LEAD Technologies

LEAD Technologies Inc. is a privately held software company headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA. LEAD develops, markets and supports a line of imaging toolkits called LEADTOOLS.

History

The company was founded by Mohammed Daher and Rich Little in the summer of 1990 as a partnership called Compression Technology and was later incorporated as LEAD Technologies, Inc. in April 1991.^[1]

In July 1994, Daher was awarded a patent - # 5,327,254 Method and Apparatus for Compressing and Decompressing Image Data.^[2] This invention became the foundation of LEAD's product line and business ventures.

LEAD gained a worldwide presence in 1993 by signing its first international reseller agreement with Unirent LTD to represent LEAD in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Two years later, it signed a publishing agreement with Bunka Orient Corporation in Sendai, Japan for the rights to localize LEADTOOLS in Japanese, and to market and support the product in Japan.

Products

LEAD was established to commercialize Daher's inventions in the field of digital imaging and compression technology. The primary product, LEADTOOLS, is a family of raster, document, medical, multimedia and vector imaging toolkits that allow programmers and developers to incorporate digital imaging technologies into applications that they are creating. In addition to selling LEADTOOLS directly to software developers, LEAD Technologies, its divisions and subsidiaries use the SDK within several end user products including ePrint, MiPACS, M²Convert and FileWiggler.^[3]

Subsidiaries

In 2006, LEAD created M² Solutions, Inc. as a wholly owned subsidiary. M² develops, markets and supports a product line called M² Convert, which helps end users convert from one multimedia format to another. M² has primarily focused on the mobile and handheld market for people using Apple iPods and iPads, and Microsoft Windows phones.

Divisions

In 2001, LEAD created a division called Medicor Imaging. Medicor develops, markets and supports a product line called MiPACS. Medicor’s primary product, MiPACS Dental Enterprise Solution is an application for large digital dental providers such as Universities, the United States Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs. When selected for use by the VA, the primary reason was that it was the only solution able to automatically acquire images from any device, view images with templates, and save images electronically to VistA imaging.^[4]

Awards

• 2011-2012 The Code Project Members Choice Award^[5][6]
• 2012-2016 SD Times 100 ^{[7][8][9][10][11]}
• 2006-2015 Visual Studio Magazine Readers Choice Award^{[12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]}

References