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As a folklorist and a history buff, I've long thought about taking a road trip that involved stopping solely at interesting and obscure historical markers. A new iPhone app released today might not be what makes me follow through with those plans, but it'll certainly help locate

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.

Email can be a burden. Whether you're sitting at your desk obsessively checking your inbox for that special email while you should be doing other things or you're surreptitiously glancing at your smartphone while you're out on the town, it can be a constant distraction. Would phone calls have made it this far if you constantly had to ask your device "is someone calling me?"

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.

In 2009, the fact that Apple didn't approve Google's official app for its Google Voice telephony service was one of the big tech stories of the summer. Since then, the tension between Apple and Google has only increased, but just a few weeks ago, Apple allowed a few unofficial Google Voice apps into its App Store and today, the official Google Voice for iPhone app is making its debut.

I have a new favorite iPhone app. And I'm not alone. After only a week in the iPhone App Store, the photo-sharing app Instagram has won not just the adoration of many in the tech media, but has netted well over 100,000 users. And according to co-founder Kevin Systrom, Instagram is now counting new user sign-ups by the minute and counting photo uploads by the second.

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.

Tecca, a new mobile comparison shopping application, is the first company to launch from the digital media fund set up by electronics retailer Best Buy with Fuse Capital. The app focuses only on electronics, which makes sense, given its backing. Available now on both iPhone and Android with both a tablet app and mobile website in the works, Tecca offers pricing information, ratings, reviews and even a barcode scanner.

Netflix has finally launched its highly anticipated free mobile application for the iPhone and iPod Touch and it's available now for download in the iTunes App Store. Like its iPad counterpart, the app lets subscribers stream TV shows and movies straight to a handheld device, either over Wi-Fi or 3G. Membership plans for Netflix start at $8.99/month, which is low enough, perhaps, to entice people to sign up, even if they only plan to use Netflix for mobile streaming.

Somewhere between Napster and Kazaa on the historical timeline of online music sharing, there was Audiogalaxy. It was a great Web-based service that offered tons of high-quality and rare MP3s before it ran into some legal trouble and was shut down.

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.

Shopkick, a new location-based service (LBS) app for the iPhone, is launching today and it's taking LBS software in a direction we've been expecting all along. Rather than rewarding users with virtual goods or contextual information like user reviews, it goes straight to the heart of the matter - kickbacks, discounts, and real-world incentives.

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.

With college students around the country heading back to school in the coming weeks, the hunt for cheap textbooks is on. If you've ever spent a couple hundred collars on a single book, only to read a few chapters and put the book back on the shelf, then you know the unique sticker shock that comes with shopping for text books each semester.

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.

Lately, it feels like you can't turn around without hearing about another streaming music app for the iPhone, and today's no exception. Grooveshark, the streaming repository of user-submitted music, has finally made it through the gauntlet known as Apple's App Store submission process and is available for the iPhone.

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.