People get it

The sales teams always tell me that when it comes to presenting TITAN, they do one maybe two slides and then it's straight to the demo. That's because TITAN speaks really well for itself.

I think it's always good to get back to the basics. My favorite instruction for a simple TITAN demo is:

1. Download the TITAN Client from www.erdas.com/titan
2. Register to the TITAN Network
3. Open up the TITAN Client
4. In the Geospatial Instant Messenger, click to select someone who is sharing data
5. Under the Data tab at the bottom, right click on a dataset they've published and choose 'Load In' a listed application!
   
6. Or, right click on a dataset and Copy WMS Link, then paste that WMS link into a WMS compliant application

TITAN does a lot more, such as publishing with permissions, search, W*S consumption, 3D interactive presentations and much more. But it's good to know that, in six steps, you can demonstrate power+ease of use. In six steps people get it.

Streamlining the Message

TITAN does a lot of things: publish with permissions, protect ownership rights, universal translator (aka 'geospatial data bridge'), internal and external permission-based data distribution, authors of content become servers of content, users build interactive 3D presentation spaces (MyWorlds), create and share location-based content, harvest and edit metadata, communicate via chat, search/discover/access data and web services, consume into various applications, consume web services, query CS-W, manage connections to multiple public and private resources of data...the list goes on.

A product may have many features, but one goal of marketing is to condense and streamline the message you present about a product, so that it is concise and digestible by many. So we've carried out that exercise recently with TITAN and have derived the following product description:

An Online Network for Sharing Data

and have also derived a few high-level supporting statements:

• TITAN is a tool for publishing, indexing, searching and retrieving geospatial data, geospatial web services and location-based content across organizations and end users
• TITAN provides access to unlimited public and private data resources and enables consumption in a variety of desktop, internet and 3D virtual globe applications
• TITAN enables participants to chat via instant messenger, providing an arena for communication and collaboration

Ta da!

TITAN Webinar Wednesday 11 am EST

Tune in tomorrow at 11 am EST for a free, public 30 -45 minute online TITAN Webinar. It's a great first start at understanding TITAN, including ingesting and delivering data, search, discovery and delivery of data into multiple applications, making interactive 3D presentation spaces (MyWorlds) and also a description of the proxy server that process requests from TITAN Clients (a GeoHub).

Register here.

The Geospatial Babel Fish

The article is TITAN: The Geospatial Babel Fish, by Art Kalinski. The Babel Fish was a fictional species in (and plot device for) Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy science fiction comedy series. The Babel Fish enables alien races to communicate with each other while speaking different languages. This is also known in many other sci-fi series as a Universal Translator.

Art brilliantly uses the Babel Fish as a metaphor for TITAN, elaborating on the fact that 'we've all been looking for a Babel fish for geospatial data' and that TITAN 'takes data sharing, viewing and publishing to a new level.'

It seems to magically ingest almost any spatial data format, read it, use it, and publish it back out in any format — and do so quickly. It does for spatial data what the Babel fish did for language and speech. A universal translator designed for sharing and the sharing environment is completely controllable via permissions, so you don't lose data ownership.

At the end Art suggests that TITAN 'deserves a serious look.' Agreed. Thanks Art.

Read it here.

Looking forward to Localization

We're running an internal beta right now and have successfully localized the GeoIM to four languages: Spanish, German, Chinese and Korean.


We're looking forward to at least one more language by release (Japanese) and also to have the Viewer localized for these five languages as well.

And, TITAN in August can be localized to any language by using a Translation Tool that will be supplied.

TITAN Webinar today at 11 am EST

Use ERDAS TITAN to Rapidly Connect and Share Your World. Register here.

This webinar will highlight ERDAS TITAN, a geospatial data bridge providing access to multiple public and private data resources, and enabling that data to be accessed in a variety of desktop applications. ERDAS TITAN enables users to share, discover and consume geospatial data in an online, dynamic, collaborative network. Organizations that implement ERDAS TITAN ensure secure, permission-based data distribution, both internally and externally.

And if you can't catch this one, there's another on July 16, also at 11 am EST.

See all upcoming ERDAS Webinars at this page.