At Bat is available on iOS, Android and for Blackberry 10 devices. There are different price points — from free to $19.99 to a full live TV package for mobile and desktop that costs $130 a season. Unless users are watching a live game — which can stretch to over 3 hours — he said users spend about 10 to 12 minutes per day in the app.

But for all that time fans spent in the apps, Bowman — who will be appearing at our paidContent Live event tomorrow – said he wasn’t sure about monopolizing his customers’ time while on mobile devices. When asked at the Dive into Mobile conference Tuesday whether he could foresee an MLB-branded homescreen play like what Facebook is doing with Home, he sounded skeptical.

“I don’t know the answer to that. We’re always one for trying to experiment,” he said. “And we don’t mind failing.” But baseball needs to balance being available and not overwhelming its fans and users of its apps, he added.

“Ours is valuable content and we know people love baseball,” Bowman said. “But you’ve got to respect people’s time. To say we want to own every piece of every day, we’re hardpressed to say that. We like to be the hotel after a long trip.”

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The free app, called Coaster, is making its public debut Thursday for iOS and Android. But for the past few months, the two men behind the app, Inderpal Singh and Kevin Callaghan, have been quietly befriending bar owners, managers and some of San Francisco’s ample supply of drinking establishment patrons. The two entrepreneurs have been trying to convince them why they should let mobile devices make ordering drinks more painless for patrons — and how it can make keeping records and taking orders more efficient.

Your pickup receipt from Coaster.

I saw the easy, painless process of using Coaster first hand. Just five minutes after placing my order via Coaster, my phone told me that my drink was ready. I walked up to the designated area of the bar for Coaster orders, flashed the iPhone screen displaying a three-letter confirmation code in extra-large bold font, and a smiling waitress handed me the greyhound I’d ordered. It was as simple as that.

Singh is a longtime DJ from Chicago, who spent a lot of time in bars, clubs and lounges. While hanging around before and after sets, he easily identified an issue bargoers know well: the process of elbowing for space at the bar, desperately trying to make eye contact with the bartender, the annoyance of being passed over for a cuter girl down the bar even though you were totally there first, attempting to close a tab at the end of a busy night, and sometimes leaving the bar without your credit card.

Coaster attempts to cut right through all of that. Its design echoes the simplicity of the overall user experience. You select from a list of bars — the app is only at 15 San Francisco locations for now, with more to come — and a menu of what the bar offers appears, along with visual representations of all their bottles that you can swipe through to select your vodka or whiskey preference.

The rest of the process is similar to Uber: your credit card is already connected to the app, so after your drink is selected, when you check out, you simply add a tip and hit send. No physical transaction of money is necessary. Bartenders are bound to like it because Coaster suggests a $2 tip per drink (and most people leave that, Sing told me).

Coaster’s back-end ordering system — which includes software for receiving the drink orders on an iPad setup next to the register — means the bartender or server doesn’t have to keep track of receipts either; all of the data is kept in the software. 

Expanding their app to more bars in the city and beyond is going to take more funding to place teams in cities that can recruit bars that want the service. Their next stops, if all goes according to plan, are Chicago and New York.

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Check out a few screenshots I took of the app on my HTC One S below:

iFixit launched an app for iOS last fall.

Also worth noting: The app is open source, and developers interested in kick-starting their own Android efforts can take a peek at the source code on Github.

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The app, which is free, is available now in the iOS App Store and via the web for Android and Windows Phone 7 devices. WillCall helps people who want to make last-minute plans, specifically what kind of concert or performance they want to go to.

At first, there will only be a few events listed per week, mostly for smaller venues and independent artists. As an example, the first list of acts available in the app will be: Shabazz Palaces at Yoshi’s, VHS or Beta at Rickshaw Stop or theater piece Jesus In India at the Magic Theatre.

The coolest part of WillCall — besides enabling poor planners and procrastinators of the world — is its attempt to capture the inherently social nature of concert-going. Users of the app will get a push notification and an invitation when a friend buys a ticket to an event.

“We recognize that folks are generally going to attend shows in groups, and this is our first attempt to making that as easy as possible,” said co-founder Donnie Dinch.

WillCall, for now, is going to be most useful for those around the San Francisco area. However, Los Angeles and New York City are on tap for launch just after the SXSW conference next month, according to Dinch.

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ShareFile is worth checking out if you’re looking for a business-oriented file-sharing service, as it offers many features that you’d find in most of the other file sharing services, plus a few that won’t be found with more consumer-oriented solutions:

Security, user and file management

• Files transmitted and stored with encryption
• Tracking and alerts to confirm that clients have received files
• Granular folder-level permissions
• Bulk load client users from Outlook or spreadsheet
• Activity reports showing who uploaded and downloaded files and when

File access and transfer

• Upload individual files up to 10 GB
• FTPS over SSL transfers, compatible with traditional FTP clients
• Map a local drive letter to ShareFile account
• Automatic resume of interrupted transfers
• Access via the web, an Outlook plugin, and through desktop, iOS and Android apps
• API and command-line tools
• File versioning
• Full-text search
• Ability to request file copies on DVD or hard drives
• Ability to send a DVD or hard drive for initial population of files

Customization

• Custom branding
• Tools for your website, including a login widget and an upload form

Not all of the above features are available with all pricing plans.

