The Google Maps of the Week

This week saw a trio of promotional campaigns that use Google Maps Street View to allow users to create short personalised videos involving images of their own homes.


Confused.com's Home Sweet Zombie, British Airway's London Calling and Jeep - The Ultimate Search Engine are the latest in a growing trend of company campaigns using Street View to provide a more personalised promotional campaign.

Jeep - The Ultimate Challenge is probably the most effective of the three as it uses Street View to allow the user to actually see what a Jeep Cherokee would like parked outside their home.


The World of Mapcraft was probably the most viral of this week's Google Maps.  This World of Warcraft map seems to have really struck a chord with players of the popular MMORPG.


The idea behind Roadtrip Mixtape is really inspired.

Roadtrip Mixtape allows you to create a play list for a road-trip containing only music by artists that are from the area you are traveling through. Drive through Boston and you might hear Aerosmith or Donna Summer. Drive through New Orleans and you might hear Lil Wayne or Dr. John.

The Google Maps of the Week

This map makes great use of the Styled Maps feature of the Google Maps API.

The Global Transition to a New Economy is a Google Map designed to showcase projects around the world that are part of a new developing economy. The map is crowd-sourced and invites contributions from organisations and projects that want to help build a framework of a new economy that maximizes well-being and operates within environmental limits.


Roadtrippers is a new Google Maps based trip planner. The application allows users to get driving directions between two locations in the U.S. and find points of interest along the route.

Using Roadtrippers it is possible to search for places of interest and good places to eat, drink and shop along a planned drive. You can search for points of interest in a large range of categories, including 'attractions', 'accommodation', 'shopping', 'food and drink' etc.

If you like the look of one of the recommended points of interest you can easily add it to your trip and the application automatically adds the stop to the finished driving directions.  

The Google Maps of the Week

Jurassic Test is a Google Maps application that should prove very useful to electric car owners. The app allows users to test whether different makes of electric car are able to complete a planned journey without having to recharge the battery.

Just enter a start and end point for a journey on the Jurassic Test Google Map (you can just click on the map twice to set two locations). Then select the 'update' button beneath the map. That's it!

The battery icon next to the car(s) you have selected will estimate how much battery power should be consumed on your chosen journey.


Rusdorogi is an Android Application that automatically tests the quality of Russian roads. The Rusdorogi Google Map shows at a glance the quality of Russian roads as detected by the app.

The app senses the vibrations on the user's phone. It uses a specially developed method of data processing which assesses the types of vibration on the phone and distinguishes between data coming from the car and other, normal background, vibrations. 


What with the Olympics and the Queen's Golden Jubilee, London is expecting a lot of visitors this summer. BBC Australia has created a great looking Google Map to help those visitors explore the English capital.

London Calling is a great way to find things to see and do in London and whilst you explore the map there are even opportunities to win prizes.

The design of the information windows on this map is very impressive. The windows include a circular smaller map to give the illusion of a cut-out in the window to highlight the location of the map marker on the map.

The Google Maps of the Week

This week's 'Google Maps of the Week' celebrates the marriage of design and functionality, featuring two maps that manage to look both gorgeous and, at the same time, provide navigation tools that greatly enhance the user experience. 


 Epungo is a beautifully designed and realised Brazilian real-estate map.

The map includes radial and polygon search tools that allow the user to closely define the area in which they wish to search for properties. The search results can also be refined by using the slide controls to define the price, number of rooms and the floor area.

None of these features are exactly new to real-estate maps but Epungo has brought them together in one gorgeous package. To aid usability there is also a step-by-step walk-through of the search tools when you first load the map. 


Pedestrian Crashes in Novosibirsk was one of the six winners of the inaugural Data Journalism Awards.

Pedestrian Crashes in Novosibirsk uses the Google Maps API to map and analyse pedestrian road accidents in Novosibirsk, Russia in 2011. The slide control above the map can be used to filter the results shown by month.

'Pullout stories' in the map sidebar allow the user to explore the data by the gender of the driver, the gender of the pedestrian, the age of driver and pedestrian, and to show only those accidents that caused a fatality. 

The Google Maps of the Week

Over the last couple of years there has been a number of clever promotional campaigns by companies using the Google Maps API (often taking advantage of Google Maps Street View imagery). Two of my favorite maps featured on Google Maps Mania this week were from Toyota and Moët & Chandon.

Both companies have managed to create campaigns with Google Maps that reflect some of the core values associated with their products and at the same time create interactions with potential customers.


