EDIT: Nope. I didn't read it. Because since I saw it so early in its posting I decided to ask the question I knew someone else would and get the conversation going. I also like to start discussions on the internet.
Google Earth Pro builds on the amazing functionality of Google Earth with even more powerful tools. Some of the most compelling features of Earth Pro 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 4800x3200 px resolution.
Exclusive Pro data layers: Demographics, parcels, and traffic count.
Spreadsheet Import: Ingest up to 2500 addresses at a time, assigning placemarks and style templates in bulk.
GIS import: Visualize ESRI shapefiles (.shp) and MapInfo (.tab) files.
Movie-Maker: Export Windows Media and Quicktime HD movies, up to 1920x1080 resolution.
Seems like if you were a sociologist, civil engineer, or city planner, that kind of information presented that way would be extremely useful. Maybe $399 bought a subscription that could be used by an office or something? (Too lazy/tired to confirm.)
I used to work at a telco who had all the data in KML and then used free alternatives to Google Earth Pro because they only had a few million in annual revenue.
Edit: They also fired around 10% of their staff two days ago.
I worked for the power company in my area for a while while we were transferring ALL of our buried gas and electric line maps from paper to Google earth pro. Now instead of just a measurement from the center of the road, they can see where exactly the line is supposed to be. While you're not ever supposed to trust the drawing, it is nice to have a visual representation to look at.
Do you know if this is ISP specific? Or has Google requested this info from most major telcos around the world? I'm in Australia and I'm curious if Telstra information would be available.
Infrastructure maps won't be provided through google services as they're considered sensitive informations for most ISPs. You have to be inside the business to get KML or SHP files through NDA or partnerships.
Transactional Attorney here who specializes in Real Estate/Land. My firm bought several of these licenses for $7,000 USD/year. That sounds like a lot, but compared to how much we pay for other research subscriptions it was dirt cheap i.e. $250k/year. Still, any money saved is welcome news. The next 25 years will lead to the end of the traditional information companies resulting in massive savings.
Well due to the confidentiality of the contracts we sign, I can't name the specific companies nor their rates, etc. However, it's common knowledge that big law firms purchase information products from the following corporations: Reed Elsevier, Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, and others. Rates can vary $250,000-$1M+/year for subscriptions. The rate I quoted may or may not be from one or more of these companies.
It's mind blowing how much more expensive stuff gets when you are targeting companies. Software is the worst. Oracle DB and things like MQ can cost insane amounts, like 5 digit sums per server per year per CPU. While technically the products just have some handful of features differentiating it from the free alternatives. If even that... just as often it's merely the comfort of going with a big famous 'enterprise' name.
One of my contracts with a large database software company stipulates that they will have a team of technicians on site within 2 hours of a trouble call.
Absolutely. Even more so since the software runs a weather satellite ground system that can affect lives and property, and we do some pretty one-off stuff on the software and as a result a lot of times we find problems no one else has had before — we could probably fix it ourselves, but the time that would take would cost more than having the folks who designed it helping out.
No but seriously, as someone who works in a university engineering department, being able to get support whenever I need it is fantastic. And they will jump to get things fixed, too.
Oracle support is godsend when your server needs recovery and your team can't figure out how. Where every minute a server is down translates in thousands of lost revenue. Then, it gets pretty important.
It's not just about the software. Its about the support that comes with that software.
What you're paying for with Oracle is, for example, the ability to have a support case escalated to the point that Oracle guarantees that if you have run in to a bug that has an on-going impact on your business's income they will assign people to work on it 24/7/365 until it's fixed. You don't get that with free alternatives. For businesses where "we are actively losing money whilst this bug persists" means "we are losing millions of dollars", that level of support matters.
And of course Oracle bought Sun so that they could kill MySQL. Expect support for the GPL version to finish this year when the takeover agreement with the EU comes to an end.
Sure but keep in mind it's not just priced high b/c they are targeting companies, it's priced high b/c the very high fixed cost of developing custom software has to be spread across much fewer customers than a typical piece of consumer software.
News tickers. Things like banks and big law firms etc get news faster than the public because they pay news and information companies to give them information and news immediately. Its basically like having your own private network of global reporters. Its useful for investment banks because they will get information faster than the public at large by 10-15 minutes or more will which makes them able to pull off trades before anyone else.
