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| Keyhole Pro | |
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It’s a small world, and I mean a really small world with Keyhole Pro. If you ever need to view a parcel of land, an intersection, an off-ramp, a parking lot or other geographic feature from above, Keyhole Pro is for you. Keyhole Pro places about 12TB of aerial imagery at your fingertips. When I first learned of Keyhole Pro, I had a little trouble understanding when I actually could use this product in my practice. It was not until a client of mine decided to purchase a piece of property in Ohio that I fully appreciated the power and ease of the software. I was able to negotiate with Ohio counsel (I am in California), bring up the subject property on Keyhole in less than 10 seconds and intelligently discuss my client’s needs. A week later, I used Keyhole to view a vacant property that secured a client’s defaulted promissory note. Within a matter of minutes, I surveyed the area and discovered the property might actually be worth something given new construction in the area. Without Keyhole Pro, I would have had to send a person five hours away to physically inspect the property. Admittedly, many attorneys might not have a use for the aerial imagery of Keyhole Pro. For those, including personal injury, real estate and collection attorneys, whose practice might require a birds-eye view of real property, Keyhole Pro is for you. Keyhole Pro involves two components: the Keyhole Client Application — for viewing, measuring and annotating — and a subscription to the Keyhole database. The client application is approximately 5MB, whereas the database is about 12TB (equivalent to more than 11,000 650MB data CDs). Given the vast amount of data available, Keyhole Pro requires a subscription to the Keyhole database. The subscription model ensures each client is accessing the most recently updated data available. Keyhole Pro lets you:
The aerial imagery of Keyhole Pro ranges from barely acceptable to excellent, depending on where you are looking. The entire United States has been imaged at 15-meters resolution, which means objects larger than 50 feet can be resolved. At this level, for example, most homes and roads appear as little blurs at best. The real magic comes when your target area is in the high-resolution database. More than 80 major cities have been imaged at resolutions between 3 inches and one meter. Downtown San Diego and Las Vegas, for example, have been imaged at resolutions of 3 inches, which makes it possible to view people walking on the street. While the Keyhole images can be used in a litigation setting, it might be difficult to properly authenticate the images because the date and time images were captured can’t be determined beyond a general weekly or monthly range. Nevertheless, Keyhole does provide the litigator with a good preliminary intelligence tool that can be useful for pretrial activities. Keyhole Pro is one of those software programs you have to try to appreciate its capabilities fully. It can be very cost effective if aerial photographs are used in your practice. For example, a high-resolution aerial photo from one of the Keyhole Pro suppliers costs at least $300, whereas purchasing a one-year subscription to Keyhole Pro only costs $599. Additional modules for printing high-resolution photos and making animations also can be purchased for an extra few hundred dollars per module, per year. I really like Keyhole Pro. It worked flawlessly during my tests. |
Keyhole Corp. Price: $599 per year, per user. Volume discounts are available for 10 or more users. Windows 98/ME/2000/XP Reviewed by Michael W. Newcomb, Esq., Mayfield & Associates, Solana Beach, Calif. PROS CONS VERDICT |
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