Newsletters
LizardTales Newsletter – April 2010
FROM MANAGEMENT
Fifty-seven percent of respondents in our last customer survey told us our support was good and another 27 percent said it was excellent. Why are 84% of LizardTech® customers happy with the support they receive? We think one of the main reasons is that our technical support is local and personal. Our small team’s goal is to get you back up and running fast.
After finding your account and establishing what product and version you’re using, our team determines what your desired result is and what’s preventing you from getting there. Sometimes there’s a better way to do what you’re trying to do. In those cases, our support technicians don’t just “reset the switch” for you, but try to provide you with training in the best practices for using our products.
As a second level of technical support, our QA team enters your issue into our bug tracking system and tries to reproduce your error. We have terabytes of data in-house that we exercise our applications with. If the problem is particularly obstinate or is the result of a bug in our software, it gets walked over to one of our software engineers as a third level of support. Your issue may even become an automated or manual test case so that it can be taken into account in the development of future applications. If an immediate bug fix isn’t feasible, often a workaround can be found and passed back to you.
Recently, one of our customers unable to encode his LiDAR data shipped us a hard drive with more than 100,000 files amounting to nearly a terabyte of data and tens of billions of points. Our QA engineer was unable to reproduce the problem. That’s a reminder that for any software package to run correctly, there are many different factors that it depends on: the operating system, patches, security settings, files in use and myriad other variables. In order for us to best support you when you call us, we encourage you to send screenshots by e-mail, tell us precisely what you’re trying to do, and give us details about the error messages you receive, including at what point in your process you get the error.
We want you to know that we take support calls seriously, and do everything we can at all levels of the company to get you the help you need. Look for the next Annual LizardTech Customer Survey in your inbox soon, and let us know how we’re doing!
Until next time,
LizardTech Management
GEOSPATIAL
Last month saw the latest release of our LiDAR Compressor™ software, version 1.1. In the first version of LiDAR Compressor, released last year, we introduced the capability to compress LiDAR point cloud data to MrSID®. In this version, we used your feedback to improve both the compression technology and the usability of the application.
One of the first things you’ll notice when you start LiDAR Compressor 1.1 is the improved user interface. We’ve tried to make the application more responsive and to give you more feedback about what’s going on. For instance, you’ll notice that switching between previews of your LiDAR datasets is much faster. Additionally, we now provide much better indications about how long it will take jobs to process. Finally, our logging system was completely revamped, giving you much better insight into how your compression jobs progressed. You can even output your log to a file and open it in a spreadsheet for further analysis.
Under the hood, however, is where even bigger changes took place. We completely re-engineered our algorithms to support fully lossless compression of point cloud data. For those of you who were using files with floating point data in version 1.0, you know that fields such as GPSTime had to be quantized in order to be compressed. Now with version 1.1, those values are compressed losslessly as well, allowing you full access to your point cloud data in a smaller package.
We hope that you find LiDAR Compressor 1.1 to be a useful tool in your every day workflow. Keep sending us your feature requests and product ideas, and we’ll do everything we can to get them into future versions.
WHERE IS LIZARDTECH?
Upcoming Events:
GIS in Action Conference
April 14-15, 2010 - Portland State University, Portland, Oregon.
Illinois GIS Association Spring 2010 Conference
April 14-15, 2010 - I-Hotel and Conference Center, Champaign, Illinois. LizardTech booth #4a.
MAGIC 2010 Symposium
April 18-22, 2010 - Westin Crown Center, Kansas City, Missouri. LizardTech booth #23.
16th Annual California GIS Conference
April 18-21, 2010 - Hyatt Huntington Beach, Huntington Beach, California. LizardTech booth #105.
ESRI Canada User Conference – Quebec
April 20-21, 2010 - Hôtel Plaza Québec, Quebec, Canada.
ESRI Southeast Regional User Group Conference (ESRI SERUG)
April 26-28, 2010 - The Westin Charlotte, Charlotte, North Carolina. LizardTech booth #103.
ASPRS Annual Conference
April 26-30, 2010 - Town and Country Hotel, San Diego, California. LizardTech booth #214.
18th Annual Pennsylvania GIS Conference 2010
May 11-12, 2010 - Frank J. Pasquerilla Conference Center, Johnstown, Pennsylvania. LizardTech booth #4.
6th Annual GEOINT TECH DAYS
May 19-21, 2010 - Hyatt Regency Reston, Reston, Virginia.
For a complete schedule of LizardTech events, please visit our Events Page.
UPCOMING WEBINARS
Every month we offer free informative Webinars covering our line of geospatial products.
Register today so you can explore the powerful features in LizardTech’s complete geospatial line of products: GeoExpress™ software for compression and manipulation, Express Server™software for high-performance delivery and publication, Spatial Express™ software for storage, and LiDAR Compressor™ software for turning giant point cloud data into efficient MrSID files – focusing on the benefits of managing, distributing and storing digital content and compressing LiDAR data.
Following are the details for the upcoming webinars:
Date and Time:
Tuesday, May 4, 2010 11:00 AM PST
Tuesday, May 11, 2010 11:00 AM PST
Tuesday, May 18, 2010 11:00 AM PST
Duration:
Who should attend:
If you have questions about this seminar e-mail us at info@lizardtech.com.
Tips and Tricks
GeoExpress
1. Do you have one input file but multiple deliverables for a client?Save your data cartridge by encoding the input file to a lossless SID. Then load the lossless SID file into GeoExpress to make the edits your client needs. Working with SID (and JP2) files will not count against your data cartridge level.
2. Are you experiencing long encode times?Having both local input and local output (on the computer where GeoExpress is running) will lower your encode time. Also check to make sure your block size is set to 64 and strip height is set to 12. These settings can be found by clicking More Encode Options then selecting theAdvanced tab.
3. Do you want to crop an existing MrSID Generation 3 (MG3) file?Save time by using the Optimize tab. This tab allows you to work with MrSID files without decoding and recompressing the image.
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.
Customer Wins
BAE Systems
Canada Department of National Defense
Fugro EarthData, Inc. – MD
Landmark Forestry LLC
Lockheed Martin
Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control – Fallon, NV
NGA, Analysis & Production Directorate – Washington D.C.
NOAA – Seattle, WA
Northrop Grumman
Nova Scotia Geomatics Centre
Québec Ministère des Ressources Naturelles
SAIC/GSTI – Springfield, VA
TechniGraphics
Thermopylae Sciences + Technology
US Army
US Army Corps of Engineers
Woolpert, Inc. – Dayton, OH
EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES
LizardTech is always seeking great talent. To learn more about current opportunities to join a dedicated, talented and close-knit team, please visit our Careers Page.