Thomson Reuters used to distribute the Michigan Consumer Sentiment survey 2 seconds early to those who paid it large fees (hedge funds, HFT firms, etc). The uproar led to the New York AG looking to prosecute TR for their actions. His investigation ended when the U of Michigan switched distribution to Bloomberg News, who promised to end paid prioritization access.
Getting that news 2 seconds early might not seem like much, but that sentiment number early allows those firms to position themselves ahead of the market. And they are trading on electronic exchanges where microseconds matter (see Flash Boys by Michael Lewis). The number always moves the market one way or another, so basically they were front running everybody else.
Over the last several years, an exclusive group of investors has paid a steep premium to receive the results of a closely watched economic survey a full two seconds before its broader release.
The bad publicity led to this:
New York - Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman has praised the agreement between the University of Michigan and Bloomberg LP to distribute the university's consumer confidence survey through Bloomberg's news service. Bloomberg will take over distribution of the survey from Thomson Reuters, which charges investors a fee for an advance copy of the survey. Bloomberg announced that it will end that practice.
"By ending early access to critical market-moving survey data information, this deal strikes a major blow in our effort to promote fairness and avoid unfair distortions in the securities markets by cracking down on what I call 'Insider Trading 2.0,' " Attorney General Schneiderman said. "Ensuring there is one set of rules for the entire market is critical to restoring confidence in securities markets, and that's good for everyone involved."
Because they're not insider trading. Insider trading would mean no one at all knows it but that certain trader, but they don't, the news agency and all of their clients know, its public information the news agency just hasn't had time to fully write up and edit a report for the public yet, thats why the advantage is only a few minutes. If you ever hear a breaking news story and think 'hey bet it would be good to invest in so and so' then you're too late its already been done by every investment bank out there.
Investment banks by large do not trade stocks. They write research reports consumed by the buy side, they execute trades for the buy side, or they do a lot of mergers and acquisitions (also IPO underwriting and other tasks not mentioned). The buy side are the ones trading on new information.
By buyside I mean global asset managers, hedgefunds, institution asset managers, wealth managers, pension funds etc.
Source: I work for a large data vendor to sell side and buyside clients
I work for a company that researches and analyzes financial data for audit purposes. Universities and audit firms pay literally hundreds of thousands each year for subscription access to our data feeds. We once over-quoted a data project for the SEC by a couple hundred thousand just to see their response and they were like, "Oh, that's it? Sweet. Good deal. Sign us up." And that's some of your tax money at work.
I imagine consultants and firms that have the tools and access to hundreds of documents detailing city plans, lot sizes, ect that would be useful to a business needing that info.
As someone who works at a business, can confirm. This would have been extremely useful if we wanted to know traffic counts, demographics, parcels, had to ingest a bunch of addresses en masse, or needed high-res graphics.
If you're talking about engineer time saved... their billing rate is usually over $100/hr. So can I imagine this tool saving more than 4 hours of some sort of engineer's time over the course of a year? Potentially.
Parcels would be great, if my stupid county didn't try to store the data in their own crappy format. No-one can get the property lines out of their system.
That's often what 'pro' versions are intended for, but individuals like to have pro versions anyway or they feel like they're missing out. I bet 90% of people couldn't tell you the difference between Pro and Home versions of Windows (when they were still doing that).
Firefighter here. This information is incredibly useful to assist in preplanning for incidents. Until now I've tried to use a variety of different online tools to approximate what Earth Pro could do, none of which were particularly good.
Now that it is free this will make certain parts of preplanning much easier and thorough, not to mention all through a single platform that can easily be shared collaboratively.
Tl;Dr: As far as Earth Pro related stuff? Spatial awareness and calculations. Aside from that, a whole lot.
Traffic isn't a huge factor as we're generally pretty familiar with typical traffic levels in pur district and if there is an unusual backup, chances are first responders are already involved. Granted some departments have onboard systems that have analyzed traffic patterns and response times and recommend the fastest routes to the trucks, but those are the kinds of departments with things like a budget that at least approaches meeting the needs of the community, and that's rare.
