SEATTLE, Wash., — Dec. 12, 2005— LizardTech, a division of Celartem, Inc., and a leading provider of software solutions for managing and distributing digital content,  announced today the company’s MrSID Generation 3 image compression format (MG3) is supported in ESRI’s ArcPad 7, making it even easier to view high quality geospatial raster imagery on handheld devices

“Customers who store their imagery on their local network and use it in the field will benefit significantly from the integration of MG3 with ArcPad,” said Jon Skiffington, product manager at LizardTech. “In the past, customers had their imagery stored in MG3’s lossless format for easy manipulation later, but in order to use the imagery in ArcPad, the imagery would have to be converted to MG2’s lossy format. Now these users will be able to use MG3 imagery out in the field without spending valuable time converting back to older lossy formats.”

ArcPad provides field-based personnel with the ability to capture, store, update, manipulate, analyze, and display geographic information. Now with the MG3 implementation, ArcPad users can take advantage of GeoExpress’ image compression functionality to quickly repurpose an image for use on a handheld device. The ability to reproject and compress the images at differing compression ratios within the same mosaic is a significant advantage over any other geospatial image compression format. This feature will enable broader use of the imagery by remote field users and first responders in areas where remote access to geospatial imagery is critical.

“The benefits of the integration of MG3 with ArcPad are significant,” said Tom Patterson, Deputy Fire Management Officer at BLM. “Right away I noticed a  substantial  performance  increase,  what  used  to  take 5-7 seconds to refresh  an  image  in  MG2  now  takes  a  staggering 2 seconds in MG3! In addition to saving a lot of time, I can now crop and do multi-resolution mosaicking which allows us to easily combine aerial photos from different resolutions into one file.”

 Additionally, the integration of MrSID with ArcPad benefits the National Agricultural Imagery Program (NAIP) image users. The flexibility and functionality that MG3 provides particularly for those using NAIP imagery are significant. With NAIP’s compressed county image mosaics being delivered in MG3 format, customers no longer have to double up their data by converting to MG2 to use it in ArcPad.

Another LizardTech product, Express Server, has also been recently integrated with ESRI’s ArcIMS.  With ArcPad supporting MG3, users can keep their imagery in one place and in one format, and access it over the web in ArcIMS, locally via ArcMap, and remotely using ArcPad.

About ESRI

Founded in 1969, ESRI (www.esri.com) is the world leader in the GIS software industry. ESRI offers innovative solutions that help users create, manage, analyze, and display information to make timely decisions and solve problems they encounter every day. ESRI’s comprehensive product line ranges from desktop GIS to GIS for the enterprise.

About GeoExpress with MrSID
GeoExpress offers the benefits of both MrSID technology and ISO standard JPEG 2000 without any compromise in image quality. GeoExpress provides lossless encoding, which preserves images with pixel-for-pixel fidelity in a compressed format easily reusable in downstream applications.

About LizardTech
LizardTech, a division of Celartem, Inc., was founded in 1992 to build valuable business solutions from technologies created by the world's leading research organizations including Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and AT&T Labs. LizardTech is a leader in applying state-of-the-art technologies to the real-world challenges of managing, distributing, and accessing large complex digital content such as aerial photographs, satellite imagery, and color scanned documents. LizardTech's software is installed on millions of desktops and integrated into a wide variety of platforms and applications. LizardTech has offices in Seattle, London and Tokyo. LizardTech is a division of Celartem, Inc., which is wholly owned by Celartem Technology Inc., (Hercules: 4330). For more information about LizardTech, visit www.lizardtech.com.

About Celartem
Celartem Technology Inc., develops and sells innovative technologies for

storage, access and distribution of rich media content. Celartem has developed

technology in the areas of digital image compression, scalable image viewing and secure

content distribution and management. Celartem is listed on the Osaka Securities

Exchange, Hercules:4330. Established in 1996, Celartem is headquartered in Tokyo,

Japan and has a wholly owned subsidiary, Celartem Inc. with headquarters in Seattle.

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