Historical iMarkers includes a fairly comprehensive database of roadside markers, with data on almost 130,000 local, state, and national historical markers. Data comes from participating State Historical Preservation Offices, the National Register of Historical Places, as well as other sites and users who contribute information.

The app contains information about the sites, as well as links to Wikipedia entries where available. It does boast the ability to read the descriptions out load, but as many of the entries are very basic name, address, and marker type and the computer-generated voice is pretty monotone, I don't think that the aural element is really the selling point for the app.

The app works on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad and costs $.99 to download. A portion of the sales, says creator Dzine Apps, will be donated to contributing historical organizations.

Enter AwayFind, a Web-based service that lets you escape your inbox by alerting you to those critical, "can't miss" messages. And today, AwayFind leaves beta with the arrival of an iPhone app that makes separating yourself from your email account easier than ever before.

That core service remains unchanged today, but now iPhone users get an app. The iPhone app does three major things. First, when you receive an alert via Twitter or SMS or any of the other methods, it only includes an excerpt of the important email, so you usually need to then switch over to an email program to read it. The AwayFind app lets you read the entire email...and then switch to an email app if you need to reply. Secondly, the app lets you set up filters while you're on the go. Third, the app now offers you native push notifications. You no longer need to have AwayFind send you a direct message on Twitter and then hook up to BoxCar to get the notification. It all happens in one app.

In addition to an iPhone app, the company has taken AwayFind out of beta and introduced three pricing plans, from the free, "tell me within 10 minutes" version to the $119 per year, "I need to know of important emails in under a minute" plan.

I've been using AwayFind in beta since last March and it helps to make sure that the important emails never go unseen. Now, with SSL security features, branding and Microsoft Outlook and Exchange support on the way, AwayFind might be able to gain some traction among the business crowd. Today, AwayFind opens up from private beta and you can sign up for free to see what it's like. Then, once you're in, download the iPhone app and leave your email behind - AwayFind will handle the rest.

The Google Voice app allows users to make cheap international calls from their iPhones and send free text messages to any U.S. number. Just like the HTML5 web app Google debuted earlier this year, you can also see your voicemail transcriptions in the app. In addition, the native app now allows for push notifications when you receive a new voicemail or text message.

The new app also features Google's Direct Access Numbers, which make connecting calls through the company's VoIP system just as fast as dialing directly from your phone. In earlier versions of Google Voice, the system would actually call you back and then connect the call after you picked up. Now, your phone will just call a central number and connect the call immediately. Sadly, though, these calls take you out of the Google Voice app and back into your native phone app.

Instagram is a free app, a simple photo-sharing tool that allows you to snap pictures and easily post them to your Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Flickr accounts. You can follow others via Instagram's social network, allowing you to view and comment on others' photos. Instagram also includes 11 filters for your photos, turning the photos taken by the camera phone - photos that even under the steadiest of hands and keenest of eyes tend to be rather mediocre - from the mundane to the spectacular.

Systrom says that Instagram aims to tackle three areas that other photo apps and sharing sites haven't quite nailed: high quality photos, an easy sharing process, and speedy uploads. And while the first part certainly makes for eye-catching photography - Instagram's filters seem to give the most banal shots a new depth and mood - the latter two shouldn't be discounted.

As Systrom noted in an interview today, the overwhelming response to the app has put some strain on the servers. And, he noted, during the brief times when the service has dropped and people have been unable to share, new registrations have gone done. Clearly, part of what's attractive to users is that they can take photos, adjust them with the filters, and share them not just with other Instagram users but to other social networking sites - all within the app, and all within a matter of seconds.

Instagram is a two-person team, Systrom and co-founder Mike Krieger, who pivoted to this app from Burbn, a location-based service, that raised $500,000 from Andreessen Horowitz and Baseline Ventures. Instagram is a great example of doing one thing simply and doing it well, and although Systrom says there are plans to improve the app, the emphasis for the time being is on maintaining the stability of the service, as the viral download rate and adoption of Instagram have not just exceeded the team's initial expectations but server size as well.

