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ImageLinks was founded in April of 1996 to commercialize advanced image processing technology developed for the US Government by Harris Corporation ("Harris", NYSE-"HRS"). Harris had, for a number of years, been involved in the highly classified development and implementation of software used to process satellite imagery for the United States intelligence and defense communities. In excess of $50 million has been invested in the development of these capabilities. With the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990's the US Government declassified a large body of software technology with the expectation that it would be commercialized and available to the Government as "Commercial Off The Shelf" products. At that time, Harris had instituted a program to spin-off technology based companies to perform this type of commercialization, realizing it would be difficult to successfully accomplish this within a government contract environment. ImageLinks is the fourth such spin-off, becoming an independent company in April 1996 with $2.5 million in initial funding from Harris, through a venture capital partnership, and Kitty Hawk Capital, a Charlotte, NC based venture capital firm. ImageLinks developed a plan to make the technical functionality of Harris software available as a service or processed product basis rather than as a stand-alone software package. The Company's initial customers were in the resource management and state/local government markets, with initial entry into the visualization/simulation market. ImageLinks also developed a relationship with EOSAT, later merged into Space Imaging, to introduce 5-meter resolution data from the Indian IRS-1C satellite. This work ultimately formed the foundation for the development of the ImageLinks RasterWare Appliances product family.