LizardTales Newsletter - April 2008

In This Issue

1. From The General Manager
2. Geospatial
3. Where is LizardTech?
4. Fun Discoveries
5. Case Studies and Customer Wins
6. Reseller News
7. Tips and Tricks
8. Employment Opportunities

From The General Manager Jim White talks about the launch of GeoExpress 7 and Express Suite among other exciting projects that were completed last quarter.

Geospatial - Exploring the new features in GeoExpress

Most of you are probably already using GeoExpress 7. We've received some rave reviews from some of you about the new features we added, so we thought this might be a good time to introduce and
explain how to use some of the great new tools in GeoExpress 7.

If you've ever received imagery from the USDA NAIP program, particularly MrSID Generation 2 images from previous years, you'll have noticed that many of the images have black collars around them. If you load these images into your GIS application and drop out these black collars, you'll see a lot of ugly "speckling." These speckling artifacts happen because compressing images to MrSID at high compression ratios requires approximating colors. In other words, "black" becomes "almost black." While the human eye doesn't ordinarily notice the difference, this can make it difficult, not to mention ugly, to mosaic images together.

Not to fear, though, as GeoExpress 7 has new "despeckling" tools to clean these images up. Start GeoExpress, and add your SID files to the "Despeckle" tab. In most cases, you won't even need to adjust any options. Just choose "Despeckle Selected Images" and GeoExpress will clean up your images for you.

Another popular workflow with GeoExpress 7 uses two new features: output tiling and decoding. Lots of customers have massive SID images that they need to chop up into smaller tiles and decode out to TIFF. In prior versions of GeoExpress, you could use a series of command line tools to do this, but of course this was unwieldy. Here's how easy it is do to in GeoExpress 7:

Add the file(s) you want to work with to the "Images" tab. Select "Tools | Image Crop..." In the "Output Tiling" section, choose how many rows and columns you want to divide your image into, and click "OK." Now, just choose "GeoTIFF" as your output format and select "Encode Selected Images." In no time, you'll have a series of GeoTIFF tiles created from your original SID image.

These are just a few of the features customers have told us have been most valuable to them; we're sure you have your favorite new features as well. Feel free to let us know how you're using GeoExpress 7 by emailing us at info@lizardtech.com, or by participating in our recently launched 2008 geospatial products survey. All survey participants are automatically entered to win a $50 gift card for Amazon.com.

Where Is LizardTech?

Upcoming Events:

• April 14 - 16, 2008 - ESRI Southeast Regional Users Conference, Hyatt Regency, Riverfront, Jacksonville, FL. Booth #117.
  
  
• April 20 - 24, 2008 - MidAmerica GIS Symposium, Westin Crown Center, Kansas City, MO. Booth #4.
  
  
• April 23 - 25, 2008 - California GIS Conference, DoubleTree Hotel, Modesto, CA.
  
  
• April 28 - May 2, 2008 - ASPRS 2008 Annual Conference, Oregon Convention Center, Portland, Oregon. Booth #318.
  
  
• May 5 - 7, 2008 - Washington GIS Conference, Seattle Center, Northwest Rooms, Seattle, WA.
  
  
• May 14 - 16, 2008 - 4th Annual GEOINT Tech Days, Sheraton Premier at Tysons Corner, Vienna, VA.
  
  
• May 19 - 21, 2008 - Nevada GIS Conference, Orleans Hotel & Casino, Las Vegas, NV.
  
  
• June 2 - 5, 2008 - GEOTEC Event 2008, Ottawa Congress Centre, Ottawa, Ontario.

View a regularly updated list of the events we attend here: LizardTech Events.

Fun Discoveries

• See Express Server 6 at work! Check out the 5 terabytes of aerial orthophotos released by North Carolina One Map. This imagery from 27 counties is being delivered via Express Server 6 for viewing in your geospatial applications.
  
  
• There's a really cool historical aerials site hosted by NETR online (A Division of National Environmental Title Research, LLC). With the help of GeoExpress and Express Server NETR was able to publish aerials showing off different locations in the U.S. Some of the locations have data from several different years going back as far as the 1950s, so you can see the difference at any given location over time.

Case Studies and Customer Wins

Recently California-based GIS Planning, Inc, which creates user-friendly GIS applications on the Web, purchased GeoExpress and Express Server 6 in order to compress, host and serve large amounts of aerial imagery for dozens of hosted client Web applications.

GIS Planning was looking for a solution to quickly configure and deploy large image data sets for customers and easily update existing image catalogs with new imagery. In addition, the company needed to improve performance when displaying high resolution imagery at different extents and improve the refresh time of ArcIMS map services that use raster imagery. LizardTech Express Server met those requirements and has proven to be a very effective solution for GIS Planning. Deployment and management of image data is much more efficient now, and the performance in their Web applications using imagery has improved, the company stated.

Here is a partial list of recently added clients to our ever expanding customer base:

North America

• Telesto Solutions, Inc.
• City of Aspen
• Gulf Coast Permit Systems
• Eagan, McAllister Associates, Inc
• O'Brien and Gere Engineers, Inc.
• The Energy Cooperative
• City of Philadelphia Water Department
• Pictometry
• Aerial Experts
• PBS&J
• Alabama Department of Transportation
• EHA Planners
• Cubic Corporation
• ShotSpotter
• Northwestern Energy
• Ministry of Lands and Agriculture
• Canada Department of National Defense
• Kinder Morgan
• Ministry of Transportation

Federal

• U.S. Department of State
• Northrop Grumman
• Boeing Autometric
• U.S. Central Command
• Lockheed Martin
• NGA
• US Army Corps of Engineers
• SAIC

Latin America

• Centro Nacional para la Prevencion de Desastres
• IMT de Mexico, S.A. de C.V.

EMEA

• Cambridge Arctic Shelf Programme
• Regione Toscana
• Tragsatec
• Centro De Calculo De Alava
• London Borough of Richmond
• Katowice City Office
• Institut Cartografic de Catalunya
• Grontmij Nederland bv

Reseller News

LizardTech has recently signed a reseller agreement with proSPATIAL, LLC, a Denver-based geospatial technology firm, to serve as a distributor of the LizardTech Express Suite consisting of GeoExpress, Express Server and Spatial Express. We are very excited to welcome proSPATIAL to our ever expanding network of resellers!

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.

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 always seeking great talent. To learn more about current opportunities to join a dedicated, talented and close-knit team, please visit: Jobs at LizardTech.