I am looking for help. I have done a little bit of geo-registration of images with QGIS. But now, I have been handed some LIDAR data in [PCD format][1] (basically x,y,z), But it is not geo-referenced. 

I have looked at: https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/132015/how-to-georeference-las-files, but I do not have LAS data, and that article talks nothing about what would work for a GUI to do GeoReferencing, as QGIS provides.

I know the exact area and have obtained a GeoTiff from Google Earth. The entire region is only about 30 acres. So I am assuming that a simple linear transform of the values will be sufficient. But I am was wondering if any GUI tools could help with the conversion (at least getting the ground control points to line up and the linear formula). I have used QGIS to do this for unknown raster data, but this is the first time I have been asked to do this for point cloud.

My simple research has found a ideas, which likely won't work, but maybe someone can tell me what does work:

I have found an interesting free tool called [cloud compare][2] which if I understand the [demos][3], I might be able to use (it looks like it needs two point clouds, but I could convert the GeoTiff with FME to a point cloud). I do not have ESRI available. Is Cloud Compare able to do this? How hard would it be? 

If we want to put out $400 perhaps the Blue Marble folks can do this with their LIDAR plug in: http://forum.globalmapperforum.com/discussion/7444/georeference-static-lidar-data , does anyone recommend that?

I have also see this in the Matlab Vision Toolkit: http://www.mathworks.com/help/vision/ref/pcregrigid.html#bux42c5

  [1]: http://pointclouds.org/documentation/tutorials/pcd_file_format.php
  [2]: http://www.cloudcompare.org/doc/wiki/index.php?title=Align
  [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjiJBqckv90