Giant Steps - Disney is a fun Google Maps based application from Disney that lets you invite a giant Goofy to your house.
Once you share your address with the application 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.
After you have created and watch your personalised video you can share it with the world via Facebook or Twitter.
The application obviously owes a lot to Chaos in Your Town. I wouldn't be surprised to find that they were both created by the same map developers.
Project Re:Brief is a Google experiment to try and push the boundaries of what online advertising can be by re-imagining some famous ad campaigns from the past and updating them for the digital age.
In 1962 Amil Gargano and his team helped introduce Volvo to America with a simple yet powerful line that made the Swedish car brand stand out. The line was "Drive it like you hate it". The campaign achieved widespread acclaim within the industry and is heralded as one of the greatest pieces of automotive advertising in history.
Google has now worked with Amil to create a Volvo ad campaign. The new campaign follows Volvo driver Irv Gordon, who has owned his Volvo 46 years and driven it 2.9 million miles. As Gordon approaches the 3 million mile mark a live GPS data feed on Google Maps means viewers of the online ads can continue following Irv Gordon's story in real time and watch as his odometer ticks towards the 3 million mile mark.
The display ad also enables viewers to discover more about Irv’s destinations during the films, and prompts viewers to start their own journey at the end by combining location cues and a database of interesting drives in their area. These drives use Google Maps and the user's browser's location detection to show nearby destinations.
Here is a brief documentary of how Amil and Google came up with the new campaign for Volvo.
Why bother designing a whole website when you can just pack everything you need into an awesome Google Maps based user interface?
Uniqlo Undercover is possibly definitely the best store locator map I've ever seen. In fact to call it a store locator map is an insult really.
Sure, you can use the map to find Uniqlo stores around the world but there is so much more to this map than finding your nearest retail outlet. For example check out the 'Looks' map view. This loads custom map tiles of photographs of The Uniqlo range alongside some historical information about the company.
If this has got you intrigued to view the stores clothing range you can then select 'Products'. This map view allows you to use the Google Maps zooming and panning tools to view Uniqlo's products.
By this time in your exploration you will want to tell all your friends about the Uniqlo map. Luckily the map also contains a 'Social' map view. Here you can view the Twitter thumbnail portraits of all those who have shared the map on Twitter and you can of course make your own Tweet.
Uniqlo have a long history of using the Google Maps API in innovative ways to promote their range. In 2009 Uniqlo created a stunning synchronised video and Google Map. That map is now dead but I did manage to capture some video of the map in action:
Shoes About Town is an inspired promotional campaign from New York shoe salon Bergdorf Goodman.
The promotional campaign encourages people to take an Instagram photo and then to 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.
I suspect that the inspiration for the design of the hand-drawn type zoom controls on the Bergdorf Goodman map and the idea for the map may owe something to Mike Gleason's tutorial Create Zoomabable Images with the Google Maps API.
Mike's tutorial explains how you can create a Google Map replacing the normal Google Maps map tiles with your own image.
The promotional campaign may also have been partly inspired by Zappos, the online shoes retailer. In 2009 Zappos created a real-time map of orders placed on the Zappos website called Zappos Map.
Zappos add photographs of their product being brought in real-time on a Google Map of the United States. If you click on any of the photographs on the map then you are taken to the web page for that product (and Zappos presumably hope you will be tempted to buy the product yourself). This is a little trick that the Bergdorf Goodman map is missing at the moment.
If I was Bergdorf Goodman I would add links from the photos of their shoes on the map to the product's page on their online store,
