Former LizardTech sales exec grabs a desk at rival ER Mapper

ER Mapper has just scored a new hire in Walt Wiley, who, was once Director of sales at Lizardtech. What's interesting about this is that Lizardtech and ER Mapper have been battling it out in courts for several years now in the ECW battle. From Wiley's bio... A strong proponent of JPEG2000 technology, Mr Wiley was the founder and CEO of Mapping Science, Inc. and has served as the Director of U.S. Sales for LizardTech, as well as in positions with EarthData International. I'm sure some of the crew in Seattle are likely talking about this one over the water cooler today! You can see the PR at http://www.gisuser.com/content/view/8351/ Wiley's new post will be as Defence Business Dev. Manager for ER Mapper. A reminder about the litigation... In 1999, LizardTech filed a patent infringement lawsuit in U.S. District Court because the company asserts that the ECW image compression technology produced by ERM, a former licensee of LizardTech image compression technology MrSID with access to LizardTech's Software Development Kit (SDK), infringed on one of LizardTech's most important patents. The patents in question relate to wavelet encoding of large images and how computer memory is utilized to achieve effective results during this operation, which is of particular interest in the geospatial market.