Our director of product management, Jon Skiffington, was ready to meet the press at the recent Esri International User Conference in San Diego. Which was a good thing, because the press showed up in the form of Sanjay Gangal of GISCafé and Alexis Brumm of Point of Beginning (POB) Magazine.

First, here’s a video of Jon’s chat with Sanjay, in which he wastes no time dishing up a very accessible one-minute primer on our product line, and even talks a little about the upcoming release of a new version of our Express Server product.

Sanjay Gangal of GIS Café interviews Jon on the show floor.

And because it’s always good to get a second opinion, here’s Jon responding to questions posed by Alexis. She pitches them right over the plate (what makes the MrSID software so popular, which of our products have drawn the most interest and why, and how are software developments affecting the market?) and Jon smacks them all into the outfield. We thought he came pretty well prepared, and in fact listening to his answers made us realize afresh why it’s so cool to be able to say we’ve been a part of LizardTech’s 20-year (so far) history.

Jon talking with Alexis Brumm of Point of Beginning Magazine.

If you’re using the MrSID format you’re a part of that history, too. If you’re not, well…it’s not too late. LizardTech plans to be making a lot more history in the years to come, and you might find that our geospatial software products could make your workflow easier or save you time and money right now, today! Contact your local LizardTech representative to become a part of the epic saga.

John Warden, senior geospatial engineer at Thermopylae Sciences and Technology, won the iPad in our contest at the Esri User Conference in San Diego two and a half weeks ago. As part of our celebration this year of twenty years of MrSID as a technology and of LizardTech as a company, we had asked folks to write in telling us how they had benefited from or been supported by the MrSID format. Names were then randomly selected from among the entries.

Mr. Warden wrote:

“A few months after starting my job as the geospatial engineer for our company, the earthquake hit Haiti. We were involved in supporting relief efforts by creating a data sharing platform. Imagery was downloaded around the clock, some satellite imagery and some aerial imagery. One of the sets of aerial imagery had significant overlap and was in TIFF format, we had hundreds of gigabytes contained in thousands of files… until I ran it through my LizardTech software [GeoExpress], reducing the overall size to a few gigabytes of data in less than a dozen files.”

He says he plans to take his new iPad everywhere he goes, which will probably provoke jealousy in his plastic LizardTech lizard, which has to stay behind on top of his computer monitor.

Our two other winners, who each took away a $50 Amazon gift card, are Wayne Scribbins, geospatial coordinator for the City of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, and Paul Huppé, applications developer at the Data Management Division of Natural Resources Canada. You can read their testimony and that of others who wrote in to wish MrSID and LizardTech a happy twentieth anniversary here: http://www.lizardtech.com/anniversary/

Thanks to all who participated in our contest, and to all who have supported LizardTech over the past two decades.