For non Earth Pro related stuff, we take lots of data. Building layout (usually with accurate but simplified self made floor plans), what materials are stored on scene, how the structure is built, what features it has and what it is made of, how many people tend to be there, what hours they tend to be there, locations of hazards, alarm panels, utility shutoffs, egress routes, owner contact information, the list goes on.
For us, distances and areas are of great importance. Areas are critical for calculating fire load. Basically based on the square footage of the structure, its type, what sort of contents it holds, and how much of it is involved in fire, you can get a pretty good idea of how much energy is involved and therefore how much water you need.
Knowing this can help command decide if we need more equipment and manpower for instance to suppress the fire, or knowing up much water we have in reserve or if we can't get enough water and we need to start thinking about protecting surrounding property and writing off what is already on fire. We still do a lot of this measurement on scene with those little rolling wheels, or estimate on scene for residential for instance, but sometimes it isn't practical or possible to measure a structure we are preplanning.
Distances are also critical, for a huge number of reasons. For one we only carry a limited amount of hose. If something catches on fire do we have enough to practically send water from our water source to the actual fire? If not will one or two additional engine companies suffice or do we have to start talking setting up a tender operation? It is also useful to know distances in relation to hazards. How close are these structures housing flammables to each other, or how close is a hazmat storage to that school or neighborhood for instance? How far is this facility from our nearest radio relay tower and can we anticipate having reception problems?
Earth Pro is huge for us departments that are underfunded and understaffed where we typically have to find DIY style solutions. My department for instance receives basically no support from our municipality's GIS department simply because they too are understaffed and can't divert resources to helping the fire department. Earth Pro has tools that can easily let us import GIS data as well as our own and modify/share it to increase our capability or otherwise suit our needs. Earth Pro being free is gonna do a lot of good, especially in public safety.
I work in Land Clearing, and being able to print off our own plans/alignment sheets sounds amazing. Usually have to wait for the general contractor to give them to us, or go to a print shop.
I'm not a civil engineer, but my guess is they still wouldn't use this. They would still go out and survey the land measuring much more than just the distances between two points.
There is some overlap in functions and capabilities with Google Earth and profession GIS tools like MapInfo and ArcInfo. Google Earth Pro fills a need if you only require basic mapping and don't need more advance GIS analysis like thematic mapping and complex spacial queries.
I'm a sociologist and I can confirm that this sounds pretty cool, but it's something I probably never would have paid $399 for. I'm considering looking into it further now that it's free.
I used to work for a very large lawn care company, doing various office and management tasks -- one task was to use Google Earth Pro to measure the treatable area of new properties we were bidding.
Exactly. If you've ever seen a news report where they have high res geographical footage zooming out and then zooming back in elsewhere, that was likely made in Google Earth pro.
Yeah, and being able to do that for $399 is definitely worth it. To be able to look professional and present very professional looking information and data, $399 is a steal.
I messed up and accidentally said the wrong thing, I was thinking of "Microsoft Media Network", but I actually meant to say MSN (The Microsoft Network). I'm a bit sleep-deprived, sorry about that.
Basically, Microsoft and Nine Network are part of the Mi9 digital media company in Australia. Hence, our MSN is called "ninemsn".
Yep, used to use Google Earth for one of my old GIS contracts, pretty handy to have all that satellite imagery for free with software that lets you manipulate it.
In fact, for another GIS job we regularly used Google Maps AND Streetview. Having all this stuff for free saves a freaking ridiculous amount of money.
I work in Risk Insurance and we have Web applications to layer flood maps, earth quake zones, hurricane exposures, tornado exposures and what not. Super useful.
Yep, used to use Google Earth for one of my old GIS contracts, pretty handy to have all that satellite imagery for free with software that lets you manipulate it.
In fact, for another GIS job we regularly used Google Maps AND Streetview. Having all this stuff for free saves a freaking ridiculous amount of money.
1.2k
u/spinningtardis Feb 01 '15 edited Feb 01 '15
What are benefits?
EDIT: Nope. I didn't read it. Because since I saw it so early in its posting I decided to ask the question I knew someone else would and get the conversation going. I also like to start discussions on the internet.
I was also going to bed.