We are proud that many law enforcement agencies around the world use our products.
SEARCH and the American Academy of Applied Forensics amongst others run courses that make use of our products.
No, the desktop applications only check for news of newer updates from our servers on startup. After that all data is directly from the social websites themselves.
The license fee is one time only and is valid for the current product version.
Our update policy is as follows. Each of our products has a version number of the form major.minor, for example the MySpaceVisualizer is currently on version 2.5 so the major version is 2. The license/s you purchase are valid indefinitely for all versions starting with the current major version, so a license purchased today for MySpace Visualizer will be valid for versions 2.5, 2.6, 2.7 and so on for all versions starting with 2.
In general we release bug fixes and modifications to keep up with changes made by the social networks as new minor versions and new major versions always include new features. Generally we do not release a new major version more than once a year. Once a new major version is released the previous major version will continue to be supported (that is bug fixed) for one year after that point.
The short answer is no.
A slightly longer answer is that our tools in essence do the same thing a search engine does with the public data available from these web sites.
Our company has no physical presence in the US and therefore we do not charge US sales tax on our licenses.
In addition our company turnover is below the threshold for VAT in the UK so we are not registered for VAT and do not charge for it on our licenses either.
This keeps everything nice and simple.
