Earlier this month, Kevin and I attended the 2nd European IABPA conference in Zürich, Switzerland.

This conference saw about 140 participants from 23 countries and was quite an interesting one. The main organizers - Sabine Hess and Andreas Schweizer [both of the Wissenschaftlicher Dienst, Zürich, Switzerland] - did a fantastic job of keeping things on track and running smoothly. Silke Brodbeck [Blutspureninstitut, Germany] did a great job organizing the talks.

There were a few interesting talks on crime scene reconstruction, several talks which generated interesting evening discussions, and presentations on the state of bloodstain pattern analysis in France and Canada. The Complex Bloodstain Patterns workshop by Brian Allen [Ontario Police College, Canada] was particularly useful to me as it helped me put our work with HemoSpat into context.

It was great to meet with licensees face-to-face and discuss potential improvements to HemoSpat, and to hear HemoSpat mentioned in several of the talks. We also were fortunate [?] enough to participate as members of the "Vineyard Escape Team" on the night of the banquet. Sadly one member of the team was injured and required surgery to his arm.

After the conference, Kevin and I were fortunate enough to be invited by Martin Eversdijk [Forensic Police Amsterdam-Amstelland, The Netherlands] to tour their new forensics labs in Amsterdam, and by Martin Roos [Netherlands Forensic Institute, The Netherlands] to tour the NFI building in The Hague. These tours were very interesting as we got to see different aspects of forensic services in The Netherlands. [Thanks also to Dennis Boon of the NFI for the tour and to Jos Klemm and Ger Coolen of the Regio Politie Limburg-Zuid for the lift to Maastricht!]

See you in Boulder, Colorado, USA!

Based on feedback from several agencies, we have decided to simplify our pricing structure. We recognize that yearly support fees are often a difficult thing to get into a budget and that this has prevented some institutions from being able to purchase HemoSpat. We have therefore decided to eliminate yearly maintenance and support fees to ensure that these organizations can use the latest tools for bloodstain pattern analysis.

Our new pricing structure may be found on our pricing & ordering page.

FORident Software is pleased to announce the release of HemoSpat v1.1 for Mac OS X 10.4 and Windows 2000/XP. The biggest change in this version is the addition of the 2D Viewer. This gives you top, side, and front views of the scene so you may verify that the virtual strings for each pattern look correct.

There are a few other changes and fixes as well. For a complete list of changes, please see this forum post.

We look forward to working with you!

This week I attended the annual IABPA training conference in Corning, NY, USA.

As with last year's conference in Santa Barbara, there was quite a large group from Europe in attendance and an especially large group from The Netherlands. It was nice to see so many familiar faces and great to meet new people and to put faces to names.

I learned quite a bit at this conference - how nasty hotel rooms can be, similarities between dismembered body disposal methods in London and Dublin, how far you can walk after taking a power saw to your own throat, how to bury the hatchet, and more mundane things like information about the IABPA itself and the relationship with the Scientific Working Group on Bloodstain Pattern Analysis (SWGSTAIN). It was also great to see the amount of interest in HemoSpat amongst the attendees.

Thank you everyone for your input on the project and I look forward to working with you!

The August 2006 issue of Law Enforcement Technology Magazine has an article in it about HemoSpat. It gives a bit of insight into Andy's background and motivation for writing HemoSpat, as well as highlighting its features.

You can read the article at officer.com.

At FORident Software, we believe that software which plays nicely with others benefits everyone. This means using a common format and working to ensure the two software products are compatible.

We are pleased to announce that The CAD Zone has verified that HemoSpat's DXF output and its ASCII Coordinate output are compatible with The Crime Zone 3D scene reconstruction software.

We look forward to working with any other vendors interested in ensuring compatibility.

A demo version of HemoSpat is now available for both Mac OS X 10.4.x and Windows 2000/XP. It contains a sample project with ten bloodstain images and documentation to walk you through an analysis designed to highlight the features of HemoSpat.

You may download it here.

We hope you'll give it a try and that you like what you see!

The first IABPA conference held in Europe was quite a success with about 140 attendees from over 20 countries. The organisers, André Hendrix [Politie Zeeland, The Netherlands] and Peter Lamb [Forensic Science Service, UK] did a great job. As with the Santa Barbara conference, the attendees were from quite diverse backgrounds and levels of experience which made discussions quite interesting.

I had a chance to demonstrate the HemoSpat Beta to a number of the attendees and the response was overwhelmingly positive. [To all those I was able to talk with - thank you for your interest in our project and I look forward to working with you in the future.]

See you in Corning NY!

I attended the IABPA training conference in Santa Barbara, California. It was a great learning experience!

I'd like to thank the organisers [especially Char] and the other attendees for making me feel welcome even though I don't work in law enforcement or a crime laboratory. I look forward to working with you to provide the best tools I can for bloodstain pattern analysis.

See you in The Netherlands!