Our director of Engineering, Michael P. Gerlek, attended and participated in GeoWeb 2009 in Vancouver last week. The annual GeoWeb gathering is a forum for new ideas and technologies that help shape the discussion of what it means to bring geospatial support into the Internet. 

Michael trio’d up with Galdos’ Ron Lake and the OGC’s Carl Reed for an all-day, tag-team relay session called GeoWeb 101. Each of the three presented about different technologies underlying the geoweb.

Other presentations throughout the week proved interesting, too. Michael’s “trip report” was published by GeoConnexion. Here’s the link:

http://www.geoconnexion.com/geo_online_article/GeoWeb-2009-Trip-Report/322

This year’s ESRI conference was a satisfying mix of fun and overwhelming customer interest for our Lizards manning the LizardTech booth.

For customer interest, the release of LiDAR Compressor 1.0 garnered a steady stream of inquirers about the breakthrough of being able to compress huge quantities of LiDAR data in a MrSID file, and we gave away 500 trial DVDs.

For fun, we held another lizardy contest.

We invited users to submit a photo of their favorite plastic LizardTech lizard doing something interesting or posing in an exotic location, the favorite to be chosen by popular vote. The results were creative and often hilarious. Clark Siler of Pflugerville, Texas (shown above with Justyna Bednarski, LT’s marketing communications manager) won the contest and took home a handheld GPS for his trouble. Clark’s photo entry (below) won the most votes on our online voting page.

We’ve always been amazed at how much people enjoy the LizardTech plastic lizards we give away at trade shows. But they are loads of fun. Ryan Burley, northeast regional account manager, and Kelly Downs, director of sales, demonstrate just some of the possibilities.

Voting is over, obviously, but to see all the photos from the contest, visit our Flickr web page at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lizardtech/sets/72157619211930889/.

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.

Update: 13 July 2009. Read an article about the OSGeo code sprint in Toronto by Michael Gerlek here. – mdf

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.