Toyota has come up with one of the best Google Maps based promotional campaigns yet. To help promote the car the company are driving a Toyota IQ around with a 360 degree panoramic camera rig strapped to the roof. They are then capturing Street View images and filling in all the blanks on Google Maps.

The campaign, currently running in Belgium, allows anyone to report a street that doesn't have Street View on the Toyota IQ - Street View Google Map. The Toyota IQ then travels to the street, captures the Street View images and adds them to their Toyota IQ map.


If you can't afford to whisk the love of your life off for a romantic weekend in Paris you could try sending her a romantically tagged Street View image from the city instead. You never know it just might work.

Tag Your Love in the Streets is a nice Street View based promotional campaign by Moët & Chandon. Using the application you can select a Street View image from anywhere in the world and then add your own message. You can add text to the image and decorate the scene with a number of romantically themes images, such as flowers, hearts or a bottle of champagne.


The island of Sumatra in Indonesia has lost almost 50% of its tropical rainforest in the last 35 years. The World Wildlife Fund, Eyes on the Forest and Google Earth Outreach have joined forces to create a Google Map of land cover, land use, and land users in Sumatra.

Eyes on the Forest: Sumatra allows users to explore data about the island's conservation values, forest diversity and wildlife. The aim of the map is to increase transparency about the threats to the Sumatran environment and identify the drivers of deforestation and habitat destruction.

It is possible to view a number of data layers on the map, including the dwindling rainforest cover over the last 35 years, wildlife ranges, protected areas and natural carbon stores. 

The Google Maps of the Week

The Map Developers Award for Innovation this week must go to The Twin Cities Storm Ready Map, an interesting Google Map showing the time-line of a simulated tornado storm hitting Minneapolis–Saint Paul.

The map, created by Minneapolis Public Radio, shows the likely effects of a tornado hitting the Twin Cities and features a really clever time-line control. To navigate through the time-line of the simulated storm the map user just needs to use the browser scrollbar.

As the user scrolls down on the page the Google Map stays stationary in position on the page but the time-line progresses and the scrollbar even initiates events on the map. To achieve this effect the map uses the Waypoints jQuery plugin.

 
The most shared post on Google Maps Mania this week was the new Made in NY map of New York's digital industry. The map shows the locations of over 500 homegrown startups, investors and coworking spaces across the city.

As well as showing the extent of New York's tech industry, the map can also help you find a position in Silicon Alley. Those companies that currently have positions available are indicated with a 'We are hiring' link in the map sidebar.


Derek Eder's Searchable Map Template with Google Fusion Tables is a free, open source tool that can help you create a searchable, filterable Google Map from a Fusion Table.

The template can create a Google Map pulling in data from any Fusion Table. It includes a number of features, including, an address search (with variable radius), geolocation (automatically center the map on the user's location), results count (using the Google's Fusion Tables API) and the ability to easily add additional search filters (checkboxes, sliders, etc).

Derek Eder's website includes a number of maps created with the template. These include Derek's own maps, mainly centred on Chicago and lots of maps created by others with the template. 

The Google Maps of the Week

One of my favorite Google Maps based applications this week was from the Nature Conservacny charity.

TNC Maps is a collection of Google Maps from Nature Conservancy scientists, in collaboration with governments, scientists and conservation organizations around the world. The site includes over 80 global maps describing the state of terrestrial, freshwater and marine habitats worldwide.


For some reason a lot of musicians seem compelled to release Street View applications in order to promote their latest songs. Shadow Days is one of the more impressive ones, designed to promote John Mayer's new song Born and Raised.

Shadow Days allows you to watch an animated Street View movie of any journey within the USA. To create your own movie you just need to set a starting point and choose a destination. You can then choose to watch as the application animates through selected Street Views from your journey route or view Street View thumbnail images moving along the route on a Google Map.

The Google Maps of the Week

My favorite Google Map this week was Open Road. Open Road from OpenFile is an awesome bike directions application that shows you all the reported bike accidents that have occurred along a suggested bike route. So not only are cyclists given directions but they are warned about the most dangerous locations along the route.

The application uses the Google Maps API bike directions function to suggest a bike route between two points. All bike accidents reported to the police are then shown along the route and the most accident prone location along the route is also highlighted on the map.


This week we have to give a special mention to Google Maps Cube, Google's long awaited Google Maps game. The game is a great way to promote some of the features of Google Maps whilst users are having fun.

