Newsletters
LizardTales Newsletter – January 2008
From the General Manager
Dear customers,
As we find ourselves at the start of a new year, we at LizardTech are looking back with satisfaction at what we accomplished in 2007 and forward with anticipation toward what we hope to achieve in 2008. Our first milestone this year will be the release of version 7 of our flagship product, GeoExpress. I’m eager to hear from you what you think of it. Several months ago, I wrote to convey our thanks to the geospatial community for participating in our product survey, which gave us important insights into the kinds of things that you our users value and what you’d like to see in future versions of GeoExpress. We listened. While GeoExpress 7 is set to roll out the door with several new big features, we also returned again and again to those survey results to find ideas we could implement in the product to simply make it easier to use. We have added things like 64-bit support, the ability to export to GeoTIFF, and “commuter licensing,” where you can check out a GeoExpress seat and go offline with it for travel. We want you to know we value your input. In addition there will soon be two new ways of communicating with us. With the launch of GeoExpress 7 we will be instituting forums and a blog. Our number one goal is to create products that help you work the way you need to work. Let us know how we’re doing, and have a Happy New Year.
Best Regards,
Jim
Geospatial
At the end of January we’ll be releasing GeoExpress 7, the latest version of our flagship application. GeoExpress has become much more than we could have ever imagined when we originally built the MrSID GeoEncoder as a simple compression utility. Over the past few years we’ve been providing more image manipulation functionality such as tools for reprojecting existing MrSID or JPEG 2000 images and color balancing options to make it easier than ever to create eye-pleasing mosaics.
Now, GeoExpress is ready to evolve once again. Most of our customers need to put their imagery on the Web. For this, LizardTech offers our Express Server application to make it easy to serve high quality imagery to a variety of applications at any bandwidth speed. But deploying imagery to an Express Server has always been a manual process, and required some specialized technical skills that most of our customers don’t want to learn. After all, you’re a GIS professional, not a network administrator.
With GeoExpress 7, deploying imagery to the Express Server can be done in just a couple of clicks, with no networking knowledge required. Now it’s easier than ever before to create WMS layers and custom Web applications directly within GeoExpress. Now you can receive your imagery, mosaic it, color balance, reproject, compress, and deploy it to the Web in one quick step. We hope that this makes your day-to-day job easier than ever before, allowing the infrastructure of your image delivery systems to stay out of your way so you can get your own work done. This integration between GeoExpress and Express Server is just a first step in a new direction for GeoExpress.
Of course, there are many other new features as well, including some enhancements to eliminate “speckling” on the edges of images, an updated user interface, new decoding tools and much more. Stay tuned throughout January as we rollout GeoExpress 7!
Document Express
LizardTech has great news for Document Express with DjVu’s loyal customer base! As many of you know, LizardTech has been developing, promoting and selling our Document Express with DjVu suite of products since the year 2000. We’d like to announce that, going forward, management of the Document Express product line will be transferred to LizardTech’s parent company, Celartem Technology, Inc. Additionally, Dr. Hyung Lim has been appointed General Manager for Document Imaging at Celartem to oversee this transition. Dr. Lim joined LizardTech in 2001 as marketing director for the DjVu product line and will use his extensive knowledge of DjVu to continue to grow the brand under the Celartem name. Dr. Lim, who is also General Manager for Celartem’s Seoul, Korea Office, anticipates that with this transfer, DjVu will be better marketed on a worldwide basis. “More efficient product development, better customer service, and a more global reach” answered Dr. Lim when asked about what this change means for DjVu customers. “It also means that the current suite of Document Express products will garner even more investment and focus from Celartem headquarters”, he added. The proof of this focus will be shown in the long awaited upgrade of Document Express Enterprise Edition 7.0 due out in early 2008. Although the ownership of DjVu will now be handled by Celartem, the North American and European markets will continue to be serviced by Celartem from LizardTech’s Seattle office by David Calabro, LizardTech’s Sales Coordinator, to ensure a seamless transition. For further information or questions, please contact David Calabro at 206-902-2879.
Where is LizardTech?
Upcoming Events:
DGI 2008
January 21 – 24, 2008 - Queen Elizabeth II Convention Center, Westminster, London. Booth #9.
Indiana GIS Conference
February 19 – 20, 2008 - Hyatt Regency, Indianapolis, Indiana.
ESRI Federal User Conference, (FedUC)
February 20 – 22, 2008 - Washington Convention Center, Washington, D.C.
GIS / CAMA Technologies Conference
February 25 – 28, 2008 - Sheraton, New Orleans, Louisiana.
Geospatial Infrastructure Solutions Conference 31, (GITA)
March 9 – 12, 2008 - Washington State Convention Center, Seattle, Washington.
Oracle Spatial User Conference
March 13, 2008 - Washington State Convention Center, Seattle, Washington.
ESRI Business Partner Conference
March 15 – 18, 2008 - Palm Springs, California.
Towson University GIS Conference
March 17 – 18, 2008 - Towson, Maryland. Booth #9.
Tennessee Geographic Information Council Annual Conference
March 26 – 27, 2008 - Chattanooga Convention Center, Chattanooga, Tennessee.
View a regularly updated list of the events we attend here: LizardTech Events.
Event Recap
GIS Day Event
On Wednesday, November 14 LizardTech participated in GIS Day by visiting fifth graders at Brighton School in Seattle, WA for a presentation about geography and geographic information systems (GIS). The focus of our presentation was geography and the role it plays in everybody’s daily lives. Additionally, the evolution of technology and its impact on geographic information systems was examined in light of the students’ current study of the American Revolutionary War. John Ruffing, Genie Hays and David Calabro were the representatives who displayed Revolutionary War era maps of the 13 original colonies, while quizzing the students and challenging them to identify the difficulties in map creation during that time period.
Our visit was very successful with full participation and engagement from the students. We have already been invited to come back next year! Additionally, The American Congress on Surveying and Mapping (ACSM) Bulletin published an article about LizardTech’s GIS Day contribution, which you can read here. You can also access the article from the bulletin’s home page.
Customer Wins
We would like to share with you recently added clients to our ever expanding customer base:
North America
Canada Department of National Defense
Seminole Tribe of Florida
State of Tennessee
TechMap Inc.
Geographic Computer Technologies
Davis & Floyd Inc.
Bohannan Huston Inc.
GeoDigital International LLC
Nationwide Enviromental Title Research
City of Phoenix
EMEA
Lantmateriet (Sweden)
Latvia Geospatial Information Agency
FLO/IKT (Norway)
EFTAS (Germany)
Etteretningsbataljonen (Norway)
Gouvernement De La Nouvelle-Caledonie (DTSI) (Nouvelle-Caledonie)
Tips and Tricks
This is a returning segment of our quarterly newsletter. Each quarter we’ll offer a practical tidbit about how to perform a certain task or achieve a certain result using one of our software products – a tip or trick you might not be aware of that we hope you’ll find useful.
Tip:
Speeding up the encoding process in GeoExpress:
To speed up the encoding process, you can elect to use more system memory.
- Select Encode Options… from the Options menu.
- Click the Advanced tab.
- Increase the strip height.
Versions of GeoExpress prior to version 7 will not use more than 2 GB of memory, so check the “estimated memory usage” (shown on the Advanced tab and also on the main Properties tab) to ensure that you are not above the limit.
Hot Tips?
Do you have tips that you want to share? Send them to suggestions@lizardtech.com and we might publish your tip in the next issue of LizardTales.
Employment Opportunities
LizardTech is seeking great talent. To learn more about current opportunities, please visit: Jobs at LizardTech.
