Last few days were very hot and happening with a lot of money talk done by some prominent companies. These are good times for companies in data compression :-)

They may soon get delisted from Nasdaq as their stock’s bid price is way below the minimum $1.00 per share requirement, but it still might be too soon to completely write them off. They have not yet given up on Jpeg patent and they are actively pursuing other interesting patents too.

Another compression patent granted that promises a “floppy disk that can store 1.28 GigaBytes of data”. I couldn’t understand a word of what it says, but still fun to read :-)

XML compression can be really great to “patch-up” the inefficiencies faced by SOA applications in handling large XML payloads, and fortunately there are solutions available. But nothing beats good design which can eliminate the problem at source.

Patent no. 7,092,580 is for a improving image quality after decompression by removing lingering compression artifacts.

August 2006 issue of the Data Compression Newsletter.

Latest version of UPX, the versatile executable packer, was released a few days ago. Looks like a bug-fix release.

IIPimage Windows installer for server version 0.9.6 was released, its a client/server system which lets you view very high resolution large images on slow connections, using multi-resolution tiled TIFF images.

Alexander Ratushnyak updates his December 2005 entry to Calgary corpus compression challenge. Matt Mahoney provides a summary of the PAQAR based compressor.

Want work doing research on data compression algorithms? The StuffIt guys are hiring.