I’d like to introduce you to Jeff Young, LizardTech’s business development manager for geospatial solutions. He joined the LizardTech team this week. 

Jeff will be responsible for expanding our third-party relationships in targeted market segments, including U.S. defense and civilian agencies, state and local governments and commercial markets. Jeff brings more than 30 years of experience to the LizardTech team. Prior to joining us, he held positions in business development, consulting and sales with several geospatial companies, including Leica Geosystems, Space Imaging and Bentley Systems.

In addition to his professional experience in the GIS industry, Jeff sits on the board of the American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Rocky Mountain Region, as a national director. Jeff earned a BS in geography (cum laude) from Lock Haven State College in Pennsylvania and an MA in geography, specializing in land use analysis and environmental hazards, from Arizona State University.

Jeff lives and works out of Centennial, Colorado, where he loves spending time with his wife Pamela, daughter Kelsey and son Colin. Travel, saltwater fishing, and golf are his other big loves. He has slept in all 50 states of the Union and in 50 countries around the world.

Everyone knows the peril of navigating a box of chocolates that have various fillings but no legend to tell you which ones are filled with what.

The following is excerpted from an email string that occurred late yesterday after each engineer received a box of chocolates from our activities team as a Valentines Day treat.

Happy Friday and Happy Valentine’s Day from LizardTech.

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Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 4:20 PM
Importance: Low
Subject: the DARK chocolate circle is marshmallow creme <eom>

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Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 4:21 PM
Subject: the DARK chocolate circle is marshmallow creme <eom>

Technically it’s a cylinder not a circle.

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Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 4:21 PM
Subject: RE: the DARK chocolate circle is marshmallow creme <eom>

The other round one is coconut.  :-(

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Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 4:22 PM
Subject: RE: the DARK chocolate circle is marshmallow creme <eom>

We should be able to put a spreadsheet together pretty quickly and get it to Jaime to distribute…

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Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 4:32 PM
Subject: RE: the DARK chocolate circle is marshmallow creme <eom>

Except by then it may be too late . 

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Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 4:35 PM
Subject: RE: the DARK chocolate circle is marshmallow creme <eom>

This is not rocket science. Each dev eats ONE of the as-yet-unidentified chocolates, and we’re there in a trice. :)

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Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 4:36 PM
Subject: RE: the DARK chocolate circle is marshmallow creme <eom>

One of the rectangles was a dark choc inside.

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Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 4:38 PM
Subject: RE: the DARK chocolate circle is marshmallow creme <eom>

did it have two ridges on it or just one?

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Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 4:38 PM
Subject: RE: the DARK chocolate circle is marshmallow creme <eom>

Too late, already in tummy.

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Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 4:39 PM
Subject: RE: the DARK chocolate circle is marshmallow creme <eom>

alright, does the remaining dark rectangle have two ridges or one?

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Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 4:40 PM
Subject: RE: the DARK chocolate circle is marshmallow creme <eom>

Unclear – it’s kinda got a bunch of medium length ridges.

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Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 4:42 PM
Subject: RE: the DARK chocolate circle is marshmallow creme <eom>

I think we should have *one* dev eat all of his chocolates for posterity.

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Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 4:43 PM
Subject: RE: the DARK chocolate circle is marshmallow creme <eom>

They mapped the human genome but we can’t figure out what’s in a box of chocolates. I’m going home…

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.

Last year we helped solutions provider Smartronix address some image delivery pains that their customer, the Air Force Special Operations Command, was experiencing. The AFSOC need to process huge amounts of satellite and aerial imagery quickly, store it efficiently, and access it instantly in common geospatial applications and viewers. In particular, they wanted to store terabytes of raw imagery in an Oracle database and view it via both MapViewer and ArcIMS.

Smartronix asked if we could make that happen. We said “Yes we can.”

We’re pretty excited about this “win” because it’s a high profile example of an Express Suite workflow.  Express Suite comprises all three of LizardTech’s major geospatial software products, GeoExpress for image manipulation and compression to industry standard formats, Spatial Express for storing compressed images in an Oracle database, and Express Server for serving out those images via the fastest and most stable delivery technology available.

We worked hard to make all three products interoperate seamlessly with each other and with common GIS software, so it’s great to see the trio succeed on the road.  

Read the entire Smartronix-AFSOC case study on the Express Suite “Customers” page on our website.

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.