ShareFile told me how one of its customers, a worldwide restaurant chain, uses the service to make creative materials available to their franchisees. The same customer’s HR department uses ShareFile to send sensitive employment documents.

The company boasts data centers on the U.S. East and West Coasts, as well as in Ireland and Singapore, but provides telephone and email help from a U.S.-based support staff.

ShareFile is available in several pricing plans, ranging from $29.95 a month for two employee accounts and 5GB of storage, to $499.95 per month for 150 accounts and 150GB of storage. All plans include unlimited client users. A 30-day trial is available.

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The KnowledgeTree service lets organizations manage and collaborate on documents, and specializes in collaboration within Microsoft Office. It offers features that documents anywhere; manage, co-author and share documents; make documents secure; and manage document lifecycles. The company says that it is interested in competing with the enterprise-oriented document management system offered by Box.net. The app also has have some similarities to cloud file sync provider Dropbox, and to document security service WatchDox, although security is not its primary focus.

The new Android app is part of a new release called KnowledgeTree Cloud 2.0. The app lets users:

• View, manage and securely access documents
• Sync documents between the cloud and the desktop
• Manage document workflow and versioning

The interface of the pre-release version of the Android app that the company sent me to try out is pretty bare-bones. You can search documents through the app’s search function, and view and edit documents using whatever tools are installed on your device; the app does not include a viewer.

Setup and security are not as friendly as I would like. The service seems to have separate passwords for the app itself, the KnowledgeTree account, and the cloud-based vault. Unfortunately, the app’s screens provide no explanation of what the differences are. It’s too easy to go back too many screens, and be forced to log in again. While I can appreciate the need for security, busy mobile workers will probably not appreciate multiple logins. Also, it does not appear to be possible to create a KnowledgeTree account from within the app; that must be done from the company’s website.

If your company is already using KnowledgeTree, of course, mobile access via the new Android app will be useful. If you are not a KnowledgeTree user, you can try it at no charge for 14 days. KnowledgeTree has several plans, beginning at $86 per month for 20GB of shared storage and unlimited users.

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The new application (iTunes link), which went live today, enables users to stream live to Justin.tv from their iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS handsets. For users of Justin.tv’s video viewing app, released earlier this year, the streaming capabilities will be added as a free upgrade to their existing application. That will give a huge boost to the live streaming startup, as it already has more than two million installed users for its old app.

Justin.tv’s live streaming app was built to take advantage of hardware encoding on the devices, and will enable users to record and stream continuously even as they move between 3G and WiFi networks. But the biggest difference between its iPhone app and that of other live streaming companies is that — like its Android app — Justin.tv’s signup, social sharing and chat features are all self-contained, while Ustream or Qik users have to log on to those websites to set up or use some of those features. It also enables iPhone 4 users to switch between front-facing and rear-facing cameras on the fly.

The launch comes as Justin moves aggressively into the mobile space. In the two weeks since it introduced its mobile app for Android devices, mobile streaming traffic has jumped dramatically, with mobile streams now making up about 20 percent of all live broadcasts. The availability of the live streaming platform on iPhone should increase that number even further.

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Justin.tv’s first official foray into mobile video as a platform provider hearkens back to its early beginnings, when Justin Kan began the enterprise to broadcast a live stream of his own life. Back then, the eponymous founder carried around a 22-pound mobile video kit to stream his life live to the Internet, but now Justin.tv users need only a mobile phone with a Wi-Fi or 3G connection to broadcast what they’re doing.

As a result, says Justin.tv CEO Michael Seibel in an interview, the new mobile app changes the use case for the live-streaming platform. While the company’s users previously were more or less chained to their desks (or wherever their PCs were) when they wanted to broadcast live, they now can shoot video from anywhere.

Justin.tv’s first mobile app is being released nearly 10 months after the first live-streaming apps from competitors Ustream and Qik began appearing in the iPhone app store. Seibel says the reason for the delay was due to his company’s plans to wait for the Android and iPhone platforms to be ready for the type of high-quality streaming that Justin.tv wanted to provide.

When asked why it took so long to get the app out to users, Seibel said, “If this platform isn’t ready yet, we could build the best app in the world, but it wouldn’t be a good consumer experience.”

That includes providing hardware encoding, which Seibel says is one of the key advantages the Justin.tv app has over competing apps, which were built on earlier builds of the iOS and Android operating systems. Other advantages include the ability to create an account, sign into and share with social networks like Facebook and Twitter without having to leave the app, and chat with viewers from directly within the application user interface.

One other key difference between Justin.tv and other platforms is its commitment to consumer applications. While Ustream, Livestream and Qik offer consumer apps, they have also have targeted enterprise and media customers with their streaming platforms. Justin.tv is focused on providing live-streaming tools to consumers and pushing user-generated content.

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