By relying on the smartphone’s built-in camera, the app for last-minute, day-of bookings is looking to enhance its carefully curated hotel choices with photo-based user reviews. Hotel Tonight started asking for users for simple thumbs up or down reviews nine months ago and began sharing those responses as “percentages of users who’d recommend this hotel” in September.

But the Snap Your Stay feature will add more information that a simple user recommendation. The new feature is sort of a guided scavenger hunt: users get a template with places to fill in six photos, with a request for specific highlights of the room you’re staying in an a “wild card” photo for something you liked about the hotel. The idea is for it to be simple and fast, with just a few taps on your phone.

“We wanted people to put in more info about what they liked about that hotel, but we didn’t think enterting a ton of text was the right paradigm for mobile,” said Hotel Tonight founder and CEO Sam Shank in a phone call this week. “We want it to be something you do during your stay, not after your stay.”

Other travel and booking sites want user reviews, but the major ones, TripAdvisor’s, for example, require text input even in their mobile apps. And Yelp doesn’t even allow mobile reviews — you have to sit down at a computer to compose them.

Hence, Hotel Tonight’s attempt to stand out with photo-oriented reviews. This method allows users filling out reviews to avoid typing descriptions on their phone — and users reading them don’t have to wade through pages of text on their phone when they’re trying to make a last-minute hotel decision. In addition to that, Shank says it’s a good way of only allowing reviews from people who’ve actually stayed at the hotel and booked through the app.

Because smartphone cameras are so good, Shank is confident that images submitted will be pretty high quality. But please, no Instagram photos: “We want Hotel Tonight photos to look different, don’t want them to look vintage, or black and white, or like they’re from 1977. So we have a dimmer switch to brighten them up.” Which, Shank points out, is going to be good for indoor room photos.

Hotel Tonight, just over two years old, is now in 12 countries, nearly 100 cities and has been downloaded to 5 million iOS and Android devices.

In addition to the photo-based room reviews, the app also plans to introduce on Wednesday guaranteed room rates: if you find a lower rate on another site, tell Hotel Tonight and you’ll get the dollar difference back in Hotel Tonight user credits.

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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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To demonstrate those improvements, here’s a comparison between the update to Podcasts (Free, Universal) and my current favorite podcasting app, RSSRadio Premium ($2.99, Universal).

Episodes to keep on the device

Episodes to keep

To start, managing downloaded episodes and choosing which episodes you want to keep on your device is important when you have limited storage space. As an example, one way to configure news podcast settings is to set your app to download only the most recent episodes, and to keep only the most recent episode.  This helps keep your list of episodes up to date, without taking up too much space on the device.  These setting would be configured differently for an episodic podcast where you want to listen to each and every episode produced.  Apple’s Podcasts offers just as good of control over your downloaded episodes as any other podcast app out there.

Download and notification settings

Download settings

This is an area where podcasts apps struggle: scheduling the downloading of new episodes. It’s not clear if Apple is breaking its own rules of when an app can be running and implement a scheduling mechanism that seamlessly downloads new episodes as soon as they are available. Other apps tend to struggle with this: they have to invent timed schedules or implement a notification system in order to wake up the app and fetch new episodes to automatically download. Apple’s download scheduler is about the best there is right now.  When a new episode is available, it just shows up.

Notification settings

When it comes to notification settings, Apple allows you to control just how and when you are notified of a new episodes availability. Many of the top podcasting apps out there offer exactly the same level of control.

Show and episode Information

Show information

“Show information” is information about a collection of episodes. You really just want to see the status of the entire list of episodes that are available, and manage how each episode is to be downloaded. Apple’s interface for managing shows is on par with what you need to get the job done.

Episode information

The same is true when it comes to each individual episode’s information: what you are looking for are things like the show notes. Apple’s Podcasts app has them right where you would expect them to be.

