Today's Wall Street Journal had an article describing how some small businesses use Google Earth to locate new customers and even do some preliminary work on new jobs. A roofer mentioned in the article uses Google Earth to look at a potential job and even uses a measuring feature to take measurements and prepare an initial estimate before he goes to the site.
Here is a view from Google Earth with a measurement of part of the house's roofline.
As the article explains there are limitations to this (many images are a few years old, resolution is poor on some images). The companies in the article do not use this in place of on-site measurements. This does, though, provide a free alternative to traveling a long distance only to discover that a job is too big, too small, or too difficult for the contractor to accept.
One obvious application to Alacrity is in our roofing program, however, this tool or others like it could be useful in future applications as well. If anybody is aware of Alacrity contractors using these techniques, please let me know.
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