Recently we were contacted by Alfred Sawatzky, a product manager for iFactor Consulting, who had a Smallworld-using customer interested in seeing how iFactor’s Web Maps Connector would perform when serving imagery via LizardTech’s Express Server® Software. Web Maps Connector provides access to the data and services provided by Microsoft Bing™ Maps in GE’s Smallworld applications.

With a copy of Express Server, Alfred created a simple workflow within the corporate firewall where he demonstrated how to use Express Server to serve a potential customer’s internal MrSID® imagery overtop Bing data from the cloud within Web Maps Connector. In this demonstration, the customer has MrSID imagery of Pennsylvania that is more recent than the imagery from Bing and they wanted to expose their current imagery over the old to ensure they’re dealing with the most up to date data.

As Alfred mentions in his blog, “sworldwatch”, although GE’s Smallworld SOMs (spatial objects managers) provide a plug-in for viewing MrSID files, “The nice thing about using Express Server is that it does all the georeferencing/tile-stitching for you so you no longer need to configure a MrSID SOM with things like multiple path names, coordinate system, etc. You can use the GE WMS SOM to simply connect to the Express Server layers and you get all the imagery stitched together.” You can “leave the MrSID file access to Express Server and enjoy a seamless cross-tile experience in Smallworld using the Web Maps Connector module.”

This is a new and exciting prospect for both iFactor Consulting and LizardTech, who can now offer another great software solution to Smallworld customers working with MrSID imagery.

This week LizardTech attended the ASPRS 2011 Annual Conference. Every year the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing holds its conference in a different city and this year it was held in fabulous Milwaukee. In case you’ve never heard of it, it is a great little city with the best beer (which is saying something since I am not a lover of beer to begin with) about an hour north of Chicago.

New Glarus Spotted Cow beer.

Arriving well into the double digits of the evening we got the car and headed to the hotel. Driving through town late gave the false impression that Milwaukee is a quiet little town with little action…au contraire! It is a busy college town full of great restaurants and lots of friendly folks.

Bright and early Monday morning LizardTech sales engineer Robert Parker, LizardTech business development manager and ASPRS boardmember Jeff Young and myself hosted a four-hour User Group meeting. We had a steady flow throughout the morning of new and long standing MrSID format users, a great way to start the week.

Tuesday was a lively day on the tradeshow floor in our booth. Past ASPRS conferences have been relatively slow but not this year. The exhibits were hoppin’ with customers; one booth even had a magician.

The famous Wisconsin cheese curd. You often find families of them huddled in newspaper cones like this one.

Wednesday LizardTech product manager Jon Skiffington gave a presentation on MG4 compression for LiDAR. It was well attended and there were great customer questions and feedback.

That afternoon, Robert and I had the pleasure of a two-hour drive to Madison to meet with a small group at a Wisconsin government agency. They are starting to work with more lidar imagery and may have a use for LizardTech’s LiDAR Compressor software in the near future. More importantly, they have decades of MrSID imagery that needs to be served out. LizardTech’s Express Server image serving software would be a natural fit so Robert demonstrated its installation and ease of use. Now if only the state purse were bottomless…

The “Ladybug Building” on N. Water near E. Michigan.

Thursday was the final day of the conference and it was only a half day. The majority of the LizardTech crew flew out Thursday. I, however, wasn’t flying out until Friday morning so this gave me some time to get to know Milwaukee a little more intimately. First on the agenda, find some lunch. 

After consulting Yelp! on my newly acquired iPhone 4 (it really will change your life) I settled on Oscar’s Pub & Grill. It was a 2.2 mile walk from the hotel and after a week of cheese soup, beer, and giant pretzels (Milwaukee has a large German population and apparently giant Costco pretzels are a popular German food — who knew?) I figured it would do me good to ditch the car. 

Potawatomi Casino you owe me $20.

Oscar’s ended up being in the industrial part of town, not much to see except factory buildings and large garages. But the Potawatomi Casino was on the route, which came in handy on my way back because they have public restrooms….and now 20 of my hard earned dollars.

Over lunch the bartender was telling me about the best coffee in Milwaukee at Alterra Coffee Roasters. So I went on a wild goose chase, on foot, to find this great coffee. En route I ended up at the Milwaukee Art Museum down on Lake Michigan. Entry is free the first Thursday of every month and what do you know?…it just happened to be the first Thursday of the month. They currently have a Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit going on through May 15th. The building itself was a beautiful sight with walls of windows so patrons enjoy a great view of Lake Michigan and as a big FLW fan, that exhibit was the cherry on top. I hit a lovely trail along Lake Michigan and headed back to the hotel.

MAM has FLW!

Well, five hours (and 22,200 steps, according to my pedometer) later I arrived at the hotel hungry, tired, wet (got rained on just a little) and feeling pretty good about Milwaukee. I never did find the Alterra Coffee Roasters establishment on my journeys but was pleased to see they had a little set-up right in the middle of the airport after I got through security and the coffee was pretty good, for Milwaukee. It sure beats Starbucks anyway. 

Well done, dairy state, I can’t wait to come back.