LAStools was the recipient of the 2012 Technology Innovation Award for LiDAR processing at the Geospatial World Forum in Amsterdam for LASzip, a free open-source solution for compressing LAS files into LAZ files, which are 5 to 13 times smaller. The tool is used by NOAA, USGS, OpenTopography, Dielmo3D, Fugro, Blom, Riegl, Dewberry, USACE, DNR Minnesota, the Finnish Mapping Authority, and others. “LASzip has become a defacto industry standard for exchanging compressed LiDAR,” said Martin Isenburg, LAStools developer, “saving agencies, companies, and their users many terabytes of disk storage and transmission bandwidth.”

More information about LAStools is at www.cs.unc.edu/~isenburg/lastools/.