Now Playing user interface

Now Playing

While Apple may have updated the look of the now playing user interface to exclude the reel-to-reel tape deck, what is has implemented in its place is right on par with the rest of the podcasting app pack. You can increase the playback speed, set a timer for when to stop playback, share the currently playing episode with friends, and control where the episode is played via AirPlay. Forward, reverse, play and pause are easy to access as well. Really a nice clean implementation.

Podcast playlist

Podcast playlist

Playlists let you have control over the content you want to listen to. You may download and manage 20 different podcasts, but that does not mean you want to listen to all of them all of the time. Apple calls this new feature “My Stations,” but it really is just a playlist. The one thing that Apple did that I really like here is it added the ability to manually set the order of your playlist.  That way you can listen to your podcasts the way you want. Most podcasting apps only allow for the list to be sorted by earliest or latest.

Overall, Apple has done a really great job with the Podcasts app this time around. Rather then try to reinvent the genre, it picked the best features already out there and caught up with the pack.  There really are no gaping holes in the implementation as there were previously. In fact, Apple’s app will likely become my new go-to podcasting app. With a solid implementation for downloading new episodes, a clean Now Playing interface, and the ability to control the sort order of my playlists, there really is not much left to ask for.

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It’s not that the email product wasn’t doing well, they had 20,000 people signed up for it, founder Pierre Valade told me in a phone call from their New York City headquarters last week. But, “people were saying, ‘This is cool in the morning. But it’s hard to go back and find it throughout the day’ because they get so much email.”

He and his cofounder, Jeremy Le Van, realized people were looking for more than what the Sunrise email was designed for. “We were like, it’s not really meant to be read twice, or three times. We had the idea that if we had an app, people would be able to go back to it, so we decided to replace the calendar.”

A culturally current analogy to understand the difference between the original and new Sunrise: On House of Cards, the congressmen get printouts from their assistants of their entire daily schedules first thing in the morning; that’s what Sunrise was meant to be originally. As an app, the better metaphor for Sunrise on iOS is having that assistant follow you through the day, adding and deleting things on the schedule as they come up and giving you all the important, personal details on who you’re meeting with and where. The app is not just a schedule, but a full-on calendar that knows a lot about you and the people you’re meeting with.

Its smarts come from how Sunrise is connected: not only can you link up your Google calendars, both personal and professional, you can sync Sunrise with LinkedIN and Facebook. This allows Sunrise to know all of your planned meetings and events, but also who your contacts are, how you know them, and when their birthdays are. The way Sunrise has implemented all this information is with some delightful design flourishes. As you might imagine from guys who cut their teeth on mobile apps at Foursquare, design and the user experience are high priorities here.

The top of the screen is where you take care of your settings, a simple “+” sign lets you quickly add events in the app — the mechanics are very similar to adding events to the stock iOS Calendar app. In the center bar is an icon that has a number badge showing if you have new event invitations. Below that is a calendar that you can scroll through an adjustable window to find the date you want.

But most of the screen is taken up by the day view of the calendar. There is where you see the close attention to detail Sunrise’s designers have dwelled on. For example, next to each meeting event is a small profile picture of the meeting attendants; a small gift icon lists birthdays that day along with their Facebook profile shot. You can click on the person’s picture, and you’re given the option to post a birthday message on their Facebook wall right from the app, or — if you have them in your iOS contacts — text them a private “happy birthday.” Similarly, when a location is listed in an appointment, a map pin appears that lets you, in two clicks, jump to directions in the maps app of your choice — Google’s or Apple’s. If the appointment is a Skype call, the Skype icon appears in the list view; if it’s a lunch meeting, a food icon will appear. Each weekend also helpfully includes temperature forecasts for your location, along with small icons representing the forecast for each day.

Now, replacing the iPhone calendar is quite a popular undertaking these days. I wrote last month about Fantastical, which is much simpler and focuses more on helping you quickly add events to your calendar through natural language processing. Last week, Tempo debuted from the same folks behind Siri – it’s a smart calendar that uses artificial intelligence technology to learn about you and infer information about events and meetings based on past behaviors and other context. There’s also a handful of others, like Cue, from Greplin, which is a combination calendar and personal assistant — it integrates not just appointments and meetings but tracks travel info, package deliveries and more.

