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.