LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ is getting pretty popular and keeping our sales and support staff busy. LEAD Technologies is a common sight around the world at various tradeshows and conferences. With our new cross-platform libraries we can now be a part of even more, and next week will mark the first time ever that LEAD will be an exhibitor at an Android specific conference!

Win a $25 Google Play Gift Card

At the end of each exhibit day, LEAD Technologies will be giving away five $25 Google Play gift cards to use on new apps and games for your Android device! Stop by our booth, let us scan your badge, and come back at the end of the day to see if your name gets chosen!

If you haven't noticed already, it's trade show season here in the US. In fact, I'm writing this post after setting up our booth at the Android Developer Conference (AnDevCon) in Boston! Next week, June 3 - 6, LEAD will be exhibiting at Microsoft's TechEd North America in New Orleans in booth #328.

We look forward to showcasing our entire document, medical, raster and multimedia imaging product lines. Not only do we have the latest and greatest imaging SDK features for all the wonderful Microsoft products featured at TechEd like .NET, Win 32/64, Windows 8, WinRT, Surface, and Windows Phones, but we also have the most powerful and versatile cross-platform imaging libraries for HTML5, iOS, OS X, Android and Linux in case you are looking to port your Microsoft apps to additional platforms.

LEADTOOLS Version 18, also known as LEADTOOLS Anywhere™, is designed with the purpose of opening new opportunities and easing the development of high quality imaging applications that can run anywhere. Since V18's release earlier this year, we have published several articles on The CodeProject showing the benefits of using LEADTOOLS to create multi-platform, native apps for .NET, WinRT, iOS, OS X and Android.

This month we are continuing that series and have written an article showing the beauty and simplicity of using LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ for barcode recognition. For each platform, it only requires a few simple lines of code to detect and recognize barcodes from still images and video streams. Head on over to The CodeProject, grab the latest evaluation for LEADTOOLS V18 and see for yourself how LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ can increase your mobile app's ROI.

I heard some exciting news from engineering today in regards to our WinRT barcode engine. Just over a month has passed since we released the WinRT SDK, and our hardworking document imaging experts have already revamped the barcode recognition algorithm in several key ways:

• Enhanced the barcode engine to produce optimum results in pictures taken from mobile devices
• New image preprocessing that resolves extreme shadows, lighting and 3D perspective skewing in images capture from cameras
• Faster recognition when reading barcodes from a video stream
• Enhanced internal binarization for color images and videos

All of these add up to superior accuracy and speed to what was already an outstanding product! To be more precise, the new algorithm is presented as a setting which means this has no impact on the previous algorithm if you are still using our barcode engine on scanned documents. These updates, as well as a free demo for the Windows Store, should be available shortly after the holidays!