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Looks like it became Deja View (DjVu) and a bunch of other niche products. But at USD$130 for a mere compressor plugin (and that's discounted), they're not going to sell many.

There is much trumpeting about making these open standards but very little actually happening, yet with wide acceptance it would save an immense amount of storage and bandwidth everywhere. It's almost a poster child illustrating the case for damage done to society by short-sightedly nailing ideas to the floor.

If there's any indication that this will actually be out in a few months, I missed it.

If there's anything indicating JPEG2000 support for Mozilla, The Gimp, Paint Shop Pro, or Photoshop in the near future, I missed it.

I've yet to see anything that indicates there are no more patent issues and that people can support this format without patent issues (Read "Can the Gimp ship with this?")

Regarding Exploer PNG support:
AlphaImageLoader Filter:
Displays an image within the boundaries of the object and between the object background and content, with options to clip or resize the image. When loading a Portable Network Graphics (PNG) image, tranparency--from zero to 100 percent is supported.

Just because I do miss it, I still see almost no support for the beloved fractal image format *.fif I think it's now part of LizardTech's line of image compression/fractal tools. If you think jpeg200 offers compression, then you missed the fif format completely.

You can also grap the current viewer and a FIF Plugin for Adobe Photoshop [Win16, Win32, and Macintosh only] from Altamira Group

You need only between 15MB and 40MB of RGB data to capture an image for any size output. For example, you could scan a 4" x 5" transparency at 600 dpi to produce a 20MB RGB file, do all your image editing at that scan resolution, then encode the image. Depending on the image, your encoded file will typically be 2MB-10MB. Now, if you need to output the image at 450MB and 60MB, you can generate both resolutions from the same encoded file.

For smaller print-quality output, you can start with a 4MB-5MB original, encode to less than a megabyte, then render the image easily and beautifully to 20MB.

For screen-resolution output, you can start even smaller. For example, using Genuine Fractals' 50 Web Graphics options, a 640 x 480-pixel original compresses to between 10KB and 150KB and renders a high-quality image for quick full-screen display on the Web.

Sometimes use it to send high quality images by email, just have to be sure the person you are sending to have the same program.

Not sure what happened to Iterated's own app, although seem to remember reading on their site way back that they were working with someone else of a streaming video application for it?

Maybe they sold it, or maybe just shut up about it till they had their final product (and if there are better methods now it could just have been dropped).

Ok, before i start I have two URLs for anyone intrested, first is Philip Greenspun's photo.net guide to digitals, albeit a bit outdated, has sound advise.
Second is the Altamira software. I have played with this, and it has a 20 use free demo. What it lets you do is use a fractal algorithm thingy to upsample lower resolution images to a high enough res to print, this is GREAT, it works well, and the results, while not as sharp as if you had started with hi-res, are decent enough for snapshots to show friends. And no, I dont work for them, but I wish I did :)
Now, on to my 2
Well, being a photographer I have to throw in my 2 (yes, a real photographer, I make money selling pictures)...
The world of digital is, intresting, to say the least. It's my feelings that digital has a _LONG_ way to go before it takes over film. In the pro photo market 35mm is only one type of film. Digital cameras today can take on 35mm for under $5000 and with a decent printer, and some software, yes, you too can be a digital photographer.
However my personal aditude towards it is that digiutal cameras are _GREAT_ for only one thing, websites. I currently own a Kodak DC215 and an Olympus D630 and both of them shoot high enough res to be used to print a fairly sharp 5x7 but nothing more. With the bigger cameras, the kodak modeks based on the Canon EOS system, and the nikon D1 you can get a decent 8x10 and those are in the $5000 range.
Most consumers will never have need for a snapshot biugger than 8x10, so I feel that these cameras "do the job" but I think they're best for just putting images on the web, and doing a photo archive of your life.
For the print/advertising world however, who often times deals with putting images on billboards, buses, and even buildings, a cheap digital camera doesn't cut it. Megavision and Lightwave Inc. both make high quality backs for medium and large format camneras that start around $20k and go up to a bit over $100k and these are getting to the point where they can be used for billboards and such, but most firms still prefer film. So...from this photographer, I say film is the way to go for at least another 10 years, and as an artform, I dont think film will go away in my life time. That's my 2 anjoy :)