I attended the American Wind Energy Association’s WINDPOWER 2009 in Chicago May 4-7. AWEA WINDPOWER is the premier wind energy conference and exhibition in North America. The North American wind market has been in a steady growth mode for well over five years with a tremendous boom for the past three years. Wind power generating capacity increased by 32% in 2007 and projections for 2009 are trending to be even greater.

The AWEA WINDPOWER Conference and Exhibition is the largest annual wind conference and exhibition in the world, this year featuring over 15,000 attendees and over 1,200 exhibitors. Each year, wind energy professionals gather at this event to learn about the latest industry developments and technologies, review new products and services in the expansive exhibit hall, and network with leading industry decision makers.

LizardTech did not have a booth at this show. As this was our first year at AWEA WINDPOWER we decided to save a little money by only attending rather than exhibiting and I was able to cruise the floor and scout out good leads. We did not spring for the sessions’ access – that would have been an additional $800.00. If you missed the sessions, too, they’re available on DVD for $500.00 at http://www.awea3.org/source/Orders/index.cfm?Section=Store .

I feel that it was better (and cheaper) to be an attendee at this show rather than exhibitor. It was too huge to be stuck in a booth all day. Walking the floor each day and talking with other exhibitors about their GIS needs (most didn’t know what GIS was) I was able to get better leads than I would have at a booth. There is something for everybody at this show and I hope to be back in 2010, when the conference will be held in Dallas. Details about next year’s show are at http://www.windpowerexpo.org/2010/coming_soon.cfm .

Photo courtesy of the American Wind Energy Association.

LizardTech was one of the sponsors of an OSGeo code sprint in Toronto last week. Mike Rosen and I were both fortunate enough to attend and spend some quality time with twenty of the brightest minds of the open source geo world, folks working on everything from GDAL to MapServer to PostGIS to OpenLayers.

Perhaps the most visible result from the LizardTech side of things was some performance analysis that Frank Warmerdam, Chris Schmidt, and I did on GDAL’s use of MrSID – which should eventually help everyone downstream of GDAL, notably MapServer.

Paul Ramsey (mine host) and Chris both blogged daily about the event. Perry Nacionales and Paul have also posted some pix on flickr, including some of us all unwinding at Le Hockey (Hey, look! Real live Canadians, in their natural habitat!).

And, though we might have the grace to blush just a little, we’re not too modest to nonetheless link to Chris’ stirring post on using GDAL with our D-SDK.

Image courtesy of Perry Nacionales

LizardTech will be at the ESRI Federal User Conference in Washington D.C., February 17-19. Look for us at Booth #321.

Says our senior product manager, Jon Skiffington, “We’re particularly excited to show off recently released version 7.0.2 of GeoExpress, which provides support for compressing CADRG/CIB files.” We expect this and other new capabilities to be of great interest to our defense and intelligence customers. If you’re attending, please stop by the booth and say hello.

It is an oft-invoked stereotype that engineers prefer to work alone in dark caves, and there’s certainly some truth there. Here at LizardTech, for example, each development team member works in a well-ventillated but cozy and earthy burrow that our ops team constructed to individual specifications out of papier-mache. Some of these workspaces have convincing stalactites, or narrow entrances lined with lichens. A few are strewn with bones.*

But in mass emergences similar to those of the 13- and 17-year cicada, engineers periodically gather together in high-energy events called “code sprints”, which last several days and whose purpose is to resolve bugs, churn out new code, share information and ideas, and dispatch untold wedges of pizza. Ethnologists now suspect that a form of socialization is also carried on.

In March, LizardTech will be cosponsoring such an event in Toronto hosted by OSGeo. A couple of lizards will be attending and will work on GDAL/MrSID performance issues. Please consider joining us there!

*By contrast, our sales team is housed in a single, large spherical room partially filled with rubber balls and water toys.

Seriously, image of New Mexico’s Lechuguilla Cave courtesy of Wikipedia.

The “Call for Presentations and Workshops” for GeoWeb 2009 has just been announced. The theme of this year’s conference is “Cityscapes”: the geography of urban environments, BIM-CAD-GIS convergence, 3D modeling.

LizardTech has been fortunate to be involved with this conference for a number of years now, and so we’re once again looking forward to July and another fun week with our neighbors to the north.