I often have to work with company logos and don't always have access to the source vector files to make the changes I want. Instead of rebuilding these logos from scratch there are a couple tools available to automate the process.

VectorMagic is a new online tool from Stanford that allows you to upload a bitmap image and have it converted to a vector image. This works similar to Adobe's Live Trace feature in Illustrator, but since I started playing with it a few days ago, it seems to work much better. The fact that it's free and web-based is also very compelling.

There is obviously some hardcore backend code running on their servers to process these images, but I thought it was interesting how they used Flex to build the front-end for this application. (Verified by James Ward’s tool)

You can pan and zoom on the original image you uploaded as well as the vectorized result, modify color palettes, and save the results as EPS, SVG, or PNG.

The Vancouver Canucks logo performed very well with this tool with an almost perfect vectorization.

If you ever need to convert bitmaps to vector images I highly recommend keeping this free tool in mind.