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!

LizardTech’s business is not only about compression ratios and lossless quality; it’s about making our customers’ jobs easier by providing the best GIS solutions around while still taking into account their current operations. While much of our team’s time during the last ten months has been spent building and launching LizardTech’s GeoExpress® and Express Server® software products, we’ve also worked (and continue to work) hard to ensure that these products remain compatible with other commonly used GIS software.

Based on your feedback, we know many of you manage workflows that include one or more pieces of Esri software and it is increasingly important for both LizardTech and Esri technologies to integrate seamlessly together. Supported file formats allow projects to run smoothly and make sharing data faster and more efficient. Everyone wins.

To that end, LizardTech has recently made available a free plug-in for interoperability between our Express Server and Esri’s server product, ArcIMS. Express Server 7 came on the scene in July offering exciting features such as added support for raster images encoded to MrSID Generation 4 (MG4™) format and the option to install as a 64-bit application. Now when used together, Express Server makes viewing images via ArcIMS up to 25 times faster!

We also offer free plug-ins that add support for MG4 raster data files in Esri’s ArcGIS Desktop version 9.3.1 and 10. Now Esri’s Arc users can harness the benefits of the new MG4 files that GeoExpress 8 produces, including support for compressing hyperspectral data allowing users to compress up to 255 bands of geospatial data.

You can download the plug-ins for ArcIMS, ArcGIS Desktop 9.3.1 and ArcGIS Desktop 10 here.

We greatly appreciate your feedback and suggestions for future releases, so thank you, and keep it coming!

We Lizards like to keep busy and we like to share the products we develop with the geospatial industry, because…well…geospatial users are just so appreciative! Hard on the heels of the release of Express Server 7, which can be installed as a 64-bit application and features support for MG4 imagery, LizardTech has unveiled the MG4 Plug-in for ArcGIS 10 Desktop.

MG4 was created to support multispectral imagery and alpha-band transparency, and it is the fourth generation of LizardTech’s MrSID format. It has been met with enthusiasm by both end-users and developers. And the new MG4 Plug-in gives users of Esri products support for multi- and hyperspectral imagery compressed to MrSID format within the applications they use every day.

And, it’s free!

Let us know what other products you’d like to see that would make your job easier. We take our customers’ feedback seriously.

You can download the MG4 Plug-in for ArGIS 10 Desktop here.