ComponentSource has been our global distributor since 1995. Starting in 2006, ComponentSource started awarding top publishers and software based on sales for the year. LEAD and LEADTOOLS have received an award every year since.

There are two sets of awards: ComponentSource Bestselling Product Awards for 2014-2015 and ComponentSource Bestselling Publisher Awards for 2014-2015. The allocation of the awards was calculated based on ComponentSource global sales orders during 2014.

LEAD Technologies is pleased to announce the release of a major update to the LEADTOOLS Document and Medical Product lines. The headliner of this update is the Advantage OCR engine, which boasts a plethora of improvements which contribute to a significant increase in overall speed and accuracy.

Keep reading below to see a list of all the improvements in this update. You can also read the official press release.

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.