How Tecca Works

To use the newly available smartphone applications, you just aim the phone's camera at a barcode and scan, or you can search or browse through product selections instead. Once you have a particular product pulled up, you can delve further into detailed descriptions, read reviews and view user ratings. You can also access a slide show of product photos, find out what's included in the box, read product specs, add items to a wishlist or even buy directly from within the app itself.

But perhaps the app's most important feature is price comparisons. According to the app's description in iTunes, Tecca will compare prices between "top-rated online retailers." Obviously, one of the retailers consistently listed throughout the app is Best Buy. On some occasions, for example, within the laptops section, we found that Best Buy was the only retailer listed, or was only one of two. It's hard to say if that's just because the app's pricing database is still in the process of being built or if the app is designed to promote Best Buy and its exclusive deals more than its competition.

That said, assuming you are shopping at Best Buy, as many do when looking for electronics, the app would definitely come in handy, especially since blue-shirted staff members are almost always busy when you need them, but are never busy when you just want to quietly browse alone. Tecca would at least let you get some of your basic questions answered without a salesperson's help as you're struggling with your shopping decisions.

The app itself is well-designed - navigation is simple and straightforward, fonts are large and easy-to-read and there are useful filters and sorting mechanisms tucked away that let you quickly and easily refine your results.

Tecca's Competition

Tecca goes up against a number of other barcode-scanning and price comparison engines, including Microsoft's Bing app, Amazon.com's mobile app, RedLaser and ShopSavvy to name a few, the latter which helps you compare prices both online and locally. But Tecca's limited focus, design, ease of use and feature set make it worth the download for serious shoppers. It may not always find you the best deal, but for general fact-finding purposes, it does quite well.

As it turns out, it was not. Going mobile has long been part of the company's strategy, although it often hesitated to admit to that. In fact, in January of this year, only a few months prior to the iPad app's launch, CEO Reed Hastings claimed building an iPhone app was "not a huge priority for us because we are so focused on the larger screen," meaning, the TV.

Either he was diverting attention from the company's actual plans or things rapidly changed over the course of the following months, because in April, Netflix announced plans to release an iPhone/iPod Touch app. (Today's company blog post says this news was merely a "hint," - which is funny, considering the actual April announcement states clearly: "we're working on it.") In June, the company again confirmed the iPhone app's arrival, saying: "get ready to watch instantly on it this summer!"

And now, just before summer officially ends, here it is.

So, Is It Any Good?

The new app is in many ways an improvement over its iPad counterpart which often feels more like the desktop-sized website crammed into an iPad wrapper. The iPhone app, however, looks more custom-built. There are buttons for "Home," "Genres," "Search" and "Instant Queue," although it's sadly lacking queue management tools.

For those who have extra-long queues, the choice to display only 3 movies per screen (and the third, just barely) means there's a lot of scrolling ahead of you if you need to reach the queue's end. You may be better off searching for the movie instead of trying to scroll down to find it!

But it's a start, at least. And it does the most important thing: stream Netflix movies to your iPhone, without requiring a jailbreak and hack.

Now, there's only one thing left to wonder about - where's the Android version?

We've missed it, sure, but now it's back, and this time it's turning your computer into a streaming music server, giving you access to your home library from wherever you are: on any computer and even on your iPhone and Android smartphone.

Unfortunately we haven't launched yet and have been testing the service with limited users. We've disabled new signups and are a couple weeks away from opening our service to the masses. We are moving into a colo-facility soon with starting bandwidth capacity of 300mbit which will allow us to open the floodgates.

When we visited the site last night, we didn't notice anything saying it was in beta or wouldn't be open to the general public and quickly signed up. For those of you who didn't get in, we guess the only thing to do is to wait.

The first thing to note is that this is not the cloud-based music service we've been waiting to see. In order to work, the computer with your music library needs to be on and connected to the Internet - not asleep, hibernating, saving power or being even slightly environmentally friendly.

The program works by installing a client on your home computer which scans your hard drive for music. Then, either via the Web interface, the iPhone App or the Android app, you can access and play your music from anywhere.

The website is supported on the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome, and there's no limit to the size of the collection you can share. The company says it has successfully used Audiogalaxy with a collection of more than 80,000 songs without a problem. The service is is completely free, both on the Web and on your smartphone, and although the company's FAQ mentions paying for "uninterrupted access", we happily listened to an entire Radiohead album without any problem. We were also happy to find that the playing continued in the background when we switched out of the iPhone app.