In the game you have to navigate a ball on a 3d Google Maps cube, avoiding the 3d buildings and other obstructions, by rotating the cube. Whilst you are also informed about some of the things that you can do with Google Maps.


Resource Intensity of Cities is a Google Maps based visualisation tool to analyse data on material and energy use in 42 U.S. cities.

The application uses a Google Maps interface to allow users to select an area and visualise a heat map of population, material and energy. It is also possible to generate a downloadable PDF report for the selected area, with a detailed breakdown of population and housing density, material intensity, material comparison, energy intensity and energy comparison.

The Google Maps of the Week

This week I loved TweetedTrips, an application that lets you create a journey map of your geotagged Twitter messages in a matter of seconds.

If you want a mapped journey of a vacation or trip you just need to send some Twitter messages from your phone and they will automatically appear on your TweetedTrip map. You don't even have to use your own account. You can enter any user name Into TweetedTrips and view a Google Map of the user's geotagged movements.


The real big theme this week however was real-time live transit maps.

 Stadtbahn Tracker Freiburg is a real-time map of tram cabs, buses and local trains in Freiburg, Germany.

MTA Bus Time is a Google Map that shows the live position of buses on New York's bus system. Currently the map tracks all bus routes in Staten Island and will be rolled out to other NYC boroughs, with expected completion in 2013.

The DC Circulator Map is a live real-time map of the DC Circulator bus system in Washington, DC. The map shows the system's bus routes and the bus stops on each route. 

The Google Maps of the Week

If you are planning your vacation then you should check Weather Hopper to find out what you should pack. Weather Hopper is a great Google Map that can tell you what the weather is normally like for any month anywhere in the world.

The weather itself is displayed in a small information window which automatically appears over your searched location. You can select what type of weather information you wish to view from the side-panel, including average usual temperature, precipitation, relative humidity and wind. 


Weather Sentiment Prediction is a clever Google Maps based application that can tell you how people feel about the weather at any location.

You can select a location on the application by dragging the map marker and adjusting the radius of the search area. Once you hit the 'search' button the application begins to analyse Tweets from that area which mention the weather. Each message is machine analysed to determine whether it is a positive or negative response to the weather.


This weekend's Formula 1 Grand Prix in Bahrain has been very controversial and should probably have never been held. However with about half an hour to go before the race (as I write) it looks like the race will go ahead.

Lusob.com has created a Google Map that will hopefully track the race in real-time on Google Maps. The F1 Live Timing Map is currently showing a demo race using imagined data. The map shows the cars moving around the Bahrain Formula 1 track on Google Maps satellite view.

Google Maps of the Week

Pin Drop is a great way to bookmark your favorite locations on a Google Map.

Have you ever found somewhere cool and thought 'I must come back here' and then later forgotten where it was? Or have you tried to tell friends about somewhere but you couldn't quite remember where it was? Pin Drop helps you to keep track of your favorite locations.

Saving locations to Pin Drop is very easy. You just need to add a pin to a Google Map. You can tag and color-code your pins so it easy to quickly find all your favorite cafes, galleries or shops when you need to find them.

Pin Drop is also available as an iPhone app so you can access your saved location when you are out on the town and you can also bookmark new locations as you find them on your travels.


Pinwheel allows users to pin notes to a Google Map. The note can be about anything, from a reminder to pick up a cartoon of milk to advice about the best dish to try at a restaurant.

You can browse locations and view your own notes, the notes of people you follow or notes left by all Pinwheel users. If you see a note that you like, you can add it to your favorites by clicking on the heart icon.

Users can organise their notes into 'sets'. By using sets it is easy to create your own map of your favourite bars, cafes or anything else that you want to collect.

When you are out and about you can use the Pinwheel mobile page http://m.pinwheel.com/ to access your saved notes or find notes left by others around you (an iPhone app is also coming soon).


Livehoods is an interesting project to remap city neighborhoods by ignoring the traditional geographical boundaries and instead looking at human social interactions.

By analysing over 18 million Foursquare check-ins Livehoods has created three city maps with new neighborhoods based on the patterns of the groups of people that check-in to Foursquare venues.

So far there are three Livehoods maps: New York City, San Francisco, Pittsburgh. The dots on the maps represent different check-in locations. Groups of nearby dots of the same color form a Livehood. The groups are determined when the same people check-in to two nearby locations.

