The Associaton of American Geographers has just published the book Practicing Geography: Careers for Enhancing Society and the Environment, a “comprehensive new resource…designed to prepare students for careers in business, government, and non-profit organizations”. And hey! our own business development manager Jeff Young is profiled in it.

One of the authors, Janice Monk, writes about how Jeff makes working from home work for him in his business role, which he describes as being “something like a diplomat” for LizardTech (it’s true, we rely on Jeff to build and nurture positive relationships with leaders in the industry we serve).

Jeff’s in the book.

Learn about the factors that made him decide to become a permanent telecommuter and what that really looks like. Oh, and even though we skipped right to the profile of Jeff, there are 263 other pages that will be of interest to students eyeing careers in the geospatial industry.

The book is available now from Pearson and from Amazon.

LizardTech business partner Ascent GIS assists organizations and businesses that are interested in building and maintaining spatial information by providing GIS and image processing services. They use GeoExpress to handle large volumes of imagery, mostly in MrSID and GeoTIFF format, in their public and private partnerships across the U.S., providing the latest and most current imagery and LiDAR data to forestry, state and local government, engineering, and utilities industries.

We spoke with Russ Martin, GIS analyst for Ascent, about their experience with MG4, the new version of the MrSID format, and especially about how MG4′s alpha bands help with transparency, and we’d like to share his comments with you.

“Recently, LizardTech launched the new MrSID Generation 4 (MG4) format. In the past, displaying two MrSID images with irregular boundaries, like county mosaics, in ArcMap resulted in areas of nodata “noise” (black pixelation) between the images when the background layer was set to transparent. This occurred because some of the pixels around the edges of the MG3 images do not have the value of 0,0,0.

Noise (speckling) in MG3 caused by nodata. Note the non-zero pixel values. Image courtesy of NAIP.

“In the MG4 format, after the data is clipped inside of the nodata boundary, the non 0,0,0 pixels are still present, but setting the Alpha channel on the fourth band completely eliminates the “noise” between the MG4 images.

MG4′s alpha channel takes care of the no data pixels for a clean boundary. Image courtesy of NAIP.

“We receive so much data in MrSID format — roughly 1.5 terabytes for a single project recently — and we anticipate processing another 6 terabytes in the next two months. The continuing transition of the aerial photo industry to digital sensors has resulted in a great deal of 4-band imagery with very large file sizes, which can be compressed and stored in the MG4 format. This is essential for field and mobile GIS solutions on laptops and other mobile devices.”

There you have it — the straight scoop on alpha bands in MG4 from our friends at Ascent GIS! We wish it was always so easy to find people to give testimonials that are little technical papers at the same time! By the way, we call that black pixelation “speckling”, and GeoExpress has a way to “despeckle” MG3 images when they run afoul of nodata.  

To learn more about the evolution of the MrSID format see this article from the knowledge base on our website and this PDF detailing the history of GeoExpress software (viewing the PDF requires Adobe Acrobat Reader).

You may already have heard, but now you can view imagery compressed to MrSID and JPEG 2000 formats on your iPad. Folks in the industry are excited and we’re already getting positive feedback about the functionality this application brings to users. Glenn Letham at GISuser picked up our news item today and Matt Ball at Spatial Sustain even wrote a little thing about how the app extends image portability. Thanks guys!

Here are some of GeoViewer’s intuitive, easy-to-use features:

• Open MrSID and JPEG 2000 images.
• Select bands to view from a multispectral image.
• Explore imagery by panning, zooming and zooming out.
• Add vector overlays (Esri Shapefiles and KML files) to get more out of image layers.
• Center on your GPS location so you can see what’s nearby.
• Measure the distance between a series of points.
• Identify geolocation by touching on any image.
• View layer properties, including coordinate reference system, geo bounding box, dimensions, colorspace, datatype, and resolution.
• Search by geographic coordinates in WGS 84 (Lat/Long) or the image’s native coordinate reference system.
• Set viewing preferences (band selection, layer line color, etc.).

The GeoViewer application for iPad is free and can be downloaded from the iTunes App Store. Get busy!

Folks, we’d like to introduce you to a new Lizard. Travis Applegate joined us before the holidays as our inside sales support rep, renewing licenses for our existing customers. He fits right in here — we put him through an ordeal by fire at our holiday white elephant gift exchange and he came through with flying colors — and we think you’ll like him, too.

New Lizard Travis Applegate.

Travis is a Portland native who’s spent some effort trying to find the city that’s the right fit for him. He found Portland a touch confining, while Chicago had a little too much echo (and snow). He settled in Seattle, where he has worked for the Cobalt Group as an order manager, the University of Phoenix as an enrollment counselor, and Seattle Weekly as an account executive. Since the Weekly‘s offices are directly above us (in fact, from a geospatial viewpoint he works in the exact same position in the building as he did before, just fifteen feet lower on the Z axis), we can tease him that coming to us represents a downward move. That’s not the way Travis sees it, though, and we’re glad to have him on our team as he brings enthusiasm and dedication and his sales and other experience to the job.

Travis is big into music in many forms, but in particular live shows and vinyl records. His prize platter is London Calling by The Clash — he would prefer it if it were the UK import first pressing, which it’s not, but since it’s his favorite album in any format he still ranks it at the top. He also loves to dabble with musical instruments and jokes that he has failed to master a great many of them. He also likes to get out into the woods and mountains and other remote places, proximity to which is one reason he cites for having hunkered down here in Seattle, where, in case you haven’t heard, we’re surrounded by mountain ranges, islands, bodies of water, and forests.

Welcome to the team, Travis!

LizardTech has become a member of the British Association of Remote Sensing Companies (BARSC).

BARSC is an industry association dedicated to the promotion of the interests of all commercial companies involved with remote sensing technology throughout the United Kingdom.

In a press release we released earlier this month in which we said some nice things about BARSC and they said some nice things about us, we noted that we’ll be getting invitations to events that in the past have included presentations from senior staff of ESA, the UK Space Agency, NCEO, and the like. That alone has got us pretty excited. But add to that the detailed information about industry goings on, plus eligibility to attend the renowned BARSC Annual Lunch, and we’re in RSSH (remote sensing seventh heaven!).

Membership in BARSC is open to all remote sensing organisations (notice the Brit spelling — wink wink) with offices in the United Kingdom. That describes us to a teacup. LizardTech’s London EMEA office is run and managed by geo-sales and marketing agency Quarry One Eleven.

Look for us in the green and pleasant land!