July is an awesome month. Not just because of America's Independence or the fact that it's National Ice Cream Month. Around here we are pretty excited because this July we are celebrating LEAD Technologies' 25th anniversary! And starting today, we invite everyone to celebrate along with us as we will be giving away cash, discounts and other prizes!

But first, the past 25 years cannot be properly celebrated without at least a little history lesson. In the summer of 1990, Moe Daher and Rich Little started a partnership called Compression Technology. Later that year, Arthur Evans and Jim Alexander, joined as angel investors and the company transformed into LEAD Technologies, Inc. The name "LEAD" was chosen as an acronym for each of their last names: Little, Evans, Alexander and Daher.

Last week, I officially introduced LEADTOOLS Version 18 for the first time and gave a bird's eye view of the changes coming to the product line. Today I'm covering the fun stuff: features!

LEADTOOLS Anywhere

Of course, the marquee update in version 18 is the completion of LEADTOOLS Anywhere. Announced last spring, our executive management put forth a vision and plan to incrementally release cross-platform versions of LEADTOOLS. First came zero footprint HTML5 and JavaScript tools, then native libraries for WinRT (the new Windows 8 platform previously called Metro), and now with version 18 there will be native libraries for iOS, OS X, Android and Linux.

LEADTOOLS Version 18 is very close, and everyone is excited around here. Our existing customers are pretty stoked as well, and this post is for them! Many of you have been asking us what upgrades will look like since we streamlined the product line to make it easier and more cost effective to get the necessary development licenses.

Who is eligible for an upgrade?

For existing customers, LEAD is making it very simple to upgrade. There is no in-sequence or out-of-sequence distinction, meaning as long as you have a valid license to an earlier version of LEADTOOLS you will receive a significant discount to upgrade. Even better, upgrading provides you with all of the new features and cross-platform development interfaces in V18, as well as the various add-on modules and plug-ins that are now bundled in at no additional cost.

We have hinted about it. We have shared bits of information here and there. And in at least one post we’ve said it was coming soon. The wait is over, LEADTOOLS 18 has been released! The new LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ native libraries for WinRT, iOS, OS X, Android and Linux are certainly the marquee update in this exciting release, but there are also many enhancements within the LEADTOOLS Document, Medical and Multimedia technology for Win32/64, .NET and HTML5.

LEADTOOLS Anywhere™

LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ extends LEAD Technologies' award winning LEADTOOLS Imaging SDKs to every major development platform. This initiative began last year with the release of SDKs for HTML5 and WinRT. The HTML5 SDKs made it possible to develop zero footprint web applications and WinRT laid the necessary foundation for porting LEADTOOLS to other native platforms. With LEADTOOLS 18, LEAD has further expanded the reach of its Imaging SDKs by offering native libraries for iOS, OS X, Android and Linux development. All core LEADTOOLS imaging technology is natively supported in each of these platforms, including viewing, annotation and markup, OCR, OMR, forms processing, 1D and 2D barcode, PDF, DICOM and support for over 150 file formats and 200 image processing functions.