Sunrise is betting that its focus on using design to make a beautiful app that appeals to users’ emotions, and on making the user experience easy by not having to jump between a lot of different apps, will help it rise above the rest.

The email product was a side project when Valade and Le Van were at Foursquare; to pursue building the mobile app, they’ve struck out on their own. They are currently self-funded, but will be looking for funding soon to continue building out both the app and the standalone email product.

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Foldify was created by Warsaw, Poland-based Pixle, a trio of two designers and an engineer. The app is for the iPad only right now, and it will cost $1.99 on launch, but will be priced higher later. The concept is pretty basic: use the iPad to create digital papercraft art that can be broadly customized with colors, facial features, designs and more, and then quickly printed out, cut and folded to make paper creatures or objects.

Finished Foldify art

It’s very simple, but Pixle is not targeting kids — though they are going to be adding blank outlines that can be printed for young children to color them in with crayons or pencils. They want it to be for “everyone,” said Krzysztof Zabłocki, Pixle’s engineer. “I think we kind of made it that way — it’s easy to use but you don’t need drawing skills.”

The iPad is an unexpected platform for making things with paper, but Zabłocki says it’s actually the ideal kind of way to create something.

“The problem with creating content on the iPad is it’s not as good as your PC for most usages, like for productivity and stuff like that, I still find my Mac more useful,” he said. “But for something really creative, with a bit of fun, I prefer to be able to zoom in, zoom out, move some stuff. It really feels more natural. We tried to prove that quite a bit with Foldify.”

It’s natural because your finger is always your brush — there’s no complicated set of tools to select from. Instead of picking a brush size, you simply zoom in or out for more level of detail. Using just your finger to create something is much more immediate and engaging than a tool or utensil — it’s likely why kids take so quickly to touchscreen tablets. And that is what I think makes this app so wonderful and accessible. I would not pick up a papercraft kit at my local art store. But did I download the app on a whim while sitting on my couch? Yep. And to confirm Zablocki’s claim, it is very simple to use. There’s a menu of colors, patterns, facial features and accessories, as well as a color wheel with which you can decorate your object.

Foldify is the second app from Pixle, which is made up of Zablocki, and Mariusz Ostrowski and Renata Ostrowska, a husband and wife team of user interface and user experience designers. They strive for very simple, easy to use mobile apps. ”We really wanted to create something fresh. We saw papercraft and said that would be a great idea,” Zablocki said. “No one ever did that on mobile before.”

But it’s a decent bet that as the idea of 3D printers and the maker movement continue to catch on, coupled with simpler, cheaper examples of using tech to make art like Folidfy, more developers and artists will be encouraged to further explore how physical art can come from the devices we use every day.

Updated to note that the app’s introductory price will be $1.99.

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The app’s target audience is an exclusive bunch of folks, the kind who want travel tips and ask questions of each other, from “which yacht to purchase to where the best restaurants are.” Membership in ASmallWorld is by invitation only from a current member. The app’s intended purchase is to help members manage their personal and business lives with help from other members.

PaidContent covered the group in 2008, noting that it counted Paris Hilton and Naomi Campbell as members at the time and hoped to grow to 1 million members within three years. It currently has about 715,000 members.

The app will allow members Foursquare-esque services such as “meet-up” and “check-in” tools, which CEO Sabine Heller noted in the press release would prove useful as members travel to London for the Olympics this summer and want to connect with each other.

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I used it on a cross-country road trip a few weeks ago. My overall impression is that HipGeo works well for keeping detailed records of a trip, dotted with comments and photos. I had a lot of fun creating my animated travel diary after the fact too — I’ll get to how easy it is in a bit. But this is also clearly just the beginning of what the three guys behind HipGeo, Los Angeles–based veterans of Yahoo and a handful of other web startups, have in mind for this location-based service.

