Google Earth Pro Now Available Free

HughPickens.com writes Google has long offered a Pro version of Google Earth for $399 per year that includes some pretty cool extras not found in the free version. Now Rick Broida reports at Cnet that you can get Google Earth Pro absolutely free. All you have to do is download the installer, run it, then sign in using your e-mail address (as your username) and license code GEPFREE. Features include: Advanced measurements: Measure parking lots and land developments with polygon area measure, or determine affected radius with circle measure; High-resolution printing: Print images up to 4,800 x 3,200 pixel resolution; Exclusive pro data layers with Demographics and traffic count; Spreadsheet import: Ingest up to 2,500 addresses at a time, assigning place marks and style templates in bulk; and Movie-Maker: Export Windows Media and QuickTime HD movies, up to 1,920x1,080-pixel resolution. If you've ever been involved in a property dispute, you'll know how acrimonious they can get. Google Earth Pro includes parcel data that definitively defines property boundaries. "Do you really need this? Probably not, as Pro was created with business/enterprise users in mind," writes Broida. "Let's be honest, [Google Earth Pro has] entertainment value that's virtually impossible to measure."

Comments

Utility

[Iamthecheese]

Just as Google Maps and friends has saved millions of man-hours and probably hundreds of millions of dollars from people not being lost sufficiently wide adoption and awareness of these advanced features may save an immense amount of temporal and fiscal expense.

Common usage combined with other services can, for example, create self-aware communities, allow public input for city planning, resolve boundary arguments, help individuals planning to, for example, install a swimming pool, and provide data for planning crop layouts.And that's just off the top of my very non-expert head. I think the implications of this are far broader than may be immediately recognized.

Re:Utility

[Hadlock]

I was able to prove out just now that the speed hump my friend in highschool's parents had the city put in front of their house isn't justified - the neighborhood street in front of our house had way more traffic and was only half a mile from them.

parcel data that definitively unreliable

[UziBeatle]

parcel data that definitively defines property boundaries.

  BOGUS statement.

  As soon as I downloaded this I zoomed in on the area
I live in (somewhere in N. Galveston CO. , Texas)
and saw immediately the property lines were wrong.

Not by a small margin either. All property lines along
the road I live along were shifted by offset of around 20 to 30 feet.

  A further look at neighboring streets showed similar
offsets.

  In the linked article to the story the blog clown stated
this wondrous GM Pro could cheaply solve property disputes (or words to that effect).

    Yah, right. Nope. Might cause trouble but not a tool to cheaply determine property boundaries.

Unreliable, therefor useless.

  Anyone else care to check theirs? I imagine it varies region to region how useful it is but bottom line if wrong in this area it is most likely wrong in other far flung areas.

Re:Mac and Windows PC only.

[green1]

As usual though, this requires more than just wine, it also requires tricking google in to thinking you have windows in the first place just to be allowed to download it. If you go to the site with a linux machine it downloads the normal google earth for linux, and doesn't let you download the PC version. (I'm guessing a user agent change would fix this, but it's yet one more hoop you have to jump through that shouldn't be necessary.)

Re:Earth = USA

[dcw3]

Typical whiner. It was a for profit product. If it had been selling in your country, it probably would have been available with the data there as well. But go ahead and pile on because you got something for free that doesn't have everything you wanted.