For some people - those who rely on streaming music services like Pandora or MOG - the service may not really offer any benefits. If, however, you have 100 gigs of music sitting at home and you want to access it from your 16GB iPhone, Audiogalaxy is a sure winner. It's like having it all right there on your phone, with an easily navigable list of artists, albums and playlists that you can create using the website.

Shopkick wants to "turn offline stores into interactive worlds" using your smartphone and some interesting technology that detects not only if you're in a store, but what floor you're on. It even knows when you're in the changing room.

The app is launching with five big names as partners - Macy's, Best Buy, Sports Authority, American Eagle Outfitters and the Simon Property Group (an operator of malls across the country) - meaning many of the rewards come in the form of gift cards and items from those stores.

Shopkick's LBS Innovation

As the company emphasizes throughout its website, simply walking into a store earns users kickbucks. So how does it know you're there? And how could it possibly know you've gone into a changing room? According to The New York Times, "the app knows someone is in a store by listening for an audio transmitter placed in each participating store; the phone's microphone picks up the signal, which people cannot hear."

Will It Work?

Perhaps, the background, check-in-less aspect of this app that will save us. But if the only way to actually get ahead is to walk around in search of items to scan for points, we're not so sure it's worth the time.

Starting today, the app is available in the App Store as a free download.

A new iPhone app by Half.com could help students quickly find cheap alternatives to college bookstores with barcode scanning and and the ability to purchase items directly from the iPhone app.

The app, just released for the iPhone and available for free in the App Store, has a number of useful features, most notably barcode scanning. The app also saves payment and shipping information to make buying through the app more seamless. Users of the app can set standard criteria for their searches, such as the condition of the item and seller feedback, limiting search results to just those items they might purchase.

The integration of barcode scanning is a first for Ebay's mobile apps and follows a June acquisition of iPhone barcode scanning application RedLaser.

Take a look at the video for some highlights on an app we're willing to bet will explode in popularity among the college student population in the coming days and weeks.

The release comes on the heels of several other streaming music apps' admission to the App Store and offers a cheap, though sometimes catalog-light, alternative to other services.

Grooveshark had previously seen its app rejected by Apple and had done an end-around, offering a version of the app for jailbroken iPhones in the Cydia app directory.

Grooveshark comes onto the scene with a 30-day free trial of its app, which is free to download, and a much lighter pricetag of just $3 a month after the first month. As a peer-to-peer style service, Grooveshark's catalog is theoretically infinite and can, at times, contain some rare musical gems. At the same time, you might be hard-strapped to find some basics. As Matt Rosoff, a writer for CNET and a fellow Pink Floyd fan, points out "there are occasional gaps: Only one song from Pink Floyd's 'Animals' album showed up".

Like other services, Grooveshark also allows users to download songs for times when 3G is not available - a feature we were really fond of when we took a look at MOG - but doesn't currently support background operation. Thankfully, multitasking is one of the slick updates the company is working on for the next version.

The app's functionality is similar to other services, though MOG remains our favorite to date. The search feature could use a little help with sorting by either artist, album or song name, but for the price, it's pretty hard to beat. $10 a month feels like an actual bill, whereas $3, though not a huge difference, feels like something that could go entirely unnoticed every month - especially for the constant stream of music wherever you go.

Although location-based social networking (LBS) apps like Foursquare, Gowalla, MyTown, Brightkite and Loopt may be all the rage right now - in terms of media hype at least - reports have shown that only a relatively small handful of early adopters are actively using these apps on a regular basis (a few hundred thousand up to 4 million, depending on the service).

Instead of tapping into the niche market of LBS users to find local hotspots, The Hotlist figured out a different way to surface these so-called "geo-trends": by tapping into Facebook and Twitter instead. The service analyzes public events and other data across social networks in order to offer a personalized "things to do" application. But up until today, that app was Web-only.

The Hotlist, launched in September 2009, digs through real-time updates on Twitter and aggregates location-specific data from it, Facebook, Google and Yelp to calculate what specific events are popular based on your network of friends and your "friends of friends."