We’ll start with the final product (Note: this is an abbreviated version of my trip):

So how did I get there?

Download the free app from the iOS App Store. To start off, I’d say don’t add friends until you see how HipGeo works and you can decide how much information about your movements you want to share.

Flip on the “tracking” switch at the bottom of the home screen. You can pick “places” or “places and routes” mode. I picked the latter, which records your GPS location with the most detail. It not only sees the places you stop at, as the name suggests, but also knows the route you took to get there.

Once that’s set up, most of the work of recording a travel diary is being done for you. How involved you want to be from here is your choice. You can “drop a pin” at a specific location. If you want to “pinpoint” it (HipGeo parlance for “checking in”), it will bring up places like restaurants, landmarks and businesses around you to choose from. You can also comment on the place, like you would with a status update.

The most engaging parts of the final trip slideshow are going to be the photos you took along the way. One thing you’ll notice from mine is that I didn’t take nearly enough for such a long trip. So I’d encourage liberal use of your iPhone’s camera. You can just click the camera button in HipGeo, or you can upload photos from your device’s camera roll to associate photos with pinpoints logged during your trip.

Creating a travel diary

This was dead simple and far less work than I imagined. You sign in to the HipGeo site, click on “create and share trip” and all of your previous activity will show up. You can then pick the dates you’d like to share your movements from, and once it shows you that activity, you can uncheck the stuff you don’t want to include.

You can also do a bit of cleanup. Let’s say you had a bunch of photos from Instagram, like I did, and forgot to associate them with places you pinpointed. No problem. You can upload them right from your computer to the site. You can also go back and comment on your activity.

Comments and questions

The biggest complaint I have is the way it sucked my phone’s battery life. But I chose to use the most power-intensive mode, “places and routes,” which keeps my device’s GPS cranking away all the time. The result is that I ended up with a very detailed record of my journey, but I only suggest this if you plan to be in a car with a charger.

You can also select just the “places” tracking mode, which records your movements but not the exact route. HipGeo CEO Scott Daniel says this mode is designed to make a phone’s battery last all day. Alternatively, the least battery-intensive mode is to not turn on tracking and just take photos and drop pins. HipGeo will connect your route later, based on the locations of those activities.

Privacy is also something I was concerned about. You should only add friends who you are comfortable with knowing exactly where you are when you have the app running in the background. HipGeo founder and head of product Rich Rygg says your activity within the app is, by default, shared with friends only. You can choose if you want someone other than approved friends to see your trip: You can choose to list the trip in HipGeo’s public directory, embed it on a blog or send out the link to it via email.

“People you share with can only see that item you shared with them,” said Rygg in a recent interview. “We took the same approach as Google does: Once you have created the trip, there’s an encoded link and it’s only available to the people you’ve given the link to.”

OK, so now what?

HipGeo makes keeping track of your trips easy, since it’s mostly just happening in the background while you’re moving around and generally being a tourist. But Rygg and Daniel see much more opportunity, like friends and family knowing one another’s whereabouts — like, say, is your teenager exactly where she said she was going to be? — or just managing your daily activity. Using it to find the location of your friends on HipGeo, however, may be obviated for iPhone owners now that Apple has added that functionality to iOS 5 via the Find My Friends app.

But much of the stuff they’ve got cooking sounds interesting, especially what they’re working on in regard to photos. For example, says Rygg, most people that shoot with high-end cameras end up with geotagged photos. “It would be cool to [automatically] drop photos you’ve taken into a timeline or put a map next to the photo” within HipGeo, he said.

They’re also looking to integrate video, daily deals and alternative ways to view your trip diary you’ve created after the fact. They didn’t give an exact timeline of when this will happen, but it’s all stuff they’re working on right now. The other big project includes all Android device owners, with a version for that platform coming “soon.”

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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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