Files slither down in size with LizardTech product

What: LizardTech, Seattle producer of technology for managing, distributing and accessing digital content.

Genesis: Founded in 1992, the company moved from New Mexico to Seattle in 1996 to raise venture capital. It licensed technology from Los Alamos National Laboratory that was the de facto industry standard for managing, accessing and distributing aerial photos and satellite images.

Ownership: Purchased in 2002 by Japan-based Celartem Technology, merged with Portland-based Extensis in 2005.

Key executives: Carlos Domingo, 33, president and CEO of Celartem and its Extensis and LizardTech divisions. He joined the company in 2002 after working at Toyota in Tokyo. Others include James White, vice president of research and development, and Kevin Hurst, vice president of marketing.

Employees: 170, in Seattle; Portland; New York; San Rafael, Calif.; and England.

Key technology: DjVu, a color document-imaging compression technology developed by AT&T Research Labs. The company says it reduces document files from 10 to 100 times smaller than formats such as Adobe's PDF and JPEG.

Major customers: Most recently helped The New Yorker capture 80 years of its magazine onto an eight-DVD set. More than 4,000 printed issues with 500,000 color pages were scanned and converted into DjVu format. The set goes on sale tomorrow as "The Complete New Yorker." Also involved with the Washington State Digital Archives project.

Growth: Compound annual growth of 52 percent since 2001; sales were nearly $29 million in fiscal year ending in June.

The name: The company was founded in New Mexico, where there are a lot of lizards, so "it was only appropriate to call the company that," Domingo said.

— Brier Dudley