The Best Google Maps of the Week

The beginning of this week saw the release of three outstanding Google Maps based applications.


Disney released an amazing animated movie creation tool using Google Maps Street View.

After you enter your address into Disney's Giant Steps you can watch a video of a giant Goofy landing on your street (with a little help from Google Maps satellite view). Goofy then walks down your street (using Street View imagery) and actually opens the window of your house.


Floating Shiny Knot is another impressive experiment that superimposes animation on top of Google Maps Street View. Here however the effect is rather more artistic

The application superimposes an animated shiny knot on top of any Street View image (you can choose a chrome or glass finish for the knot). The effect is very impressive and if you rotate and drag the Street View around then the application soars to even higher levels of impressiveness.


The world has had to wait a long time for this meeting of Tower Defence and Google Maps but the wait is now over.

MapsTD is an amazing tower defence game built using the Google Maps API and the new 8-bit map tiles.

In the game you can choose from a number of locations around the world. When you have selected a location you then have to defend it from attackers by strategically placing your defence towers. If you've ever played a Tower Defence game you should know what to expect. If you haven't then where have you been for the last few years?

The Google Maps of the Week

Today's release of the 8-bit map tiles for Google Maps has to get a special mention this week. The NES version of Google Maps is all sorts of awesome. If you haven't seen it yet then go to Google Maps and select the 'Quest' button.

However there were some other brilliant maps released this week.


The UK Department for Energy and Climate Change released this real heat map for England. I say 'real' because it actually uses Google Maps to display heat use at building level throughout England.

The CEO - Heatmap shows heat demand from individual buildings throughout England and provides a range of tools to help developers and planners identify priority areas for low carbon heat projects.


AllTrails wasn't released this week but it was the first time I stumbled upon it. AllTrails currently has over 200,000 members who have mapped over 45,000 trails. The trails includes routes and information on many different activities including hiking, mountain biking, skiing, and snowboarding.

It is possible to search for trails by location and the results are displayed on a Google Map. It is then possible to refine the trails shown by the driving distance from your location, the length of the trail and / or its duration.


The Yard Sale Treasure Map seemed to get a bit of buzz this week. You can use Yard Sale to find yard sales happening around your location and plan a route and an itinerary, to help you visit them all.

When you add a location to Yard Sale Treasure Map the nearest sales are automatically added to your itinerary. You can add or remove sales by clicking on their map marker. You can even search for places to stop off on your route. For example if you fancy a coffee between yard sales you can search for nearby cafes and add one to your route.

The Google Maps of the Week

For me the Nature Valley Trail View was the stand-out map of the week.

The map includes a number of trails in the Grand Canyon, each of which can be experienced with a glorious animated custom Street View tour. If you click on the menu link you can select any of the trails and then virtually walk the trail with custom Street Views of the whole trail.

Each tour includes an option to animate a walk on the trail, so you can just sit back and watch as you walk the trail with custom Street Views. Below the Street View is an altitude graph, and a compass rose is also provided.


The World of the Living Dead is a browser based game of zombie survival that makes extensive use of Google Maps.

In the game you have to lead a small squad as you try to avoid the zombie hordes, scavenge for resources and set up safe-houses. Integral to your mission for survival is your handy Google Map. The map shows important locations in the game and luckily includes color-coded zones indicating where the zombies have already gained control.

So can you survive the World of the Living Dead?

The Google Maps of the Week

This week we saw some familiar mapping themes but with some new twists. For example, Pothole Season is far from being the first pothole reporting Google Map but the addition of pothole avoiding driving directions is a nice addition to the concept.

You can use Pothole Season to report the location of potholes and you can also use it to get driving directions that shows you the route with the least potholes.


Vasile Cotovanu', Lausanne Transit Network Simulator, is not the first real-time transit network simulator either. Vasile himself is responsible for the Swiss Railways(SBB) network simulator and Romanian Railways(CFR) network simulator.

Vasile's latest simulation however is even more impressive because of the availability of oblique aerial view imagery in Lausanne. The simulator animates the town's buses in real-time based on the Lausanne public transit network time-table.


This week I was also impressed with Tweereal, a real-time Google Map of Twitter users activity. In particular I liked the cool animated map markers.

I also think that Everplaces is a nice addition to the location bookmarking market. Everplaces has some neat features, such as importing your saved locations from Google Maps and the ability to share your favourite locations with friends via the various social networks.

