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Chinese Investment in Africa

China has been heavily investing in Africa the past few years.

SodaSnap offers a simple app interface that matches the simplicity of the final product. To get started, choose an image. You can either select a photo from your iPhone’s camera roll, snap a pic of your surroundings, or use your location.

Using your location brings up the maps app from which you can screengrab. This doesn’t make the most compelling picture postcard, but it may be a useful tool for meetings and invitations.

Once you’re happy with your image, you can add text and hit the “Share” button. The way the app is designed, it’s pretty much what you see is what you get, so you’ll have a good idea of what the recipient will see in the inbox. As well as email, there are options to share to Twitter and Facebook.

OSHKOSH, Wisconsin – The iPad has been a huge hit with pilots who use it for everything from flight planning to navigation. Now synthetic vision can be added to the list of capabilities available to pilots using the device in the cockpit.

Synthetic vision has been around for a few years, using glass panel cockpit displays costing tens of thousands of dollars. The technology renders a three-dimensional digital representation of what a pilot sees out the window. It looks similar to a flight simulator. Everything from mountains to buildings can be shown, providing pilots with a picture of their surroundings at night or when flying in the clouds.

Now the technology is available in a 99-cent app (with additional subscription fees).

WingX Pro7 from Hilton Software has been a best selling navigation app on the iPad, providing aeronautical charts, weather and terrain capabilities. Today the company announced it has added synthetic vision.

The top image shows the map view of an airplane flying over the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. The lower image shows the synthetic vision showing the coastline, runways and mountains off to the right. An video of the synthetic vision appears below.

WingX Pro7 developer Hilton Goldstein admits his app is not to be used as a primary navigation tool. The FAA requires much more testing of primary navigation hardware and software used in airplanes, and that adds to the cost of more expensive systems. But used as a backup tool for pilots who may or may not already have synthetic vision capabilities, the iPad app provides a tremendous amount of information for a small investment.

A subscription for the maps and terrain database costs $99 annually, and the synthetic vision subscription is an additional $99 per year.

Hilton Software also is partnering with Levil Technologies to offer an attitude and heading reference system that, when connected to WingX Pro7, turns the iPad into an artificial horizon-type device that displays pitch and bank. The tiny AHRS unit is the size of a business card and about one inch thick. It transmits wirelessly to the iPad and provides more backup capability in the event of an instrument failure.

Image/Video: Hilton Software/BA3

Hipmunk, the trendy Y Combinator travel startup that simplifies the flight search process, is out with an iOS application for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad .

The Hipmunk mobile application iTunes link experience is the perfect complement to the web experience and allows for fast sorting and filtering of flights. The app includes Hipmunk’s characteristic “Agony” filter for automatically sorting flights by a combination of annoyance factors — stops and travel duration, for instance.

“Like any good iPhone app, Hipmunk does its best to be fun,” says developer Danilo Campos. “You can zoom and scale your search results just like the Maps and Photos apps.”

Booking flights through the Hipmunk application has its pros and cons. Should you find a suitable flight, you can buy the ticket through a third-party vendor like Orbitz on your mobile phone, but it’s not an in-app experience.

One nice convenience, however, is that should you wish to abort the mobile booking process and book online instead, Hipmunk essentially bookmarks the saved flight for you. You can then visit Hipmunk’s website and enter a secret word to continue booking the flight online.

The newly released application offers travelers a more convenient alternative to flight search via mobile devices, and it’s the product of Campos’s passion for great user experience design.

Campos gives a “damn” about user experience design; he penned a blog post back in October commending the Hipmunk team for a job well done in that department. Campos’s impassioned stance on design caught the attention of Hipmunk co-founder Adam Goldstein and landed him a full-time position with the startup, where his first order of duty was to build the iPhone application.

Hipmunk is still a very young startup, but it’s managed to raise more than $5 million in back-to-back seed and Series A funding rounds. The mobile app will likely help the startup reach a larger, more mainstream audience, and allow it to find its footing amongst more traditional flight search tools.