Newsletters
LizardTales Newsletter – April 2004
Letter from LizardTech CEO, Carlos Domingo
Hello once again. Three months ago we resumed our quarterly LizardTales newsletter to begin building a solid bridge of communication between LizardTech and our customers and partners. I welcome you to the Q2 2004 issue of LizardTales where we will continue delivering valuable and timely information about new products and recent activities happening at LizardTech.
This quarter, we have started to unveil our JPEG2000 strategy for GeoExpress. For the past 10 years, LizardTech has been the leader for wavelet compression technology in the geospatial market with our MrSID technology now the de-facto standard compressed image format within the geospatial industry. Therefore it was a natural move for LizardTech to begin incorporating the emerging ISO standard JPEG2000 into our products. The first step has been the release of a new SDK for compressing and distributing geospatial imagery that supports both MrSID and JPEG2000. Next, LizardTech announced a partnership with Galdos Systems, Inc. to significantly extend the capabilities of JPEG2000 by jointly developing an ISO standard for geospatial metadata in GML through the Open GIS Consortium (OGC) consensus process.
On the document imaging side, LizardTech had a wildly successful presence at the 2004 AIIM Conference and Exposition in New York City where we had the chance to present our new strategy of focus on the color scanning market with our DjVu technology where we have started to see a lot of traction recently.
The next few months we are going to continue with the renewed activities and initiatives that we began following the acquisition of LizardTech by Celartem Technology, So, please stay tuned for more announcements and interesting news.
Regards,
Carlos Domingo
President and CEO
Celartem Inc.
New LizardTech Partnerships
EMC - LizardTech’s Express Server integrated with EMC Corporation’s content addressed storage (CAS) solution. Read the news here.
Sun - LizardTech aligned with Sun Microsystems as an iForce(SM) Content Network Partner to simplify the complexities of managing content and knowledge assets across the enterprise. The Sun infrastructure for content management offers everything large companies need to build, deploy, and market mission-critical, end-to-end content and knowledge-management solutions. LizardTech’s software solutions, supporting both Solaris™ x86 and Solaris SPARC® Operating System, provide unique image compression technologies specifically designed to facilitate the management, distribution, and access of digital content such as aerial photography, satellite images and scanned color image documents. For more information, click here.
Galdos Systems - LizardTech and Galdos Systems team to jointly develop an ISO standard through the Open GIS Consortium (OGC), Inc. consensus process. In addition, LizardTech and Galdos Systems, both OGC technical committee members, plan to jointly produce a GML implementation of JPEG2000, driving cross platform interoperability and rapid Internet distribution for geospatial imagery. For the full story, click here.
Upgrade to GeoExpress 4.0 now!
In addition to the robust set of features we introduced with GeoExpress 3.0, features such as lossless encoding, unlimited file size and localized updating of existing MrSID images and mosaics, here are the top three reasons to upgrade to GeoExpress 4.0 with MrSID:
- With new Image Crop Tools you can interactively crop input images, mosaics and even MrSID files to quickly repurpose imagery for different uses.
- Combine images with different resolutions into one seamless mosaic.
- Interactive preview window allows for quick and easy review or output images and mosaics prior to encoding.
You may not know… with GeoExpress 4.0 with MrSID, you can crop MrSID images, resample MrSID images on the fly and create or update mosaics of MrSID images all without decreasing the encoding allotment in the GeoExpress data cartridge. Only the initial encoding of raw data such as TIFF or JPEG images to MrSID image format decreased the encoding allotment of the data cartridge. The advantage is lower a total cost of ownership for GeoExpress with MrSID, enabling users to pay for only the amount of data they encode to MrSID format.
To upgrade to GeoExpress 4.0, contact your LizardTech sales representative: Click here.
Express Server 4.6 with ArcIMS Integration Toolkit Available Now!
The ArcIMS Integration Toolkit in Express Server 4.6 allows you to eliminate the creation and maintenance of image pyramids and provides a number of tools to facilitate collaboration across the organization, accelerate image delivery via ArcIMS and manage image repositories.
To learn more about Express Server 4.6 and the ArcIMS Integration Toolkit, click here.
Document Express 5.0 with DjVu®
Everybody knows that PDF documents load very slowly. Even documents on your local machine can take 10 seconds or more to appear on the screen. Over the Internet, the problem is compounded by the fact that PDF documents are usually very large. Don’t take our word for it and check out the following 3.2MB PDF document. (hint: plan to go get some coffee while the document loads!)
However, the same document, when converted to DjVu using Document Express becomes a 40KB document, with equivalent visual quality and text legibility! Sound almost too good to be true? Don’t take our word for it and see for yourself.
DjVu documents are ideally suited for storing, exchanging and distributing scanned and electronic color documents over the Internet, whatever your connection speed.
Download a trial version of Document Express with DjVu Professional Edition and experience all that DjVu can do for you, Click here.
IrfanView 2.90 now supports DjVu!
We are pleased to announce that IrfanView, one of the most popular image viewers in the world, now supports DjVu viewing (along with a plethora of additional image formats!). IrfanView is a nifty (and free) Windows® program. If you have a lot of digital photos and documents on your hard drive, you will find it very useful for navigation, slideshows, basic image manipulations and more. Now that it supports viewing the latest DjVu document format, it becomes an even more useful tool!
For more information and to download IrfanView, visit http://www.irfanview.com. Note that the IrfanView plug-in packs need to be installed in order to enable DjVu support in IrfanView.
Genuine Fractals 3.5 Available in May!
Now with 16-bit support for RGB, CMYK images and improved thumbnail handling and file browsing functionality, Genuine Fractals 3.5 is the preferred software solution for enlarging and scaling high-quality images in Adobe® Photoshop®. Available in May, 2004.
Where is LizardTech?
GITA’s Annual Conference & Exhibition
April 25th – 28th, 2004 - Seattle, WA
The premier educational event for professionals involved in geospatial information technologies, including automated mapping/facilities management (AM/FM), geographic information systems (GIS), supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), and related geospatial technologies. Visit us at GITA this year, booth #406.
AIIM Content Managment Seminar
May 4th, 2004 - Seattle, WA
May 6th, 2004 - San Francisco, CA
This FREE educational seminar produced by AIIM – the industry’s leading non-profit association – will educate you on the important steps and issues needed to help your organization plan an ECM strategy and succeed.
IMExpo 2004 – AIIM UK
April 27th – 29th, 2004 - London, England
May 10th, 2004 - Edinburgh, England
May 12th, 2004 - Leeds, England
May 13th, 2004 - Manchester, England
May 14th, 2004 - Birmingham, England
LizardTech will be exhibiting with Headway UK.
ASPRS Annual Conference
May 23rd – 27th, 2004 - Denver, CO
This event affords the unique opportunity to meet and work with over 1,200 geospatial data and related technology professionals.
For a complete schedule of LizardTech events, Click here.
Promotions
GeoExpress 4.0 with MrSID
ESRI and LizardTech are joining forces to offer a special promotion for existing ESRI’s ArcGIS 8.x-based customers using MrSID Encoder for ArcGIS who wish to upgrade to GeoExpress 4.0 with MrSID. For more information, click here.