The Google Maps of the Week

Over the years the fashion retailer Uniqlo has created a number of unique maps. Their latest effort, Uniqlo Undercover, is possibly the best store locator map I've ever seen. In fact to call it just a store locator map is an insult really.

Using custom map tiles Uniqlo has in effect created a whole website just with the Google Maps API. My advice is to explore the map yourself. Use the menu at the top right of the map to navigate to the different sections and make sure you zoom in on the map to see each section in detail.


This Canberra Crime Statistics Map from the Australian Federal Police is a very nice looking map with some great design features.

The numbered place-name markers are attractive and dynamic (the numbers change depending on the crime or date selected). If you zoom in on the map the shaded polygon areas are also dynamic. If you mouse-over an area it grows by a fraction to help highlight the selected neighborhood.

There are a lot more great design features on this map, for example, just look at that great map sidebar.


Shoes About Town is another inspired promotional campaign, this time from New York shoe salon Bergdorf Goodman.

This promotional campaign encourages people to take an Instagram photo and then post it on Twitter with the hashtag #BGSHOES. The photos of the shoes then appear on a great looking custom map, created using the Google Maps API.

The Google Maps of the Week

My favourite map this week was by far Old Maps Online. Old Maps Online is a map that helps you find old maps.

Of course I'm going to like it.

Using the map it is possible to search for historical maps published online by libraries around the world. All you have to do is click on a location on the map and the search results are automatically presented in the map sidebar with a direct link to the map image on the website of the host institution.


This week I was also impressed by the NBN Rollout map.

In Australia a new broadband network is being rolled out. Over the next ten years over 200,000 km of fibre-optic cable will be deployed across the country and up to 6,000 homes a day will be connected to the new network.

Australians can use the NBN Rollout Google Map to see when their homes will be connected to the network. The use of shaded areas on the map to represent the progress of the rollout provides a visually attractive and simple guide to the progress made in different areas of the country.

The Google Maps of the Week

The USA National Phenology Network's Phenology Visualization Tool helps monitor the influence of climate on the phenology of plants, animals, and landscapes in the U.S..

The site allows users to select a plant or animal and view where that species has been reported on a Google Map. It is then possible to view an animation of the species' phenology (phenology refers to recurring plant and animal life cycle stages) through time. If you animate the species data through time, with climate visible, you will see the climate data on the background change alongside the phenology data.


Good baristas and café owners can be hide to find, especially when you travel somewhere new. Beanhunter is a website that can help you find great coffee wherever you go in the world.

You can search for cafés submitted and reviewed on Beanhunter on a really nicely implemented Google Map. The map includes the option to filter the cafés shown by ratings, the number of reviews and you can even order the results by rating, number of reviews and by the date of the cafés' listing.


The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan has released a real-time map of radiation measurements in Fukushima Prefecture. The Japan Radiation Monitoring Map uses Google Maps to show the radiation levels measured by monitors throughout the Fukishima Prefecture.

The measurements displayed on the map are updated every ten minutes. The map uses a marker clustering system to show how many radiation monitor measurements are available at different locations. If you click on a marker all the measurements from that point can be viewed in the map sidebar.

The Google Maps of the Week

The idea of providing coupons in context is inspired. Vyaggio is a great application for getting driving directions with coupon deals at rest stops along your route, so not only do you get directions but you get news of great deals to be had on your journey.

If you don't want driving directions that's fine as well. You can also use Vyaggio to find restaurants, shops, hotels and cafes offering coupon deals in European towns. The coupons can be searched by location and filtered by category.


Another app providing deals in context is Wo-Wollen-Wir-Essen.de (where shall we eat?). Imagine it is lunch time and you want to eat. Wouldn't it be great if you could turn on your phone and view nearby restaurants with great lunch-time deals?

Wollen-Wir-Essen.de is a German Google Maps based website and mobile application that does exactly that. Using the app you can quickly see and browse through local restaurants' lunchtime offers on a handy Google Map.

Currently the site has lots of suggestions for where you can eat during the day in Hamburg. Coverage outside Hamburg is currently patchy but I'm sure that will improve as the app's popularity grows.


Sketchmap.co.uk, is an application for creating and sharing maps with friends. It is a great tool for quickly sketching out a location or a route that you need to share with others.

No registration is necessary and the provided drawing tools are very easy to use, so you can create and share a map with Sketchmap in a matter of seconds. As well as the handy drawing tools the map has available a number of layers, including administrative boundaries, listed buildings, scenic interests and geology.