Unlike LBS apps, which require you to announce your current location by way of a GPS-matched "check-in," a feature which worries some privacy advocates, the Hotlist looks at where people plan on going by way of Facebook Events and other non-GPS sources. It also respects the Facebook privacy settings you already have in place. "Nobody will know where you are unless you want them to," explains the site's FAQ.

In May of this year, The Hotlist received $800,000 in angel financing, funds from which the social aggregation startup used to launch the new mobile application. The iPhone app is first to arrive, but apps for Android and Blackberry will soon follow.

Local Trends via your iPhone

With the new Hotlist mobile application, users can see which spots their social networking friends have visited in the past, which ones are popular now and which ones friends plan on visiting in the future. It displays the venues closest to your location - a handy feature to have on a mobile app. It even provides venue details like friend attendance, photos, real-time Twitter updates and the guy-to-girl ratio.

In addition to tapping into your own personal social networking friend lists, The Hotlist also offers the social activities of over 100 million people worldwide, all based on public data.

Currently The Hotlist has only around 160,000 users, reports the company. However, unlike its LBS competitors, the app doesn't need to obtain critical mass in order to provide relevant data. Instead, The Hotlist uses data from networks that have it to spare in large quantities - most notably, the data from Facebook's 500 million users and Twitter's 100 million users.

You can download The Hotlist iPhone app from here. A Facebook account is required to use it.

Previously, my favorite option for creating panoramas on my iPhone has been an app called AutoStitch. To make panoramas in AutoStitch, I have to first snap a series of pictures, making sure to leave enough overlap for each image to fit together with the next. Then I would fire up the app, select the right pictures, and wait about 30-60 seconds for the app to complete the stitching process.

With 360 Panorama, the time it takes to create a panoramic image is significantly reduced. Once the app loads, simply hold the phone up in the position you wish to begin the panorama, tap the screen, rotate the view either left of right and tap the "Save" button to store the panorama. Panoramas are created right before your eyes in real-time as you pan side-to-side, eliminating the uploading and waiting time in other apps.

"Literally every single frame is used. Behind the scenes, our computer vision-based system is processing every frame and calculating precisely how much you moved," says Reddy. "The vision system is extremely fast and precise, and there's nothing like it on the iPhone period -- panorama or otherwise."

So how well does the app actually work?

As for capturing and saving panoramas, the app works as advertised - at least on the iPhone 4 where gyroscopic readings help the app better determine movement. The speed and ease at which it can create panoramas is the selling-point of this app, and is the only area in which it beats apps like AutoStitch. The overall quality and resolution of the images, however, doesn't come close that seen from AutoStitch.

The example below is a 360-degree panorama captured in front of my house. Upon closer inspection, we can see vertical lines representing the various images captured by the app. Additionally, the app realigned the start and end points of the panorama (just right of the tree) to the middle of the image, causing a jarring overlap. On other attempts, the app misjudged where the images should begin and end, causing a large black void to fill the middle of the image.

The resolution of the images created with 360 Panorama is also much smaller than those that can be created using an app like AutoStitch. The above 360-degree shot is 2048 pixels wide at full resolution while this AutoStitch panorama of less than 90 degrees I made a few weeks ago is 3222 pixels wide.

AutoStitch also includes several handy features which 360 Panorama lacks - namely the ability to crop images. Users will need a third-party app to crop their images from 360, and will also be missing features like export settings and AutoStitch's advanced exposure blending.

The verdict for 360 Panorama is a bit of a toss-up. If you want the speed and ease of creating panoramas with the steady wave of a hand, then this is definitely an app you need to try out. But if you want higher quality and resolution from your panoramas, then you might be better off sticking with an app like AutoStitch.

Both apps leverage a database that contains GPS data for each hole on over 33,000 courses across the globe. Based on the user's location as determined by the phone's GPS, the apps can provide highly accurate distance estimations to various points on the course, including greens, bunkers, doglegs and layup points. Golfscape takes it a step further, however, providing this information in a heads-up AR view.

