Chris Pendleton reports that you can now license Virtual Earth UltraCam (proprietary) aerial photography without having to license the Virtual Earth platform. This is great for offline use, if you've ever had the need to acquire Virtual Earth aerial photography for uses outside of the Virtual Earth platform, wrapping your own client or creating an interface that allows for deeper zooming than the VE platform does today. You can purchase the photography through 2 vendors - Mapmart and i-Cubed.

Here's the official announcement:

We’re pleased to announce that VE UltraCam orthos can now be licensed for offline use! We’ve recently signed two resellers to offer our hi-resolution UltraCam imagery for offline applications. These groundbreaking deals are the first milestone in VE’s monetization of MS-owned geospatial products.

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