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.

The 2012 Esri International User Conference is coming up later this month and LizardTech will be there. We’re an Imagery sponsor of the conference, and you can find us at Booth #1317 in the Imagery Island. We’ll be busy, too:

• This year MrSID turns 20 years old, and we’re holding a contest where customers (like you!) give us a sentence or two (or a paragraph or two, or a page or two) about what MrSID has meant to you or your organization, how MrSID has come to your aid — saved your job or your marriage, that sort of thing – or just how MrSID has made doing your work easier. Details of this contest are here:
  http://www.lizardtech.com/anniversary/

• Jon Skiffington, our director of product management, will be giving a presentation about managing large imagery and LiDAR datasets in the Imagery Island Theatre on Tuesday, July 24 at 3 p.m.

• Our long-time friend and customer John Peterson of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Geospatial Unit in Albuquerque, New Mexico, will give a Lightning Talk about using LizardTech’s geospatial products as part of his organizations’ Enterpriese GIS Viewer workflow in SDCC, Room 28D on Tuesday, July 24 at 8:30 a.m. More information about that here:
  http://www.esri.com/industries/map-chart-dataproduction/imagery/imagery-uc.html

• You know Lizards are gregarious creatures, and we’ll have a booth at the Imagery Social on Wednesday, July 25 from 6 – 8 p.m in the Upper Level City Side Corridor. More information about that here:
  http://www.esri.com/imageryUC

We hope we’ll see you for some or all of these events. As always we’ll be showcasing our line of geospatial software products — GeoExpress for compressing and minipulating satellite and aerial imagery, Express Server for high-performance delivery and publication, and LiDAR Compressor for turning giant point cloud datasets into efficient MrSID files.

See you at the show!

We like talking with our customers (and our potential customers), which is why we go to a number of trade shows and other industry events throughout the year.  We’ll be exhibiting at the following shows this month:

• May 8 – 9 in Bloomington, Ind., at the 2012 Indiana GIS Conference.

• May 15 – 16 in Syracuse, N.Y., partnering with GIS Services at the New York State Geographic Information Conference in booth #20.

• May 22 – 23 in Grantville, Pa., at the 2012 Pennsylvania GIS Conference in booth #24.

• May 29 – 31 in São Paolo, Brazil, partnering with Engesat International at the MundoGeo Connect Latin America Conference in booth #28.

Oh, we’ll be there. São Paulo, Brazil. Image by Heitor CJ licensed through Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

As always, LizardTech representatives will be available for product demonstrations, to talk shop with you and to answer any questions you have. Stop by and say hello!

To see a complete list of LizardTech’s upcoming shows, visit www.lizardtech.com/events.

Editor’s Note: Genie wrote this weeks ago and we meant to post it right away, but we dropped the ball (“we” being an unidentified editorial entity who may or may not have the initials MF).

Sacramento! Image courtesy of Robert Parker.

A handful of us Lizards attended the ASPRS conference in Sacramento last week. Here are some of the highlights:

Monday evening – ASPRS reception. LizardTech was one of the sponsors for this at Fat’s Catering in Old Downtown Sacramento. Great appetizers, great drinks and good company.

Tuesday morning – Show floor opened at 10:30. Terry Ryan and I popped across the street to pay a visit to the USACE in Sacramento. It went great. We had a good-sized group turn out and were able to discuss products and workflow for a couple hours.

Tuesday evening – The vendor reception was from 5:30 – 7:30 on the show floor.

Wednesday – Wyoming DOT came by the booth for a pre-arranged visit to drop off a sample dataset that we then compressed with GeoExpress and threw into Express Server for delivery via WMS all in a matter of minutes while they were standing at the booth – which is something we will do for anyone interested in finding out how quickly and easily they can use our products with their data.

Thursday – Washington DNR came by the booth to invite us down for a visit to their office once we got back from the conference to discuss workflows. Located in Olympia, they are just a short one-hour drive for us from the LizardTech office in downtown Seattle.

ASPRS is a great show for us to meet with others in the industry, maintain existing relationships, and cultivate new ones. Thanks for all who stopped by and took the time to say hello. We hope you enjoyed the show and look forward to seeing you at the 2013 ASPRS annual conference in Maryland.