History
After working together at Los Alamos, John R "Grizz" Deal and Dr. Vance Faber formed LizardTech to move the MrSID (Multi-resolution Seamless Image Database) technology from LANL, where it was developed for government applications, into the wider arena of private industry. They recruited Dr. Jim White from LANL and Peter Crook from the private sector to drive the first commercial wavelet-based image compression product, LizardTech's early MrSID GeoEncoder software (later renamed GeoExpress) was designed specifically for geospatial professionals working with massive sets of aerial and satellite imagery.
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) was one of the early adaptors, and the National Information Mapping Agency (now called the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) and many other government agencies have since embraced the MrSID format. It is now supported by more than 300 GIS applications including those of ESRI, ERDAS (ERDAS IMAGINE), Autodesk and Intergraph.
In the mid-1990s, LizardTech moved its headquarters to Seattle, Washington, where it was identified in 1998 as the Washington Software Alliance’s Most Promising New Company.
In 2000, still a privately owned company funded by venture capital, LizardTech released its Content Server software product (later renamed Express Server), a server add-on that leveraged efficiencies in wavelet-based image compression to "stream" image data over networks on an as-needed basis as users navigated imagery.
With the slow but steady emergence of another wavelet-based compression technology, the powerful but complex JPEG 2000 ISO standard (ISO/IEC 15444-1:2000), LizardTech launched an aggressive R&D program to incorporate JPEG 2000 into its software products and became experts in JPEG 2000 compression for the geospatial industry. A by-product of this research was a gradual shift toward more use of open source tools and software and cooperation with the open source development community.
Deal and Faber left LizardTech in 2002. In 2003 the company was purchased by Celartem Inc., a Tokyo-based imaging technology company. The same year, LizardTech joined the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).
In 2005 LizardTech began adding tools to its basic compression product with the aim of supporting geospatial users from a workflow standpoint, such as reprojection, area-of-interest encoding and color balancing. That year the company also released Spatial Express, an API and set of tools for storing and retrieving wavelet-compressed imagery in an Oracle database.
From 2006 onward, development focused on interoperability of LizardTech's products with each other and with the broader geospatial ecosystem. LizardTech rolled out its Express Suite -- all three of its geospatial products together—in 2007. The 2008 release of GeoExpress 7 completed the work of making GeoExpress, Spatial Express and Express Server all interoperate fully for the first time.
In 2000 LizardTech negotiated exclusive rights to commercially develop and market the DjVu technology developed at AT&T Laboratories in 1996. The company hoped to widen its market from raster imaging only (mainly in the geospatial arena) to include the complex raster and vector imaging necessary in the growing document imaging industry. LizardTech developed the Document Express enterprise and professional level products in the years 2000–2006. DjVu-based solutions were most successful in Asia, and in 2007 Celartem began transferring all aspects of DjVu development to its Tokyo headquarters. Celartem USA now handles all aspects of DjVu marketing, sales and support in the U.S.
The MrSID image format continues to be an important compressed image format for geospatial applications and is supported in virtually all GIS software products. It is required as a delivery format by the USDA's National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP). Interest in JPEG 2000 has grown slowly but steadily as users become aware of the standard's capabilities for carrying georeferencing and other XML-based metadata via the Geography Markup Language (GML), as well as for fine-tuning compression parameters for particular workflows.
Read more about this topic: Lizard Tech
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations ... all of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“The history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)