So how well does it work? During my testing while playing nine holes with my father, we were both very impressed with app's ability to accurately determine our distance from various landmarks on each hole. The app tells you how strong your GPS signal is and will adjust the range of its estimates accordingly, but in most cases the app was very accurate.

At one point I held my phone up, pointed it at the green and waited a few moments for the app to zero in on my distance. Eventually it settled on 73 yards. I looked around on the course for a sprinkler head, which normally has the distance written on it, and there just so happened to be one right next to where I was standing. It had the number "73" written on it.

As for the heads-up augmented reality view, the app does a decent job of displaying the information in perspective, but it could be better. The app wasn't always accurate in pointing out where the center of the green was, and when panning the phone side to side, the data would skip around the screen. Unlike some other apps, Golfscape is not yet taking advantage of the iPhone 4's added gyroscope, which provides a far smoother AR experience.

The other problem is not so much one with the app but with the use of smartphones outdoors. The iPhone's glass screen makes viewing the information very difficult to do on a sunny day, though holding the phone up in the AR view does help avoid some of the glare and brightness problems.

The app defintely has the wow factor that is sure to impress your less tech-savvy golfer friends, but I would suggest sticking with the $29.99 Golfshot app that includes so much more functionality. For just $10 more than Golfscape, you get the same highly accurate GPS distances, plus score keeping and stat tracking - just no fancy AR view.

If anything, Golfscape is a fun app to show off and a great way to explain the complicated field of augmented reality to a layperson. The app sparked interesting dinner conversations that left random family members with a piqued interest in augmented reality. The Ben & Jerry's AR app didn't hurt their interest either, and it is that interest that will help push AR into the mainstream.

When the app opens it pinpoints the user's location and shows key demographic data about that area. According to the application, within a mile of my house are just over 15,000 people, with an average age of 35 and an average income of over $100,000. The app also tells me what percent have a college education, are homeless, are home owners, and how much is spent on retail shopping in my area.

Using the comparison tool, I can see that people in my area make well over the national average income, and they spend their money more too. The tool also allows me to compare my neighborhood to any other location within the U.S. by either dropping a pin on the map or searching for an address.

If you have lots of addresses in your contacts (which oddly I do not), the application can also randomly compare any location to that of your friends and family with a shake of the phone. Using the "Smart Map" feature, you can provide search criteria, such as population, income and media age ranges. The app will then color code results as you search for them or drop pins on the map.

While this free application is fun for an everyday user like myself, it is actually aimed at people who already make use of the BAO on the Web. This includes realtors, who can get instant demographic data about neighborhoods in which they are trying to sell a house. Anyone looking to understand more about their neighborhood or any other neighborhood would certainly benefit from having some basic BAO functionality on their iOS device.

Check-ins and Check-in Streams

The Web page for Geolorean answers the first question we had about this application: Is this new? The site reads: "What do you mean you've seen this? It's brand new."

Well, indeed it is.

Check.in only launched out of private beta yesterday and already here's an app taking advantage of the functionality it provides. The App Store, though, shows an "Update Date" of May 6th for Geolorean and the app itself launched back in late April. That means it actually launched even before Check.in went into public beta. If only we had known!

Geolorean (love the name, by the way) is a creation of two Chicago developers, Andy LaVoy and Max Beatty. With this $0.99 app you can view an aggregated stream of your friends' check-ins and you can locate your friends on a map where you can see the details of each check-in. And when you're out and need to check in somewhere, you can use the Check.in Web service, which is integrated into the application by way of a Web view. When selecting this option, Check.in launches within the app, not in an external Safari window.

The iTunes app description promises more "updates and expanded features soon," but apparently that won't include any additional location-based services for the time being. According to a Q&A on the app's homepage, it will add other services only "if another one gets popular." (Does no one use Loopt?) However, the site does mention that you'll soon be able to use the app to merge contacts across the three supported services into a single contact in order to better track their check-ins.

There isn't much more to this app, but I tried it this morning and it worked well without any crashes or noticeable bugs. Of course, I'm sitting here at home writing about it so I haven't been able to test the Check.in feature yet. But based on my previous experience with the standalone Web app, it should do just fine.

If you're interested in trying Geolorean for yourself, you can grab it from iTunes here.