. 1, while the techno advocates and laggards opted for the broader Marriott brand).

On their choice of mobile devices, the mobile professionals and the laggards were in agreement, picking BlackBerry as their top choice, followed by the iPhone and Motorola. The techno advocates were bigger fans of the iPhone, with BlackBerry as their second choice and Motorola again coming in third.