LizardTech
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| Public | |
| Industry | Software |
| Founded | Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S. (1992) |
| Headquarters | Seattle, Washington, U.S. |
| Products | GeoExpress, Express Server |
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Number of employees
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30 (August 2008) |
| Parent | Celartem, Inc. |
| Website | http://www.lizardtech.com |
LizardTech is a geospatial software company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, notable for transferring the wavelet-based MrSID image encoding and viewing technology from initial development by the U.S. government to the geospatial market.
LizardTech's products enable users to compress, manipulate, and distribute high-resolution geospatial data such as aerial, satellite imagery and LiDAR data. The company is a division of Celartem Inc. (Hercules: 4330), and has offices in Tokyo and London. Its sister company, Extensis, is based in Portland, Oregon.
LizardTech was founded in 1992 to commercialize the MrSID technology and file format originally developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico. The name of the company is an homage to the lizards of the New Mexican desert.
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.
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