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/.

We’ve just released our new viewer, LizardTech GeoViewer 3.0, and so far it’s flying off the shelf, or rather across the Internet. It’s free to download here (http://www.lizardtech.com) and we’ve had thousands of takers already. We issued a press release yesterday, and I was going to follow up with an announcement here, but the way things are going it’ll be old news by the time I hit “publish”.

Geospatial professionals have been asking us for a new viewer for a long time, and we were finally able to devote some time to making one. We didn’t want to short-change it, and I think you’ll love the results if you’re a person who uses imagery every day.

For input GeoViewer supports too many raster formats to list here, plus ESRI Shapefiles. It exports to GeoTIFF, JPEG, and PNG. What’s more, you can add layers (images and vector overlays) from local repositories, from a LizardTech Express Server catalog, or from WMS or JPIP servers.

Best of all, you can group your layers and hide or show them, so you can visually compare years, or regions — or any other organizational units you care to create — with a click.

We put a lot of care into making GeoViewer easy to install and get started with. If you haven’t already grabbed yours, why not try it out? And let us know what you think.