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I saw this story on WebWare tonight about how Sungevity is using Virtual Earth's Birds Eye View to assist in determining how much you could benefit from installing solar panels on your roof. From WebWare -

The company's secret sauce is a trigonometry-heavy application that can take satellite imagery and create a 3D model of a house. From the model, Sungevity calculates the pitch of the roof, the azimuth (for instance, where the house faces in relation to compass points) and the available area. Sungevity uses data from Microsoft Virtual Earth rather than Google Earth for its satellite imagery. Google Earth only provides a top-down view of a roof. Virtual Earth gives data from different angles, which lets Sungevity calculate pitch.

I'm always surprised at how often I see this innocent error. Maybe it only matters to map nerds, but reality is that the best aerial imagery you see online doesn't come from Satellites. That goes for 'straight down' ortho imagery as well as the 45 degree view of Birds Eye Imagery. The cameras used in aircraft based photography capture at higher resolutions, but it's color range and accuracy where they really excel. But back to Finding a Solar panel for your roof - Sungevity only services the state of California right now. According to one estimate from the Webware story the upfront cost is a lot less than it was a couple of years ago. The mapping interface built by Sungevity is visually nice, providing a 'lens' with which to manually pinpoint your house.